Meeting Jesus

Right now it seems to me that the most important story in the New Testament is the conversion of Saul.

The first gospel to be committed to paper, the Gospel of Mark around 70AD, ended with the death of Jesus. Maybe there was a worry about being too challenging or maybe the resurrection was such a personal story that it could not be shared – but for whatever reason the writer did not include it in his record of the life of Jesus.

Saul was a committed Jew and a committed anti-Christian. But one day, on the road to Damascus, he had an experience that changed his life: he had a personal experience of the long-dead Jesus. 

It did change his life – but, because he was such a passionate and skilled thinker and communicator, it also came to change how the early Christians came to talk about Jesus. Until Saul/Paul’s insights, Jesus was seen as another passionate and talented communicator who had died for his refusal to compromise his knowledge of God and his role in relation to God.

Based on his experience on the road, Saul/Paul suddenly had first-hand irrefutable proof that Jesus still lived. To him the resurrection was first-hand – he was a witness to the fact that Jesus still lived. True, he no longer walked among us, but he did visit, he did speak, he did form relationships with other living people. 

Clearly Paul was not the first person to have this experience – but the mystical nature of Paul’s experience was intensely personal, and clearly changed him.

And maybe because Paul had not met the historical Jesus while he lived, this meeting became the central event in his life. 

It led him to claim the title “apostle” just like the other apostles called by Jesus, and it inspired his whole interpretation of the life and sayings of Jesus. His excited recounting of the experience also gave permission for others to share the intense and personal relationships they had formed with Jesus after his death, and so the stories came to be recorded in the writings of the early Church (including later revisions of Mark’s Gospel).

When I first read these writing in the Gospels (as a much younger person!) I understood that personal contact with Jesus ended with the ascension – despite my own experience of what felt like a personal contact with Jesus in my prayer life. Now I know better.

Now I see the ascension as writers clearing the way for future pray-ers (like us) to understand our own personal experience with Jesus is real, but also as an experience (like that of Paul) that is not part of the material world.

When we encounter Jesus today, it is a spiritual meeting: a meeting just as real, just as personal, just as affecting (if we have the courage to accept it) as that of Paul. And right now, for me, that event is at the very center of my reading of the New Testament.