The Appearances: Damascus

Amen, well, we are on page 1087 of the Red Bibles, and we're also going to dip into 1 Corinthians 15. And I found a book up the back, which I found very helpful yesterday; I just ducked across to church and picked it up. 1 Corinthians by a fellow called Paul Barnett; you can fight over this at the end—it's terrific. I think we've only got one copy of it, but if you want to read more and think more deeply, that is an excellent piece of writing.

What's your biggest mistake? When I was 17, I bought my first car; it was a Ford XR Falcon painted GT Gold. It's actually just sort of an off-colored brown, but they called it GT Gold back in those days. The only trouble with the car is it didn't have a transmission, but that's okay. My friend Andrew, who was a Greek Cypriot, he rebuilt automatic transmissions and he gave me a completely rebuilt C3 transmission to put into my XR Falcon. And he even told me how to do it, which was great, and so I did and it worked fine and I drove it everywhere. It was not the most delicate of machines, but I loved it.

One day I was driving to school and suddenly I heard this massive thud and then the sound of screeching and scraping metal. I thought, "Oh no, what's that?" I pulled over, I looked at the front of the car—it was all okay. I looked at the back of the car—it was all okay. I looked underneath the car—it was not okay. The transmission had fallen out; it was sitting on the road. I'd been so excited to get the car working that in my haste I'd neglected to put split pins in the bolts on the crossmember that held the transmission to the car, and the vibration of driving around day after day after day caused the bolts to slowly unwind and the whole thing had fallen out.

What's your biggest mistake? I don't know what your biggest mistake is, but if I was to go from the ridiculous to the sublime, it's nothing compared to the mistake that Saul of Tarsus made. "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" Words of Jesus. "Who are you, Lord?" "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." That's a pretty big mistake. Saul of Tarsus, a religious zealot, thinks he's persecuting the Christians; he's persecuting those of "the way"—that's how they were described in the day. But Jesus takes it personally: "No Saul, you're persecuting me." When Saul set off, the last person he thought he would meet would be Jesus. "I'm persecuting the Messiah, the Lord of all, the one who was once dead but now is alive—dangerously alive—the one whom it says in the book of Acts God has made both Lord and Christ." If you're going to make a mistake, that's a beauty.

We are post-Easter 2026, and we are studying the resurrection appearances of Jesus. Maybe study is too intense a word, but we are looking at them; we are thinking on the resurrection appearances of Jesus, and today: Damascus. It's so famous it has become idiomatic; it's an idiom that has entered into the English language—the Damascus road experience. It's used for so many different things, the Damascus road experience. If you look it up in the dictionary: a sudden, dramatic, life-changing shift in belief or attitude.

The appearance of Jesus to Paul—I'm going to call him Paul because he changes his name from Saul to Paul, but rather than confuse you and confuse me, I'll just call him Paul from now on. The appearances of Jesus to Paul are so important that they are documented at least five times in the New Testament. You can read the backstory in Galatians chapter 1; there is a short aside to it in Romans chapter 1. You see it here in Acts chapter 9, where it's recounted for us; Paul's conversion story is told. And then you get a reprise of it in Acts chapter 22, where Paul is speaking to a crowd in Jerusalem, and then you get another reprise in chapter 26 of Acts, where he is before King Agria II and his sister Bernice and the Roman governor Festus. In those two last examples, Luke is clearly an eyewitness, so Luke is there reporting what was said. But Paul also recounts the appearances of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15.

So let's play historical detective for a little while, just for a few minutes—will you do that with me? Less than two years ago I was in Dublin. I'd been to see the Book of Kells at Trinity College. There's pretty much two things you do when you're in Dublin: you go to the Guinness Factory and you go to see the Book of Kells. There's no relationship really between the two except that they happen to be in Dublin. The Book of Kells, if you've ever seen it, is amazing; they are beautiful. It is a masterpiece of medieval art; they are lavishly decorated manuscripts of the four gospels written in Latin and they date to about 800 AD. And if you go there, there are tourists everywhere; it is an absolute tourist magnet. But when I went back to my humble hotel in Temple Bar in Dublin, I remembered there's another museum in Dublin as well. This is the Chester Beatty Library, which is kind of on the edge of Dublin Castle, and it was just a few hundred meters away. So in the afternoon I went to the Chester Beatty Library. There's no tourists—well, not many anyway; there's no fanfare, but it contains the Chester Beatty papyri.

