Acts 22:1-5 (NIV)
“Brothers and fathers, listen now to my defense.”
When they heard him speak to them in Aramaic, they became very quiet.
Then Paul said: “I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city. Under Gamaliel I was thoroughly trained in the law of our fathers and was just as zealous for God as any of you are today. I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, as also the high priest and all the Council can testify. I even obtained letters from them to their brothers in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished.”
Paul’s defense of himself is actually his testimony – not a declaration of his innocence as much as an explanation of why he was doing what he was doing.
He begins, as any good testimony begins, with the “before” picture. In his pre-Christian days, Paul identified himself primarily by his heritage. He was a Jew first and foremost. Even though he was born in the foreign city of Tarsus, he was brought up in Jerusalem and educated in the law by Gamaliel, the preeminent authority on the law of his day. His pedigree was spotless.
In addition, many years before, when Christianity had been in its infancy, he was a rabidly against it as any of his attackers were now. That opposition went as far as not only actively persecuting the believers, but even tracking them down in cities as far away as Damascus and bringing them prisoner to Jerusalem for trial and execution.
But what the crowd was seeing as positive points in all this, Paul’s heritage, his education, and his zeal in the persecution of those seen as heretics, Paul saw as powerful negatives, even points of shame. In a couple of years, he would write his letter to the Philippians, in which he again outlines many of those same points, and then finishes by writing, “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish (literally “manure”), that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ–the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.” (Philippians 3:7-9 NIV)
But for now, Paul is warming up to relate the central event of his life, the shining moment that erased the significance to him of everything that he had taken pride in before, replacing it with the plans for the growth and expansion of the kingdom of God that had occupied his whole life ever since.
Father, it is interesting to me to so clearly see the dichotomy between Paul’s shame-filled view of his past and the approval for those exact same things that the crowd would have given him for them. What a difference Jesus makes! Thank you for my own story of transformation. Help me to share it frequently and well. Amen.
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