April 28: St. Paul and “The Great Fifty Days”

As we know, Easter isn’t just a day, it’s a whole season. The Easter season stretches all the way to the feast of Pentecost. Lent, which sometimes feels like it is stretching on forever, is actually forty days long. Easter, on the other hand, is all of fifty days long. About these fifty days theologian Nathan Mitchell writes: “The great fifty days are not an unwelcome, unrealistic obligation to ‘party on,’ even if we don’t feel like it, but an invitation to explore more deeply ‘the weather of the heart,’ to awaken our memory of God’s presence and power in our lives, to look more closely at all the rich and varied textures of creation.”

One way the Church pursues this goal (of seeing God present in the world) is through the reading of the Acts of the Apostles. At Masses all through the Easter season, our usual practice of reading from the Old Testament is replaced by reading from the Acts of the Apostles. These readings tell the story of the Church’s earliest days, and the beginning of our faith spreading throughout the ancient world. These stories of heroism, controversies, persecutions, and miracles all testify to the continued presence of the Risen Christ in the world, through the lives of His disciples, and the actions of the Holy Spirit.

One of the highlights of the Acts of the Apostles is found in chapter 9, verses 1-20. It gives us one of the major turning points in the development of the early Christian community and indeed for the future of the whole Church in centuries to come: the conversion of St. Paul. St. Luke gives three accounts of this momentous event (Acts 9, 1-20; 22, 5-16; and 26, 10-18). St. Paul himself speaks about the experience in his Letter to the Galatians (1, 12-17). The extraordinary event of the conversion of St. Paul brings him to see the truth about Jesus and the inadequacy of his own previous ideas, however sincerely they may have been held.

The conversion story deserves to be read and re-read often. It marks, again, a completely new chapter in the development of the early Church. There is obviously in this story a great deal for us to reflect on in our own lives: about our way of treating others; about our blindness and our constant need for conversion; and about our responsibility to share our faith with others.

Let us pray. “O God, who taught the whole world through the preaching of St. Paul, draw us, we pray, nearer to you through his example, and so make us witnesses to your truth in the world. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you forever and ever. Amen.”

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The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul is celebrated on January 25. For more: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/calendar/day.cfm?date=2022-01-25

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