Chester Beatty was a mining magnate; he made his money out of copper and he decided he was going to collect antiquities and he built a library in Dublin. It's a great story actually; fell out with the English government—not hard to do—and built a library in Dublin to house all these antiquities, including these biblical papyri that he had procured. And I'm going to show you a photograph of one of them—there it is. That is a photograph of P46, which you can see there just in glass cases, and it is way more significant than anything in the Book of Kells because it includes a very early copy of Paul to the Corinthians: late 2nd century, early 3rd century. In other words, it's just a few generations after Paul himself. It's extraordinary that we have a copy which is so close to the original; it's amazing.

And what it says is this in 1 Corinthians 15: "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve." After that he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also as one abnormally born.

So keep playing historical detective with me. Paul wrote this 1 Corinthians 15 around 53 to 54 AD; that's about 20 years after Jesus. And what he says there in verse three is he says, "What I received"—he said he received something and he passed it on to you, the Corinthians, as of first importance. He received something, but what he's writing is not something new. Most scholars—most mainstream scholars—think that what he passed on to them was an ancient song or a rhyme or a creed, and you see it there in these words. And most people think, or a lot of people think, that it is just dates just a couple of years after Jesus died and Christians were passing it around to each other like a song. You might recognize it as a mnemonic, as a memory device. And Paul says he'd already passed it on to the Corinthians a few years beforehand; he'd received it himself when he became a follower of Jesus. "What I received I passed on to you as of first importance."

So it probably went something like this: Paul became a follower of Christ around AD 31 or 32; he visits the eyewitnesses in Jerusalem about 33 or 34; he receives this creed, this hymn, this mnemonic in the mid-30s. And so this means that the details of Jesus' death and resurrection were circulating very, very early. And what does it say? Says Jesus was the Christ; says he died for sins. How do you know he died? Well, because he was buried. You don't bury living people; he died; the evidence is he was buried. He was raised on the third day. How do you know he was raised? He appeared; he was seen.

Paul locates his seeing Jesus amidst the fabric of all the other appearances of Jesus. He appeared to Cephas—Peter—then to the 12; after that he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at that same time, most of whom are still living though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also as to one abnormally born. How do we know Jesus rose? Paul says, "Because he was seen." It's not something you need to just believe by faith; check out the evidence. There is evidence here to be absorbed and weighed. He was seen by Cephas—that's Peter. He was seen by James—that's Jesus' younger brother. What would it take you to convince your older brother was God? At least a resurrection. Then he appeared to the 12 disciples, then 500 people at one time, which means you can contact them, you can trace them; I could give you names and addresses, I think Paul would be alluding to. And last of all he appeared to me—Paul—as to one abnormally born.

So Jesus' appearances to Paul—that's what we're thinking of today. Jesus' appearance to Paul: two things it wasn't and three things it was. First of all, it wasn't a story that grew slowly over the years because you can see that from a very, very early time it was well-formed. When people are talking to other people about Jesus in those year or two after he died and risen, what are they to tell people? Well, this creed, this mnemonic, would have been perhaps the thing they would talk about. So it wasn't something that grew slowly. Secondly, it wasn't just a spiritual resurrection—you know, the idea that he just rose in our hearts or his teaching just lived on in us and it was sort of like a resurrection within our own selves. No, it was physical from the beginning: he died, he was buried, he rose, he was seen.

It wasn't a story that grew slowly over years, wasn't just a spiritual resurrection; it was a sudden change. Look at Paul on the road to Damascus, verse three: "As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; he fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?'" It was sudden. "Why do you persecute me?" He was blind; now he sees. We expect people to change slowly mostly, and often people do change slowly, but God can change people quickly as well and conversion can happen quickly.

