Breaking-in the Ox (Acts 9:3-9)

 The Message of Acts

John Stott

Saul’s conversion was not at all the ‘sudden conversion’ it is often said to have been. To be sure, the final intervention of Christ was sudden: ‘Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him’, and a voice addressed him. But this was by no means the first time Jesus Christ had spoken to him. According to Paul’s own later narrative, Jesus said to him: ‘It is hard for you to kick against the goads’ (26:14). By this proverb (which seems to have been fairly common in both Greek and Latin literature) Jesus likened Saul to a lively and recalcitrant young bullock, and himself to a farmer using goads to break him in. The implication is that Jesus was pursuing Saul, prodding and pricking him, which it was ‘hard’ (painful, even futile) for him to resist. What were these goads, with which Jesus had been pricking him, and against which Saul had been kicking? We are not specifically told what they were, but the New Testament gives us a number of hints.

One goad was surely his doubts. With his conscious mind he repudiated Jesus as an impostor, who had been rejected by his own people and had died on a cross under the curse of God. But subconsciously he could not get Jesus out of his mind. Had he ever seen him, met him? ‘There are those who categorically … deny the possibility’, writes Donald Coggan, but ‘I cannot be among their number.’ Why not? Because it is ‘more than likely that they were contemporaries pretty close in age to one another’. It is therefore probable that they both visited Jerusalem and the temple at the same time, in which case ‘is it not possible, indeed highly likely, that the young teacher from Galilee and the younger Pharisee from Tarsus would have looked into one another’s eyes, and that Saul would have heard Jesus teach?’ Even if they did not meet, Saul will have heard reports of Jesus’ teaching and miracles, character and claims, together with the persistent rumour from many witnesses that he had been raised from death and seen.

Another goad will have been Stephen. This was no hearsay, for Saul had been present at his trial and his execution. He had seen with his own eyes both Stephen’s face shining like an angel’s (6:15), and his courageous non-resistance while being stoned to death (7:58–60). He had also heard with his own ears Stephen’s eloquent speech before the Sanhedrin, as well perhaps as his wisdom in the synagogue (6:9–10), his prayer for the forgiveness of his executioners, and his extraordinary claim to see Jesus as the Son of Man standing at God’s right hand (7:56). It is in these ways that ‘Stephen and not Gamaliel was the real master of St Paul’. For Saul could not suppress the witness of Stephen. There was something inexplicable about those Christians—something supernatural, something which spoke of the divine power of Jesus. The very fanaticism of Saul’s persecution betrayed his growing inner uneasiness, ‘because fanaticism is only found’, wrote Jung, ‘in individuals who are compensating secret doubts’.

But the goads of Jesus were moral as well as intellectual. Saul’s bad conscience probably caused him more inner turmoil even than his nagging doubts. For although he could claim to have been ‘faultless’ in external righteousness, he knew that his thoughts, motives and desires were not clean in God’s sight. In particular, the tenth commandment against covetousness convicted him. The other commandments he could obey in word and deed, but covetousness was neither a word nor a deed, but a disposition of the heart which he could not control. So he had neither power nor peace. Yet he would not admit it. He was kicking violently against the goads of Jesus, and it was hurting him to do so. His conversion on the road to Damascus was, therefore, the sudden climax of a long-drawn-out process in which ‘the Hound of Heaven’ had been pursuing him. The stiff neck of the self-righteous Pharisee bowed. The ox had been broken in.