Conversion And Transformation Series

Friday of the Third Week in Easter 2025

Sometimes we can aid our personal understanding of the Scriptures by our imagination, and in the Gospel we just heard, our imagination should be running very, very fast. Jesus said, “This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.” We don’t need evidence from some Eucharistic miracle to infer what Jesus was doing when He said, “This is the bread which came down from heaven.” He was gesturing to Himself and probably pointing right at His heart. Recall for a moment that Scripture records in both the OT and NT that King David was chosen to lead Israel because he was a “man after God’s own heart.” It means that David’s actions as king corresponded with what God wanted for His people. David’s personal life was deeply flawed, with adultery and murder flagrantly displayed across the books of Samuel. But His heart was God’s, as shown when the prophet Nathan accused David of his sins, and his immediate repentance.

More so does Jesus’s Sacred human Heart correspond to God’s. Jesus came to do the Father’s will, all the way to the Garden of Gethsemane, when His human heart seems to have strained under the divine plan. But in the end, His total giving was to that salvific plan: “Not my will, but Thine be done.”

Now in today’s Gospel, the Jewish followers of Christ are challenged in a similar way. Jesus tells them, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” They strained against this divine invitation, and many, perhaps most of them left His company. The answer to their question, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” is obvious to us who believe. First, Jesus was fully God and fully man, so He can make possible actions that seem impossible, even repulsive. Second, Jesus, through the Church He established, enables us to take His flesh and blood sacramentally, under forms of bread and wine. The reality exists on a higher plane of being, one we begin to understand through faith, and will be totally clear when we celebrate at the great marital feast of the Lamb in the kingdom of God in heaven.

Perhaps the reading from John, understood in this manner, will help us also get insight into the awesome transformation of Saul into Paul on the Damascus road, and in the presence of the Christian leader called Ananias. His conversion was so unexpected and dramatic that the narrative appears three times in the NT. He wrote to the Galatians: “For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” He was present at the murder of the deacon Stephen, and assented to that crime, which he thought was a just response to the blasphemy that Jesus, the crucified, was raised and sits at God’s right hand, Messiah and judge.

Saul was going to Damascus precisely to find and arrest followers of the Way of Jesus and send them in chains back to Jerusalem for trial and probable execution. But he saw Jesus, as Lord and Messiah, in divine glory and was blinded by the glory of the Lord, a symbol of his own blindness to the Resurrection. He learned from Jesus Himself that the Christians he was persecuting were the earthly reality of Christ. Jesus said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting; but rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” He went to Damascus and got together with Ananias, who was fearful of Saul’s reputation, but became convinced of his authentic conversion, prayed over his vision, which was restored, and baptized him for the remission of sins.

Saul, who began using his diminutive name, Paul, became the apostle to the Gentiles, and so all of us can make our own the words of Psalm 117, “Praise the Lord all you nations; glorify Him all you peoples,” and celebrate God’s steadfast love, for which we give thanks forever and ever, Amen.