A reflection on Paul, zeal, and the field we were never given to clear
Note to the Reader:
This reflection grew out of What Must Not Be Uprooted, my recent piece on Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds. I thought I had finished with the field.
Then I began thinking about Paul.
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Before Paul ever met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Jesus had already told the disciples what was coming.
“They will put you out of the synagogues. In fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God.”
This was not persecution dressed up as persecution.
It was persecution dressed up as devotion.
Jesus was not warning His disciples only about enemies who hated God. He was warning them about people who thought they were serving God, convinced they were protecting what belonged to Him, who would do terrible harm with a clean conscience and a sense of holy purpose.
It is a strange thing to be warned about sincerity.
Yet that is exactly what He named.
I think of the parable of the wheat and the weeds often these days.
The servants see the field. They believe they have identified what does not belong. They want to go and pull it up.
The Master tells them no—not because they can see nothing, but because they cannot see enough.
The timing is not theirs.
The sorting is not theirs.
The uprooting is not theirs.
Paul is what it looks like when someone becomes all three.
The Servant Who Did Not Wait
Saul of Tarsus was not a cynic. He was not pretending to be righteous while secretly serving himself.
By his own account years later, he had been “advancing in Judaism beyond many of his own age,” “extremely zealous for the traditions of the fathers,” blameless by the law’s own measure.
He believed he could see the field clearly.
He believed he had correctly identified what was growing in it that did not belong.
He did not just want the weeds gone, the way the servants in the parable first did.
He went to the high priest and asked for letters. He wanted official sanction to go to Damascus, find whoever belonged to this Way, and bring them bound to Jerusalem.
Paul did not stumble into violence.
He petitioned for it.
He secured religious authority behind it.
In his own mind, he was not uprooting wheat; he was faithfully clearing weeds.
He thought he saw the field.
He thought he had identified the plants correctly.
He took it upon himself to clear it.
None of those three jobs had ever belonged to him.
Neither had the field.
What It Looks Like From the Master’s Side
We know what happened next.
A light.
A voice.
A question.
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?”
Me.
Whatever Paul believed he was doing to the followers of the Way, Jesus received it as something done directly to Himself.
Saul asked:
“Who are You, Lord?”
The answer came:
“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
The distance Paul imagined between defending what belonged to God and harming what belonged to God collapsed in a single answer.
This is the same Master who told the servants to let the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest.
His patience in the parable was never indifference.
It was protection of what was His.
And protection of what the servants could not yet safely separate.
Paul’s zeal did what the parable warned against. It got past the wanting and into the gathering.
Then something extraordinary happened.
Saul rose from the ground and opened his eyes.
He could see nothing.
The man who had set out for Damascus certain enough of what he saw to bind other people now had to be taken by the hand and led into the city.
For three days, he could not see.
He Could Not See
This is the part I keep returning to, and the part that breaks my heart.
Paul was not insincere.
He was devout, disciplined, trained, convinced.
If you had stopped him on the road before the light and asked whether he was doing right, I think he would have said yes without hesitation.
He had letters to prove it.
That is so much more unsettling than if he had been a villain.
A villain can be identified. A villain, in a strange way, is almost safe to think about because we are confident we are nothing like him.
But a sincere man, trained in his tradition, zealous for God, blameless by every external measure, who could still be so terribly wrong about what faithfulness required—that offers no such comfort.
It means seeing clearly is not the same as seeing completely.
It means the very zeal that feels like faithfulness can become the thing uprooting what God loves.
But this is not a story that stayed in the first century.
We have the account. We have the warning Jesus gave before it happened. We have Paul’s own testimony afterward, naming what he had done and how wrong he had been.
We have in Paul a startling example of sincere religious zeal mistaking the wheat for the weeds and uprooting it anyway.
And still we repeat it.
Across centuries. Across traditions. Across causes that each felt, from the inside, like finally clearing the field correctly.
Paul could not see.
Neither could many who came after him, holding his own story in their hands.
Brother Saul
Jesus did not leave Paul blind.
There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias.
When the Lord told him to go to Saul, Ananias knew exactly who He meant. He knew what Saul had done in Jerusalem. He knew why he had come to Damascus. He knew that Saul carried authority to bind followers of the Way.
Ananias was afraid.
Still, he went.
He entered the house where Saul sat in darkness. He laid his hands on the man who had come to Damascus to bind him and people like him.
His first recorded words to Saul were:
“Brother Saul…”
Brother.
Then something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes.
And he could see again.
What Was Actually Entrusted
Here is what I think Paul’s story adds when we place it beside the parable.
The servants in the field are told to wait.
Paul shows us what can happen when someone does not wait—not because he believes himself wicked, but because he believes waiting would be the irresponsible choice.
He thinks clearing the field himself would be the faithful choice.
He had taken on three jobs at once: seeing the field completely, deciding what needed to be removed, and carrying out the separation himself.
The parable never gives any servant these three tasks.
The servants see something troubling and take their concern to the Master.
It is His field.
They can notice. They can ask. They can listen.
But concern does not transfer ownership.
The Master keeps the final separation for Himself, and He tells them why: in gathering what they believe are weeds, they may root up the wheat along with them.
Paul devastated actual lives.
Real people were imprisoned and scattered. He approved when believers were put to death—all because one zealous and sincere man believed he had correctly identified the threat to God’s field.
Years later, Paul would use the language of the field himself.
The Corinthians were dividing themselves around their teachers—some around Paul, others around Apollos.
Paul answered:
“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”
Then Paul says whose field it is:
“You are God’s field.”
God’s.
Paul had learned how to describe his place there.
A laborer.
The field had belonged to God all along.
The most sobering part of Paul’s story is not that he was wrong.
It is that being wrong felt, from the inside, exactly like being right.
And the most merciful part is that the Master still came looking for him on the road—not to destroy him for what he had done, but to open his eyes to what he could not yet see.
He came with letters in his hands.
He left Damascus a brother.
That leaves me with a question I cannot easily set down:
What does it look like to live as someone who could still be found on the road, rather than someone too certain to be stopped?
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© 2026 Gilda Wray. All rights reserved.