Acts 26:19

THE HEAVENLY VISION

‘Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.’

Acts 26:19

St. Paul was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, and so it grew and expanded before his spiritual eyes until it left nothing outside its range, until it offered to him that unity after which all thinkers are consciously or unconsciously striving, and in the end he was able to conceive it as a whole, to express it, however inadequately, in terms of human language, and to propose it for all time to come as the profoundest and most ennobling philosophy of the life of mankind. Thus we begin to understand what made the great difference between St. Paul and the early writers who told the story of Jesus Christ in the Gospels.

I. The Body of Christ.—It was because he had seen the vision that he could not go back on other men’s recollections. He stood in a manner alone. His gospel was his own—‘my gospel,’ as he calls it. It was pre-eminently the gospel of the exalted Christ, and, may we not say it, the re-embodied Christ. Christ died, Christ rose, Christ ascended, Christ is supreme in the unseen world, and the same Christ is still living and working in the visible world to-day. He is not bodyless; He has feet and hands, eyes and lips; He sees and speaks and comes and helps, in and through His larger and ever growing Body—that body into which His disciples are baptized, within which they are held united by the sacred food which is His Body, through which they realise their relation to one another as parts serving the whole, which is Christ Himself. This, the living, exalted, active, ever enlarged Christ, this was the Pauline message.

II. The heavenly vision.—When once we have grasped the corporate relation of Christ and His disciples, the words are discovered to be profoundly significant. ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?’ He who touches the least member of the body touches the body. If you hurt my little finger I say that you hurt me. So that the words mean no less than this: ‘Thou art persecuting the very limbs of My body. Thou art persecuting Me, for I and they are one.’ Not that he would see it all from the first, but it was implicitly there. Christ and His Church are not two but one. ‘I persecuted the Church of God,’ says St. Paul in after days. ‘I am Jesus Whom thou persecutest,’ was the voice of his first vision.

III. The Pauline mission.—This was the man who was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. Plainly such a man as this was a man to be claimed for a great cause, was a chosen vessel to bear the name of Christ to the Gentiles. He could never allow the possibility of a broken Christianity, which should admit of two churches, Jewish and Gentile. The Gentile was co-heir and concorporate with the Jew or he was nothing at all. He was a member of the body or else he was still an alien, still without hope. There could be no compromise. If at Antioch Jew and Gentile could not eat together, what was become of the Body of Christ? We are one body, as he afterwards said; we are one body because we all partake of the one loaf; the loaf which we break is the fellowship of the body. The unity of Christians, and therefore Christianity itself, was at stake in the controversy, and St. Paul stood actually alone in perceiving it.

IV. True unity.—The body is Christ. It unites all classes and all nationalities. It finds place for every one, keeps every one in his place. It transmutes self-assertion into self-devotion. It counts charity, that is to say the spirit of membership, above all other spiritful gifts. It creates an efficiency and generates a force which transcends all efforts of all individuals, and which in the end will be irresistible. It presents a living Christ to the world, a living and growing Christ, embodied in the Life of His members, gathering up in one all the individuals of humanity into the ultimate unity of God’s One Man. And so it offers a new philosophy of human life, and with it a new human hope, as certain of fulfilment as the purpose of God.

Dean Armitage Robinson.

Illustration

‘ “It has been our duty,” once said Prebendary Webb-Peploe, “to look to see whether there was any possible bond of union which might develop at last into real union and co-operation of service; whether we have, with regard to Dissenters, as we call them, or Nonconformists, kept strictly before our spiritual eyes that word ‘all one in Christ Jesus.’ I am one who has been privileged to know for many years the splendour of the power of that utterance at the Keswick Convention and similar gatherings, and I know what it is to be able to absolutely forget mentally whether the brother speaking from the front of the platform was of this denomination or of that, because he preached Christ Jesus the Lord, and we were enabled to realise, as he spoke, that he was in communion with God the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, and the man’s message came home to us with power for that reason.” ’