I had always prided myself on understanding people. I had always thought I knew enough about the human mind that I could predict what a man would be like on the basis of what he had always done.
After all, if a person is a thief when he is a child, you expect that he will be a cheating thief when he is a youth and a lying thief when he is a man. And you expect that he will be a cheating, lying, imprisoned thief when he is old. You suppose that whatever a person is now, he will always be.
I took pride in my ability to read people and to predict what they would be, on the basis of what they had always been.
And so that’s why I reacted so negatively that morning when the Lord told me, "Get up and go to a certain place, and lay your hands on that man." I reacted very badly because I felt I knew exactly what he was up to, and that if I were to go there he would have literally destroyed me.
But I was wrong. Oh, how wrong I was! And I am just glad that I did not let my own hostile feelings control me, or else the world today would be a much worse place than it now is. Why, do you know that if I had let my feelings, my prejudices, control me, you folks might not even be Christians today? If I had done what I wanted to do, you might never have had a chance to hear the Gospel.
So I have to tell you this morning about how I learned to believe the best about the worst.
My name is Ananias. I am a citizen of the city of Damascus. Damascus in my time was in the country called Nabatea. You today call it Syria. In Damascus I had been, first, one of the leaders of the Jewish community. There were many of us, in fact – at least twenty thousand or so. We Jews enjoyed prosperity and a comfortable life, and we were connected to our fellow Jews back in Judea and Jerusalem by many ties of friendship and by our allegiance to the high priest at the Temple there. We Jews did well in Damascus.
But, I say, that was what I was at first – a leader of the Jews. But just a few short years ago, I and some of my friends became convinced that God had sent His Messiah, and that that Messiah was Jesus of Nazareth. My heart leaps as I still can remember that day when I first believed and trusted Him. I became a disciple; we didn’t use the word "Christian" as you know it. We said we were disciples, I and several other prominent, upstanding, solid Jewish folks.
Now I speak of us as prominent, upstanding, solid folks in order to emphasize for you that some of us didn’t have to change all that much in order to become Christians. Oh yes, we changed the way we worship and we changed the way we pray. We changed our religious vocabularies and we began to separate from the synagogue. But, you see, we had already been moral folks, upstanding, prominent, solid folks; and when we became Christians that didn’t have to change.
And so even the Jews who did not believe in Christ trusted us. I kept the same friends I had always had. They all thought poor old Ananias was a little crazy for having picked up on this Jesus thing, but my lifestyle was pretty much the same, and so they found it easy to tolerate me.
I guess you could say that it was easy to think the best about the best! It’s easy to look at solid respectable citizens who are sort of like you are and to accept them without much of a problem. You can think the best things about the best people.
But, as I’ve already hinted, the problem comes when you have to deal with somebody who’s not like that. The problem is that I heard the Lord telling me I had to think the best about the worst! And believe me, the man whom the Lord directed me to meet was the worst you can imagine.
Saul of Tarsus had built a reputation as a fanatical, fire-breathing, disciple-killing monster. In Jerusalem, just a few months ago, he had encouraged an angry crowd to stone and kill our brother Stephen. And then, in the furor that followed, Saul actually broke into people’s houses and dragged them off to prison, just for the crime, as he put it, of following Jesus. Saul was all over Jerusalem, taking men and women, boys and girls, into custody. And it was all done with a kind of ruthless zeal you wouldn’t believe.
Well, when the disciples in Jerusalem were just about exhausted from all of that, Saul really got busy. He got letters of extradition from the High Priest, permitting him to come all the way up here to Damascus and search out believers. Jerusalem was not enough for this evil man; no, he had to get out every last believer he could find, and so off he rode to Damascus.
So you can imagine what I felt when the Lord told me to get up and go to the house of Judas and meet Saul. Can you blame me for believing the worst about the worst man I had ever heard of? I knew what he was like, and I knew there was no changing him. Saul was dangerous, he was unacceptable, he was just horrible. Lord, why me and why him? If I have to witness to somebody, Lord, why can’t it be somebody who is at least nice?
But the Spirit told me that I had to believe the best about the worst. The Spirit told me that I had to trust that the worst man I had ever known about was really and truly changed!
And so, reluctantly, fearfully, off I walked to the street called Straight. To be honest about it, I tried to think of reasons not to finish my journey. I thought about stopping at the famous bazaar here in Damascus and losing myself in shopping. You twentieth-century Americans think you invented, "Shop ’til you drop". Not so! We have a wonderful bazaar here, and I really thought about losing myself there … or stopping to visit a friend … or anything but go to Judas’ house. But I had promised the Lord, and so I did go.
When I entered Judas’ house, over there by the window was a small, wiry, dark man, with his head bowed and his hands lifted up and tears falling down his cheeks. I couldn’t help but be shocked at this sight. Who was this? Surely this could not be the terrible Saul? Surely this short, bony figure could not be the one which hammered down many a door in Jerusalem! Surely these mumbling lips could not be the ones which had called for the destruction of people like me!
