I will not deal with you directly. Those people in Damascus speak for Me.

Fr. Fr. Patrick Reardon's Pastoral Ponderings 4/5/09 via Dean Calvert at the St. Andrew House Forum:

It was in this direct encounter that Saul requested specific directions for his life: "Lord, what do You want me to do?" (9:6; 22:10) But this request the Lord refused to grant. Instead, Saul was told, "Arise and go into Damascus, and there you will be told all things which are appointed for you to do" (9:10; 22:10).

I mention the Lord’s refusal here in connection with the "low ecclesiology"---rather popular these days---in which the believer is related to Jesus first, and to the Church second. Let me say that this is not what we find in the Acts of the Apostles.

In this passage Jesus asserts, in effect, "I refuse to say another word to you, Saul of Tarsus. Get yourself into Damascus and consult those people you were on your way to persecute. You humble your soul to the authority of My Church, because your ill treatment of those Christians was inflicted on Me. I will not deal with you directly. Those people in Damascus speak for Me." The tone and message of this text in Acts indicates, I submit, a "high ecclesiology," in which the believer is normally related to Jesus within the institutional context of His Church, later described by Paul as “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).

St. Augustine correctly perceived why the biblical God is "reluctant," as a general rule, to instruct men directly. It would betray, he said, man's corporate nature, which is also the condition of the Church. He wrote, "The state of our race would have been more seriously impaired, had God not chosen to use men as the ministers of His Word to other men." The very intent of that Word, he said, is to unite the hearers together in the one body of Jesus' Church, His temple. "Moreover," wrote Augustine, "love itself, which ties men together in the bond of unity, would have no means of pouring soul into soul, and, as it were, mingling them to one another, if men never learned anything from their fellow men" (De Doctrina Christiana, Preface, 6).

Those people in Damascus speak for Me, indeed.

Thank you, Fr. Patrick.