Praise to be Jesus and Mary.
We celebrate today the conversion of St. Paul the Apostle,
his conversion from being a persecutor of the Church
to being one of its columns, to being the Apostle of the Gentiles.
In the first reading, our Lord says of St. Paul,
This man is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles,
before kings and the children of Israel,
and I will show him what he will have to suffer for my name.
And just what St. Paul had to suffer,
what he had the grace to suffer for Christ,
he himself tells us he had no human gain from becoming a Christian.
He had everything to lose, humanly speaking, by becoming a Christian.
And he tells us himself,
For as I see it, God has exhibited us
apostles as the last of all,
like people sentenced to death,
since we have become a spectacle to the world,
to angels and human beings alike, he tells us.
We are fools in Christ's account.
To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty.
We are poorly clad and roughly treated.
We wander about homeless and we toil,
working with our own hands.
When ridiculed, we bless.
When persecuted, we endure.
When slandered, we respond gentlely.
We have become like the world's rubbish,
the scum of all, to this very moment.
And all this St. Paul received as a Christian and as an apostle.
Humanly speaking, Christianity has little to offer us.
It is not a religion of human benefits.
It's a supernatural religion.
St. Paul had everything to lose, nothing to gain by following Christ.
He says to us,
In righteousness,
based on the law,
I was blameless.
As a Pharisee, as a Jew, he was blameless.
He had a good social standing.
By his works of the law,
he could, so to speak,
he could boast before God of being just, of being righteous,
and of being better than all the sinners,
better than all the Gentiles,
better even than the Christians whom he persecuted.
But at the moment of his conversion,
St. Paul received the grace to understand,
to realize that it is God alone who justifies,
and he does it through his infinite mercy.
Whatever gains I had,
St. Paul tells us,
these I have come to consider a loss because of Christ.
More than that,
I even consider everything as a loss
because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things,
and I consider them,
I consider them so much rubbish,
that I may gain Christ and be found in him,
not having in your righteousness of my own
based on the law,
but that which comes through faith in Christ,
the righteousness from God.
And how do we get that righteousness?
By sharing in his sufferings,
by being conformed to his death,
if we want to somehow reach his resurrection as well.
Conformity to Christ means conformity also to his passion,
to his death,
in order to reach the resurrection from the dead.
Are you unaware that we who are baptized into Christ,
were baptized into his death,
St. Paul asks us?
We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death,
so that just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father,
we too might live in newness of life with Christ.
In this world,
if you want to follow Christ,
you must remember that Christ reigns,
he does reign,
he's a king,
but he reigns in this world principally from the cross,
because the world is all subject to the evil one,
and in this world,
the kingdom of God suffers persecutions.
Our Lord reigns from the cross in this world,
and we must be made to conform like unto him,
in order to one day reign with him,
because it is necessary for us to undergo many hardships
to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Who are you, sir?
St. Paul answers our Lord when he appears to him.
I am Jesus, whom you persecute,
our Lord responds.
And as St. Paul,
as Pope Benedict XVI noted in one of his catechesis,
exactly on the conversion of St. Paul,
Christianity is not just any new philosophy,
it's not just a new morality,
it's not a new outlook on the world,
it's not just one new religion amongst others,
these things are not sufficient,
these things are not sufficient to give us the courage,
the strength to resist,
and the sufferings that come along with being a Christian,
Christianity, as the Pope reminds us,
is based on a personal encounter with Christ,
a slogan which we hear maybe too often,
and we hear it void of any content.
What does it mean to have a personal encounter with Christ?
And St. Paul answers himself,
you know, it was his faith in Christ
that made him suffer the loss of all things,
to gain everything in Christ,
that faith, which is a supernatural virtue,
which inclines our intellects
to give an assent to all revealed truths,
because they come from God,
because we rely on the authority of God
who reveals them,
not on any intrinsic evidence of their own.
It's a faith that relies on the authority of God
who reveals, and He reveals what?
That God became man,
that Jesus Christ is God made man,
and that He sits now at the right hand of the Father
and will come one day again
to judge the living and the dead.
He loved us first,
and He will judge us according to our correspondence,
to that love.
If we have died with Him,
St. Paul reminds us,
we shall also live with Him.
If we persevere with Him,
we shall also reign with Him.
But if we deny Him,
He will deny us.
St. Paul knew that he himself
was loved first by Christ,
and in his whole life
he sought nothing else than to
return that love,
and to love back,
you know, him who loved him first.
Therefore, you know, drawing to a conclusion,
we should say with St. Paul,
you know, in our lives as Christians,
you know, we should say with him,
and persevere in this, you know,
in this conviction,
therefore I bear with everything
for the sake of those who are chosen,
so that they too,
and he speaks of us,
so that they too,
along with me,
may obtain the salvation
that is in Christ Jesus,
which will come at the cost of sufferings,
but which will come,
and that we might inherit it together
with eternal glory,
with St. Paul and all the saints.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.