But Judas said, "Ananias, this is Saul of Tarsus. Saul has seen the Lord, out on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus. And because of it, he is now blind. But talk with him, and you will find out for yourself what has happened."
I went over closer. I was still afraid, because, you see, as I have told you, I know that what a man is, he is. If a child starts out as a thief, he grows to be a youth who is a cheating thief. And he grows up to be a man who is a lying, cheating thief. We know, I thought, what this man is. And he’s dangerous.
Saul seemed to sense that I was standing there. "Who is it? Is it Ananias?" Oh, my soul, he knows who I am. Even though he cannot see me, he knows who I am. I’ll bet he has a warrant for my arrest in his saddlebag. I expect he’s already picked out the stone he’s going to aim at my head." "Who is it? Is it Ananias?"
It was a moment before I could answer him. I had to get my wits together. I had to be careful what I would say. This man was capable of twisting anything and using it against me. I just didn’t feel comfortable here, not at all. I really wanted to turn and walk out and run back home as fast as my legs could carry me.
But Judas, the man in whose house we were, reminded me: "Ananias, Saul says that in his mind’s eye he has seen that the Spirit is sending you here to heal him. Go ahead, Ananias. Saul needs to be healed. And he’s changed. Or at least he is changing. Go ahead, Ananias; do what the Spirit put you here for."
And, first, I just put my hands on Saul. Both hands. Laid them on his head. For a moment I let him feel my palms, and I wondered if he could sense the trembling that I knew was in them. I can tell you that I felt his body relax; I felt him almost melt into my hands, as though he had never felt the touch of love before.
And then I spoke, words that came from beyond my brain, I’ll tell you. I said, "Brother Saul – Brother – I almost choked on it, because it was the word we used for fellow disciples – Brother Saul, regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
He stretched; he shook a little; then he was clutching at his eyes and rubbing at them; and in an instant he was animated, alive, jerking his head around, looking at the room, running to see out the window, picking up a scroll to make sure he could read it. All I could do was to stand with my mouth wide open in wonder – but then his eyes fixed on me.
Oh, oh. Now this is it. Saul the Pharisee, Saul the death-dealer, Saul the merchant of destruction – was I in for it now?! I could not help thinking the worst about the worst man I had ever heard tell of.
Saul said, "Brother Ananias, thank you. You are the servant of God on my behalf. I know Jesus now. I know He is Lord. What must I do next?"
You know the rest. You know, of course, that I told him he must be baptized and that he must be about what God had called him to. You know all of that.
But do you know what I, Ananias, had found out?
Do you know that I had found out that the Spirit of God calls me to believe the best about the worst, to believe that no matter how terrible someone’s reputation or how unlikely their appearance, to believe that no matter how uncomfortable they might make me or how different they are, still they can be changed. They really can be changed! In my nice, neat, middle-class environment I had not seen that, but it’s true. And if you believe the best about the worst, they will become what you expect them to be.
And something else I learned. I learned that when the Spirit says go, you’d better go, no matter how much personally you’d rather not go. I didn’t want to go to the street called Straight, any more than you want to go to the streets called Georgia Avenue or Fourteenth. But I learned that if I had not been obedient, Saul would not have been redeemed, and the world would have been deprived of the most brilliant spiritual insight it has ever received. And more than that, the church, if there had never been a Saul, who later called himself Paul – the church might have remained just a part of Judaism, and you folks might never have even had the chance to know about Christ. Think about it! The consequences, if I had disobeyed, are enormous. But just by believing the best possible things about the worst possible man, I had become the instrument of God to change him.
Something else: I learned that folks need to know it if you have decided to believe in them and help them. Folks need to feel that your love is genuine. It wasn’t easy to do, but I put my hands on Saul; it seems as though he could feel something special when I did that, as if I were not afraid of him, as if I were making a real contact with him. I know that in your day you’re going to find it important to touch people, literally. Those boarder babies, those AIDS patients, those homeless men – they need for you to hold their hands, to sit down next to them. They need to feel that you can treat them just like a brother ’or a sister; you can’t seem to be better than they are. You have to be their brothers, their sisters. Oh, I tell you, it almost choked me to call the persecutor Saul my brother. But that took the blindness from my heart as well as from his eyes.
And one more thing; oh, my friends, one more thing. And that is that doing ministry changed me. When I finally learned how to think the best about the worst, I found that I too was changed. It wasn’t just a matter of well-turned-out me doing my correct Christian thing for a poor unfortunate soul, not at all. I found that Saul ministered to me; I found that the Holy Spirit ministered to me; I found that when I think the best and hope and pray the best for the worst of men, I am also making myself open to be loved. Saul had thought the worst of me before; but now, just because I could touch him and brother him for the sake of Christ, he could see the best in me too.
For several days thereafter Saul visited and talked with us, and on the first day of the week, as was the practice of the believers, we came together to break bread and to share the cup, the symbols of the Lord. And when we did, Saul looked with his new eyes first at the table, and then at me, and finally at all the others. And he said, "He is the Christ; He is the one sent of God. We will be witnesses to all the world of what we have seen and heard."
