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The account of Saint Paul’s conversion is something that’s very familiar to most of us. Saul was persecuting the early Church, and Jesus stopped him in his tracks with a blinding light. But He might have responded to that persecution in a different way. He might have said, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.’ Instead Jesus reached out to Saul in a way that was difficult to resist. Jesus called him to something different.

      The account highlights two important points about grace. The first - and perhaps the most important - is that grace is never something that we deserve. Neither is it something that we can earn. It is always a free gift of God. The second thing is that grace is not something that we possess already, that God perhaps draws out of us. Grace is given so that we might be able to do something we otherwise wouldn't be capable of. Saul was never, of his own accord, going to stop persecuting Christians and instead start risking his own life by preaching the Gospel. He was an extremely zealous persecutor.

      It will be helpful to hear Paul himself speak about his conversion. Please look-up Saint Paul’s Letter to the Galatians chapter 1, verses 11 to 17, in a Bible, or read the excerpt from it given below.

      This passage highlights a third point about grace. It’s simply this, we must play our part in the work of grace. We’re not bystanders, we must actually respond to God’s call to receive grace. Saint Paul, at the end of the passage tells us that he didn’t set to work straight away, but instead went to Arabia. He himself had to decide to accept what God was calling him to.

      So, the three major things about grace are: we can never deserve it, it allows us to do much more than we would otherwise be capable of, and we must choose to accept what God gives. What these points don’t give us is a definition of what grace actually is - they are just things that can be said about it. Make no mistake, down the centuries people have written definitions of grace, but it’s a bit like trying to learn what love is - it’s best done by example.

      It has to be said that Saint Paul’s experience is a bit unusual. But there are two examples that come easily to mind from our own time that can help us. In 1987 Gordon Wilson lost his twenty year old daughter Marie to an IRA bomb. In May 2008 Barry and Margaret Mizen lost their sixteen year old son Jimmy at the hands of another boy. It would have been perfectly normal - and certainly acceptable in our secular society - if the parents in these two cases had spoken about ‘getting justice’, ‘making them pay’ or ’locking them up and throwing away the key.’ But in neither case did the parents use that kind of language. Margaret Mizen spoke of feeling sorry for the parents of the other boy. She said that anger breeds anger, and that bitterness would destroy her family - and she wasn’t going to let that happen. Gordon Wilson said, ‘I don’t bear a grudge. Bitter talk is not going to bring Marie back to life. I’ll pray, tonight and every night, that God will forgive them.’ The difference between what these parents might have been expected to say, and what they actually said, is grace. Their words were not natural, they were supernatural, because they responded to God’s offer of grace.

      The call that these parents heard would probably be very difficult to describe, and that will probably be the case most of the time for us too. But God constantly offers us grace in situations big and small, we need only recognise them and accept the gift.

Mark Howe

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