Homily
Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle
25 January 2011
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center
Paul was a proud person before his conversion. If Mary was the most humble of all the apostles, the one who proclaimed that the Lord looked upon her lowliness, the one who was most ready to receive Jesus Christ, then Paul was the opposite. Paul and Mary represent the bookends of the apostles. One was perfectly humble and ready to receive Jesus. The other was perfectly proud and ready to persecute Him. One was chosen even before Jesus' birth, and carried Him in her womb. The other never met the Lord face to face, but only met Him after His ascension into heaven. Yet both became super-apostles, the apostles of the apostles, the apostles par excellence. Paul, because He eventually was called to outwork the other apostles in the mission of evangelization. Mary, because from her beginning she was to be the pattern of the apostolic Church, teaching us how to receive Jesus before being sent by Him. She too, like Paul, eventually outworked all the other apostles, eventually winning converts by the millions, most notably here in the Americas sixteen centuries after Her assumption. If there is any apostle who has brought the Gospel here to the Americas, it is Mary herself, and our Lady of Guadalupe is the apostle to the Americas.
The vocational stories of Mary and Paul could not be more different really, and yet their lives bear similar fruit. They are both zealous for the law of Moses, Mary by virtue of her Immaculate Conception lived the law of Moses even more perfectly and intensely than did Paul, whose life was based on enforcing righteous laws that preserved goodness, not only for himself but out of love for God and nation. It can easily be said that Paul loved the law to the point of neglect to the law-giver, and Paul would be the first to say that his conversion was from being a murderer to being an apostle, yet the zeal with which Paul lived the law of Moses was exactly what God desired for the preaching of the Gospel. The conversion of Paul is the greatest conversion in history; it is God's healing of pride and turning that extraordinary pride that Paul possessed into a zeal for souls that the rest of the apostles could never dream of imitating.
Paul ended upon proclaiming, as does Mary in her magnificat, that God looked upon his lowliness, his unworthiness, and began to love Paul and to heal Paul and to call Paul precisely beginning at that point where Paul was weakest, where because of his pride he did not yet know the love of God. Paul then like Mary boasted only of his lowliness, and teaches us to boast to others only of our weakness. Our proclamation to the world as Christians is not to show how the law of Christ has made us better than other people; even if it has, this is not the story that is to be proclaimed. No, our story is to proclaim with Paul the story of our conversion, of how Jesus Christ comes to visit us in our lowliness, how he has personally healed my sinfulness, and beginning with my weakness, has called me into His great apostolic mission.
No comments:
Post a Comment