It happened quickly for Paul. I can remember when I was about 22 years of age, I was on a summer holiday mission in Kiama on the south coast. And they were the coolest people I've ever had the experience of being with—apart from yourselves, of course. And at that time it was like we were trying to reach teenagers and we surfed and skated with the locals and of an evening we took over the local hall in Kiama and bands came down from Sydney and it was like we were the nightlife that came to Kiama. And one young guy heard about Jesus in one of the sessions and he believed and he became a Christian. And I went back down to visit him about five weeks later; in five weeks' time he read the whole Bible. He was changed quickly, suddenly, dramatically.

Jesus appears to Paul and it changes him; he is converted. That's what conversion is: it's to change, it's to move from X to Y, from one to another. It's good to remember that God doesn't want us to round off an otherwise good life; he wants converts. He wants people to move—people to move from themselves to God, from death to life. God changes people; sometimes he does it very, very quickly.

And then it was unlikely. Paul was one of the most unlikely of people; he was completely against the Christians. You could not think of anyone more antithetical to the Christian cause. His cause is to move from house to house to end the cause of Jesus, to arrest the believers. And yet, the most unlikely convert, and all because he witnesses the appearance of Jesus. God does choose unlikely people.

I'm reminded of CS Lewis of Narnia fame and the prolific author; he says this: "You must picture me alone in my room at Oxford night after night feeling, whenever my mind lifted for even a second from my work, I felt the steady unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly decide not to meet. That which I greatly feared meeting—Jesus—had at last come upon me. In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in; I admitted that God was God and I wasn't. So I knelt and prayed—perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England."

Paul was an utterly committed opponent. It's hard when you go very publicly as an opponent; it's very hard to change because people know what you stand for. I really feel for people when they say they're atheists; often I say to them, "Are you a closed atheist or an open atheist?". Most people say they're open because it sounds narrow to say you're closed, but in fact most people probably are, and the reason for that is it's very hard to go back on what you said once you've said that. It's very, very hard for us to change; no one likes saying they were wrong. But we need to remember that God can change the most intractable opponents as he did with Paul.

And thirdly, it's a work of divine and sovereign grace. Paul did nothing; it was free, it was unmerited. God overcame whatever was necessary; God's free—he can do it, he can do it however he wants. And you know, Jesus' appearance to Paul was for your sake. Think about this for a moment: nothing has changed the course of history more than this man's conversion. Paul—Saul the Pharisee—becomes Paul the Apostle. He took the gospel of Jesus from being cocooned in a Jewish Middle Eastern sect to becoming the dominant religion, the dominant faith system in the world.

A few years ago I was sitting in church—it wasn't this one so I can speak freely—and I looked around the building and this is what I saw: I saw two surgeons, one of whom who'd just come back from doing some I guess you'd call it pro bono work in Gaza. In an infectious diseases specialist and a primary school boy. I saw a disabled man and an NRL player who had just achieved a recent premiership. There was an engineer, a paramedic, and two men with mental illnesses from nearby boarding houses. An architect, a lawyer, and a woman who couldn't work because of chronic depression. A third-year arts student, two publishers, and a high-profile business analyst. A woman from Africa, an Italian, two New Zealanders, an Irishman, and a Chinese national. A rock guitarist and a man who organizes stunts for movies.

And all here because of God's grace shown to this man Paul. The appearances of Jesus recounted by Paul, the appearances of Jesus to numerous people—to James, to Peter, to 500 people at one time—and when you think about it, how did we get here? Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that our faith rests on not just wishful thinking but it rests on the empty tomb and most of all the appearances. And we thank you for the appearances to the apostle; we thank you that he went on to be the apostle to the whole non-Jewish world. We thank you that we sit as part of that trajectory here, 21st century on the other side of the world. We pray, heavenly Father, that these treasures might be very dear to us, and we pray, heavenly Father, that this message may be one that rings out ever more clearly in our world, our country, our city, and our little part of North Sydney. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

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