Today Christians celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. It is an unusual feast, for it is not an anniversary of the death, or martyrdom, of a saint but a commemoration of a “turning around” of one of the great teachers and thinkers of the Christian world.

St Luke records in the Acts of the Apostles how Saul, the strictest of Pharisees, was journeying to Damascus to persecute and put to death Christians, the followers of a new way, which he regarded as heretical. They had to be stamped out because they were leading the people of God astray. Suddenly, on the Damascus road, a blinding light from Heaven overwhelmed Saul, the blinding light which in the Jewish tradition was the shekinah, the dazzling glory of God. He falls to the ground and asks “who are you Lord?” To which the answer comes: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” There, at the very centre of the glory of God, is the One whose followers Saul had come to Damascus to root out. Blinded and overwhelmed by this experience, Saul is led stumbling into Damascus. There, a Christian disciple, Ananias, comes in obedience to find the persecutor, and lays hands on him that Saul may receive his sight again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

If you go to Damascus today you can visit the chapel on the traditional site of the house of Ananias, just off the ancient Roman main street of Damascus, the street called Straight. It is a place of pilgrimage marking a moment that can be said to have changed the history of the world.

The conversion of Saul, later to be known as Paul, meant that Christianity spread into the non-Jewish world. This was not accepted without argument and difficulty. There were Jewish Christians who understandably argued that you had first to become a Jew before you became a Christian, but Paul passionately believed that the people of God were now no longer limited by race. The church was a catholic, a universal, church. No longer were the detailed requirements of the Jewish law to be the measure of acceptance with God, God himself had acted in Jesus Christ to redeem the world and to offer the way of salvation to all. It was faith, trust in the God revealed in Jesus Christ, which was the way of acceptance, and that reaching out in faith was met by the free love and grace of God, His transforming and life-giving Spirit.

Paul's mission took him from Jerusalem to Rome. It is a symbolic journey, which ends by setting at the heart of empire the faith of Jesus Christ. This is the faith that draws into its service Roman law and Greek philosophy, shaping the whole of the Europe we know today. Without Paul there would be no Europe, no Christian faith which provided the ground for science because the world is God's creation, and therefore a world that can be understood scientifically because its order witnessed to the truth of God. Likewise the sense of history, or purpose, for the whole world, is part of the Gospel preached by Paul. We are not bound by an endless cycle of reincarnation in which history ultimately has no meaning.

Paul points us to our own need for conversion, for turning around to live by faith, and for that faith to be faith in Jesus Christ, the crucified, risen and ascended Lord, who by the grace of His Spirit turns us into His likeness from one degree of glory to another. Faith for us, as for Paul, is inescapably personal - I am the one who is called to trust in God. But for Paul, personal faith is never reduced to individualism, for we belong inescapably to the community of faith, the church of God, which is no less than the body of Christ. It is right that “we should have his wonderful conversion in remembrance”. For if we do not live by that transforming faith, we shall live by some other and lesser faith, serving a God more likely than not made in our own image, rather than the Christ who is the image of the God for whose love we were made, and who transforms us by the gift of His Spirit.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe