Cataracts (Acts 9:1-19( 4/14/13

For a couple years, I had noticed that my vision was deteriorating. During a beach vacation a couple summers ago, I realized that when I looked at someone in bright sunlight, I could see nothing but a silhouette if the person was between me and the sun. I thought I was just hyper sensitive to glare. But it kept getting worse. So did my driving. It finally occurred to me that I might have a problem.

I went to an optometrist, who pronounced that I had not one, but two, dense cataracts on the lenses of my eyes. Over the next several months, both cataracts were removed and I received artificial lenses. Now I see like an eagle. Well, not really, but you know what I mean. Before, my vision was impaired. Now, I can see clearly.

I hope I never forget the day my bandage was removed from my first cataract surgery. It was late spring. I walked outside the hospital to an explosion of definition…and color! I remember that the grass and the leaves on the trees were so much greener than I had noticed in years. And they were even different colors of green. Everything was vivid and full of detail. It was as though I was being re-introduced to sight. I was amazed. I felt like a child, with so many new things to discover. As Cindy drove me home from the hospital, she had to listen to me constantly exclaiming over everything I saw. Even road signs fascinated me. I felt as though I had been blind, and now through a modern medical miracle, I could see again.

The apostle Paul had a similar problem. He had a really bad case of cataracts…only his cataracts were spiritual instead of physical. They blinded his heart from seeing the gospel of Jesus. When Stephen became the first martyr to Christianity, the stoning witnesses laid their garments as Saul’s feet.  Saul later testified in Acts and in his epistles to having been instrumental in that execution. He began to ravage the church. Acts 8 tells us that he “dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”

Not content with his actions in Jerusalem, Saul petitioned for, and got, letters from the chief priests giving him permission to go to Damascus and do the same thing to the Christians there. Luke tells us that he was “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.” Paul was a man in a hurry. He was so busy doing the work of a zealous, legalistic Pharisee that he had no time to hear that still, small voice of God inside him. So Saul was not only blind, but also deaf, to the gospel.

Theologian Robert Maddox, Jr. speculates that Saul’s spirit was very restless. He couldn’t be still. He had to be on the move. Maddox wonders if Saul wasn’t about to explode from the inner pressure of doing what must have on some level felt completely wrong to him. All those innocent, kind faces, beginning with Stephen. All those people not fighting back. Maybe it was beginning to have an effect on Saul.

Can you identify with Paul? Paul, then Saul, was so on fire with what he was about that he had little time or little inclination to stop and ask God if he was headed in the right direction.  Perhaps the most notable characteristic of the Pharisees was their devotion to prayer, and Saul was the Pharisee of Pharisees. Yet for all that prayer, he must have been doing a lot more talking than listening. Sound familiar? Sometimes it’s tough to wait for the answer to prayer. It’s tempting for us to inform God what we’re about and figure he will stop us if we are going the wrong way. Our impatience and our desire to make our own decisions get in the way of our faith.

You know, when Jesus wants our attention, he is most certainly going to get it. Saul was no exception. Jesus got his attention on the road to Damascus. There was this incredible light, then the voice and then…blindness. Luke describes the event in Acts 9: “Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.” He fell to the ground. He heard a voice, saying “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul said “Who are you, Lord?”, but I’m thinking he knew perfectly well whose voice it was. He was trying to figure out if he was in a vision or a dream or a close encounter of the Jesus kind. Jesus identified himself and then told Saul to get up and that he would be told what to do.

So Saul gets to his feet. He opens his eyes and sees nothing. How ironic. For the first time, Saul is seeing consistent with his mind. All this time, he has been exposed to people martyring themselves and suffering for the gospel, and he has looked right through them and their witness, seeing nothing. Now he sees nothing for real. He is now physically aligned with his spiritual blindness.

I can remember clearly when my cataracts were removed from my eyes. Although my eyes were sedated, I can remember the room being bathed with much more light. The scales which had covered my lenses from normal sight were gone and the light could once again penetrate my line of vision. I knew even before the surgery was complete that something very significant had happened to me.

I’m thinking that as Saul was led by the hand by his fellow travelers, he too was aware that something very significant had happened to him. He was undergoing spiritual surgery and he was never going to be the same. For three days not only could he not see; he also neither ate nor drank. Saul was being emptied.

Enter Ananias. Ananias is a God-fearing Christian who is minding his own business when God decides to use him. God speaks to him in a vision and the next thing he knows, he has been commissioned to go to the murderer of Christians. God tells Ananias that Saul is his chosen instrument to carry his name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. Guided by a vision from God, Ananias plucks up his courage and goes to Saul as he is ordered.

So…let’s try to follow this. In a series of ironic twists, the man who cannot see Jesus comes face to face with the risen Christ. The person who sees only his own will loses all sight in order to see God’s will. The leader of the Jewish opposition to Christianity becomes God’s agent to the Gentiles, even though he is not himself a Gentile. A humble disciple who fears for his own life is called to lay hands upon the blind Saul in order to restore his physical sight. And he finds his subject where? On a street called Straight in Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the history of the world.

The result is predictable. After three days of listening, prayer and an epiphany supplied by God, Saul is ready. He has become weak enough to find his strength in God. He has, in his inability to see anything, become ready to see the truth. Paul’s sight is restored. He is baptized. He is ready to see, not only physically, but spiritually. He has been emptied in order to be filled…filled with the Holy Spirit and the revelation that comes with it. His path from here on will be like the street upon which his sight is restored. For him, the way is now Straight.

I have thought many times since my cataract surgeries that I got a new lease on life with my eyesight. But that experience reminded me that real vision takes not only my eyes, but all my other faculties as well. I have the lesson of Saul to remind me that seeing is only part of vision. There is so much more.

It is no accident that we can read so much symbolism in this story of Saul on the Damascus Road. Like Saul, we all need to meet with God’s disciples on the Straight Street of life. Like Saul, we all need the laying on of the hands of our fellow disciples. And we all need to do what Saul was told by God to do: to rise and enter and wait until we are told what to do. Saul waited only three days. I’m sure it seemed like an eternity to him at the time. But look at what God was able to do with him once he got Saul to see. He became Paul, the thirteenth Apostle.

God can do that for you and me too. We just need to rise and enter that Straight Street…and wait…until he tells us what to do. Ananias will come to us too, or we may find ourselves playing the role of Ananias for a time. He may be named Officer Jones or Uncle Bob or Aunt Sarah, or he or she may be you on God’s errand. He may just be that still, small voice in our heart. But he will come, and give us the vision that we were meant to see…if we rise…and wait…until we are told what God wants us to do.