Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Why are you persecuting me?
Acts 9:1-9
1 But Saul, still breathing threats and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest · WEB
The question put to Saul on the road identifies Christ with the people Saul was arresting, and it is the premise of everything he later wrote about the church.
Saul is introduced still breathing threats and slaughter, which continues the sentence about him from the previous chapter without a pause. He is not drifting into extremism; he is escalating deliberately, and he goes to the high priest for warrants to extend the arrests to Damascus — a foreign city, a hundred and fifty miles away, well outside any jurisdiction he could enforce without local cooperation.
The warrants specify any who were of the Way, whether men or women. That last phrase recurs whenever this persecution is described, and Paul repeats it himself twice in later years. He was hunting households.
The interruption is described in the plainest possible terms: a light from the sky, suddenly, and he fell. Then a voice, and the question it asks is not the one the situation calls for. Not why do you persecute my people, not how dare you, but Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?
Everything Paul later believed about the church is contained in that pronoun. He had never met Jesus of Nazareth; he had arrested his followers. The voice makes no distinction between the two acts, and the identification is total rather than sympathetic — not that Christ feels for the persecuted but that what is done to them is done to him. The man who receives that correction on a road will spend thirty years describing the church as a body with Christ as its head, and this is where the idea entered his life.
His question in reply is honest and is stripped of everything but the essential: Who are you, Lord? The title he uses need mean no more than sir, and the situation has already told him he is addressing someone with authority over him. What he needs is a name.
The answer is seven words that end his old life. I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. The name he had been suppressing as a blasphemy answers him from heaven, which settles simultaneously that Jesus is alive, that the disciples' claim was true, and that Saul has spent his best energies on the wrong side of God.
What is not given is worth noticing. There is no rebuke beyond the question, no sentence, and no explanation. He is told to get up and go into the city, and that you will be told what you must do — by someone else, later. The most direct call in the New Testament withholds its own content and sends the man to a local disciple to receive it.
The companions stood speechless, hearing the sound but seeing no one. Saul rises, opens his eyes, and cannot see; the men who came to help him make arrests lead him into the city by the hand. He is three days without sight, and without food or drink. A man who set out with letters arrives blind, dependent and fasting, waiting to be told what to do.
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