Ananias knew that the first thing Jesus does to a person—or at least what He did to him—is He injects them with a strong dose of humility. That’s what Jesus does to a heart. He calms it. Reduces it. When Jesus grabs a hold of somebody, that somebody becomes both smaller and bigger all at once. All the world becomes bigger, and you become smaller, and all of a sudden the world isn’t yours anymore—it’s God’s and you’re just a little part of it.
As it turned out, Saul—yes, THE Saul, the one who went around murdering Christians—Saul, of all people, was the next person that Jesus welcomed into His life. Also, as it turned out, Ananias was chosen by God to nurture that Christ-life in Saul. The first stage of this nurturing was bandaging up Saul’s wounds. Jesus did a number on Him. Saul was stopped in his tracks. Saul was not okay.
Think of the devastation, the injury—not only the physical but the spiritual. Saul was thrown from his life. Didn’t know where or who he was. Saul would spend years being made new. Jesus had a lot of work to do. So did Ananias.
You must excuse Ananias for fearing what Jesus asked him to do. For all these years, he and his fellow Jesus followers would run in the other direction whenever they heard Saul was headed their way. Saul was a tornado of a man, reckless and powerful, he was a Christian killer who breathed threats against Jesus’s church. He was hell-bent on exterminating every Christian he could get his hands on. Before Christ stopped him in his tracks, He sought to perfect himself in his power, thinking God was impressed by his strides. Saul used his efforts and abilities to ground himself before God and others. That was his Pharisaical ways at work.
Later, he would count his former life as one lousy and misguided attempt to secure himself before God. His efforts were self-serving and faithless. He thought he was serving God, but all he was doing was implementing strategies to keep God at arm’s length. Later, he wrote that he accomplished many things in his former life, but none of them established him before God.
But Ananias trusted the voice he heard. He trusted that it belonged to Jesus, and Jesus would never lead him astray, so out He went to find a house along Straight Street. It’s important to mention that Ananias talked back to the Lord at first—something only brave people do. But what Jesus was asking Ananias to do sounded like crazy talk to him, so he put up a well-meaning fight. But we all know who wins these fights. So, Ananias packed his things and went!
Flannery O’Connor once wrote of Saul,
“I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him straight off his horse.”
Saul’s conversion experience is way out of the ordinary, but that man needed something big to happen to him. Jesus had to throw that man down to the ground and afflict him with blindness to get his attention. The way the man saw just about everything needed changing. And drastically.
When Ananias arrived at the house on Straight Street, he got right to work. Jesus was serious about him nursing Saul back to health again, getting him trained up and taught in Jesus. Jesus came into Saul’s life so fast it hurt. Saul didn’t even know who he was anymore. That’s what Jesus meant to do. Saul had no idea which way was up.
The old Saul couldn’t keep his mouth shut, and it was full of vile words; but the man Ananias met was silent, confounded, helpless, and overcome. God can knock the nonsense out of anyone He wants to.
It took three days for those scale-like-looking things to fall from Saul’s eyes. Three is an Easter number. Then he could see again. He stopped mumbling too, so Ananias could finally understand what he was saying. Ananias would never forget the first clear words out of his mouth, “I want to be baptized.”
Time passed. So many of us think that Saul was struck dumb and blind, got cured of his blindness, hopped up, and suddenly knew everything he needed to know about preaching and teaching Jesus. This account in Acts makes it sound that way, but there’s more in his letter to the church in Galatia. Saul writes it down himself, saying that it took something like 14 years in all to be raised in Jesus.
During those 14 years, Saul traveled long distances to meet up with other Christian leaders like Cephas and Barnabas and he studied and prayed under their care. Being raised in Christ isn’t anything that happens quickly as I’m sure you know. It takes years of humble discipleship, dedication, and apprenticing. It’s slow work. It takes parents and teachers and mentors. It takes a hunger that you don’t ever want to lose.
Through all that training up in Jesus—through all that study, endless questions, worship, and prayer—Jesus sinks in, deeper and deeper, changing us from the inside out. That’s what happened to Saul. All that anger got left behind, and others like Ananias could see the wonder and awe and joy replacing it. That’s how Jesus works! The fancy word for it is transformation, but most people call it grace.
So, what does this all have to do with you and me? Well, maybe we should reorient our imagination. Stick with me, here. Instead of seeing ourselves as those who do God’s work for others, we should get used to a more Biblical way of practicing church. We are not doers of the gospel’s work; the Gospel is working on us! Rather than imagining that it’s our task to change to world or even our little corner of it, can we imagine that it’s Jesus’s desire to change the church?
God is working to transform us. Our first task is to receive God’s grace. Rather than seeing it as our task to go out and change the world, to make an impact for Christ, can we stop to recognize that God is first and foremost working on us? Jesus wants to sink in, deeper and deeper—to change you and me from the inside out. Jesus is never done building His people. He’s never done building His church, and it’s not our task to do that for Him. A church is primarily a people who Jesus is working on.
If you had a chance to ask Saul, I bet he’d tell you that becoming a disciple of Jesus is slow work that’s never finished. I bet he’d tell you that Jesus has consequences, and those consequences are bound to knock us straight off our horses. Faith is not something claimed as much as it is something lived out as Christ accomplishes His purposes in us.
Ananias took those days to carefully tend to Saul’s immediate needs, his wounds, and hunger, all the while trusting that Christ was tending to who he would become.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.