Divine Confrontation and Conversion

Lectionary reflections for the Third Sunday of Easter (C)

by Mark Harris

Readings for Easter 3, Year C, Apr. 25, 2004

Acts 9:1-19a

Psalm 33

Revelation 5:6-14

John 21:1-14

The Rev. Earl Beshears, a good friend, writing to a small group of us who read the scriptures together, summarized this Gospel reading from John this way:

Old pals get together for a fishing trip; they take Peter's boat. The sun is rising over the lake, they've been out all night, all the beer is gone and they've caught no fish. In the shadows on shore they can just barely see a man cooking over a fire. He directs them to the fish and they filled their nets. Peter thinks he might know who it is and swims ashore. The stranger invites them to a breakfast barbeque on the beach. None of the disciples dare to ask him, “Who are you?” They already know the answer. Do we 21 st century mainliners know who he is? Does it matter?

Does it matter, indeed! Knowing who he is is crucial, as is how we know. The radical nature of both of these points is that knowing who anyone is is a visceral matter, a sensual matter, and the nature of our knowing is experiential. There is no retreat possible into the realms of abstract realities. There is only incarnation.   Such knowing involves confrontation and seeing anew. The whole of such knowing is called conversion.

Conversion is a central component of the radical understanding of the Good News in Jesus Christ. By “radical understanding” I mean an understanding that confronts us with the implications of engagement with the One who is the source of awe and love both.   Radical engagement with the Gospel, whatever its form, recasts our sensibilities, our view of the world, our view of ourselves, in ways that forever change us. Such conversion is what happens when we are forced to respond to confrontation in the material world by the divine.

Christian progressives have every reason . . . to reject the mechanics of conversion as widely touted by Christian fundamentalists. Conversion is not primarily a product of the interior terror of the sinner in the hands of an angry God; rather it is the result of divine confrontation and the acquisition of sight. We are encountered, we change, we see.

Christian progressives have every reason to affirm the centrality of conversion to Christian faith, and every reason to reject the mechanics of conversion as widely touted by Christian fundamentalists. Conversion is not primarily a product of the interior terror of the sinner in the hands of an angry God; rather it is the result of divine confrontation and the acquisition of sight. We are encountered, we change, we see.

Such encounters are often quite different from what we might expect. The lessons for this third Sunday in Easter are full of such unexpected surprises.

The Gospel story seems a “guy” thing: “Old pals get together for a fishing trip; they take Peter's boat,” and the point of the story seems to be the barbeque on the beach and their knowing without asking that this is Jesus. But this story has hidden in it an element of transformative love, one not easily seen as part of the surface story.

It has taken years for me to move the point of impact back several sentences before the meeting on the beach to what I now think is the revelation moment, the moment where the disciple Jesus loved says, “It is the Lord.” From that moment on Peter and the others believe it is Jesus there on the shore. From that point on the matter is settled.

The connection that makes one who loves another recognize the other in even the most obscured environment amazes anyone who is fortunate enough to have had such a love. It is a connection present between John and Jesus. It is John, who Jesus loves, who recognizes Jesus.

What can we say of a love that includes such recognition? The word used here in Greek is from the word agape , and it is fair to say that such love is not about mere flesh. Yet flesh is exactly what is at stake here: to recognize the beloved at a distance is to recognize the body, but it is not only about body. It is to recognize in the obscured distance the one hoped for, the one beloved. It is to see in the form of the body that which the body itself cannot deliver, but only the beloved.

Such love is costly. The body remembers the body and so much more. John the beloved disciple knew Jesus in the body and saw it in its glory and in its horror. (We dare for the moment to make the body and the person different entitites, an artificial separation for sake of the dialectic. But we know there are not two, but one.) John laid his head upon Jesus' breast; stood at the foot of Jesus' Cross; missed him terribly. From such memories of the body came the recognition of the body.

The conversion to the wonder of the resurrection is not alone a spiritual matter. It is visceral, a remembrance of one hoped for, a turning again to one known in the flesh. “It is the Lord,” John said, and he should know. The point of turning, the place of conversion was in the confrontation between the distant point of hope and the ache of the one who was beloved. The divine confrontation that leads to conversion can begin in the expectation of one who is loved, remembering.

The conversion experience of Paul is the headlined story in the reading from Acts. It is clearly a conversion based on divine confrontation. But his is not the only such conversion. Ananias too has such a conversation with the Lord, and he too is converted.

When first meeting Saul, Ananias refers to him as “brother Saul,” a remarkable change given his distress at what Saul was doing to the followers of Jesus. Perhaps the fullness of conversion – the falling of “something like scales” from Saul's eyes and his recovery of sight – were only possible with that word, “brother.” The conversion of Saul was no easy thing. Someone who had no reason to trust him did, and laid hands on him and called him brother. Ananias had no reason to use that word, and Saul had no right to expect it. The conversion of Saul (a.k.a. Paul) and Ananias both is completed in the reconciling word “brother.” The “eye opening” was the result, but the reconciling word and the conversion came first.

We who profess to be progressive in our Christian faith need to recognize the visceral character of true conversion. The body does matter; the sensual is the source of loving care as well as the basis for the demand for justice and the hope for mercy.

We who profess to be progressive in our Christian faith need to recognize the visceral character of true conversion. The body does matter; the sensual is the source of loving care as well as the basis for the demand for justice and the hope for mercy.

We are not turned around by an idea, but by a brother or sister newly found in the reconciling moment, by the stranger for whom our hearts ache as if that stranger was the one who loved us, by vision so strong that it fills us with awe and we fall down before it.  

I am not sure we 21 st century mainliners see it, but perhaps we will when by way of reconciliation or being beloved or by vision the scales fall from our eyes. And then it will matter very much indeed.

The Rev. Canon Mark Harris is author of The Challenge of Change: The Anglican Communion in the Post Modern Era , and a member of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company's ( The Witness magazine) board of directors. He lives in Lewes, Del., and may be reached by email at poetmark@worldnet.att.net .