When a Saul Knocks at the Door
If we are not conquerors, but people called to pray for the peace of the city of Babylon while trying to heal the land of Mitzrayim, the narrow place, through the creation of sanctuaries and refuges to take in people, eventually someone who did us or our community harm will show up at the door asking to come in.
If we reject them, then we are denying our promise that everyone is welcome. We become liars and hypocrites. If we allow them just to enter in, we could risk the safety of the community for the sake of our principles. There has to be a middle way.
This is not just a concern that we might be hypocrites. It is the core of our identity as a group. Grace is available or this is a power play like it is in the Imperial and Evangelical churches. If we believe or practice that anyone is beyond salvation, we are nothing more than a political movement with a spiritual veneer and not a spiritual movement at all.
If we trust too easily, then we are opening the way for abusers to continue to traumatize people within our sanctuaries, rendering them useless. We have to find a way to give sanctuary to the vulnerable without welcoming wolves in among us.
Jesus sends us out as sheep among wolves, but in our folds we have to keep the wolves out. There are people who want to abuse their authority, take advantage of the vulnerable, and center themselves and their own needs over those of the community. Wolves desire to prey on the flock.
The problem is that through grace, a wolf can change. That is the power of the gospel message, but that change takes more than words to prove. We prove all things through our works. That is how James teaches us to show one another our faith. We cannot allow harm to continue, but we cannot ostracize someone solely because of their past mistakes. Their harm must stop, and they can never be put in a position that will tempt them to do harm again.
In our sanctuaries, all people live by the law of liberation and love. We have to protect one another from threats, healing past harms. Grace does not take away accountability. No one is exempt.
Saul Before the Light: Violence with Authorization
The early church faced this issue repeatedly, but most powerfully with the Apostle Paul. He was born Saul of Tarsus. His father was Roman and his mother was Jewish, which gave him citizenship in both camps. He studied under Gamaliel the Elder, who was the grandson of Hillel the Elder.
Saul vehemently opposed the early Way of Jesus. He sanctioned the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:58–8:3). He then set out to persecute the movement and eradicate it.
Saul is not acting on his own. Despite Gamaliel’s protestations, Saul gets permission to persecute the Way. He was an agent of the community, sanctioned to remove this heretical sect from their midst. His violence was ordained and justified by the system of his day.
In our day, there are many wolves walking amongst us, many Sauls who have gained authority and are wielding it like a cudgel against us. Some are authorized by our capitalistic culture, spreading a gospel of wealth that is the opposite of everything that Jesus and the prophets ever said. They are able to get away with what they are doing because they are feeding the machine that is trying to devour us all.
Others have learned that if they claim the mantle of authority, they can merely quote the scripture that “you shall not touch the Lord’s anointed (1 Chronicles 16:22; Psalm 105:15 ),” and they can get away with anything, whether that’s stealing money from the church, abusing their parishioners, or creating devilish systems of control that center them as the only authority and voice for God amongst their following. These are the cult leaders who use claims of spiritual power and authority to try to get away with all of the harm and abuse that they are doing.
Still others have found the utility of separating people one from another in order to increase their power and wealth. They attack people based on their ethnicity, their immigration status, their gender, or their sexuality. The only way to maintain patriarchy is not just to keep women down, but to solidify the roles men and women can play in society. That requires rigid gender norms, the denial of transgender existence and rights, and the destruction of loving queer relationships.
These wolves have all gone out amongst the people, and they have claimed cultural, institutional, and academic support for their actions. They claim that they are above the laws of men and God. They are a threat to everything that we hold dear.
But Saul is not just the persecutor who is going around to harm the faithful. He exists within all of us. Any time we exercise a modicum of self-righteousness, any time we justify our actions by saying this is for the greater good or that I am only doing what is necessary, we are allowing the voice of Saul to speak through us.
Saul is the certainty that we are right and inerrant. Some of us try to cast that inerrancy off and say, “No, the scripture is inerrant, and I am only doing what is in the scripture,” or “The Spirit is inerrant, and I am only doing what the Spirit demands.” Some go so far as to say that the facts are clear here, and so I have no choice but to act this way. Once we give up our agency to this self-righteous certainty, we are acting like Saul.
Certainty is a demon that has haunted the church since its inception. It haunts every institution, looking for whom it can devour and twist to its aims. Certainty is the lie that we know all that we need to know, that learning has ceased, and that we do not need to progress further. Certainty is the wall that prevents us from seeing anything outside what our comfort zones will allow.
Certainty is the idol that takes the place of God. When we are certain, everything is concretized. It is sculpted out of the hardest stone and sealed with the hardest metals. Certainty has no room for change. When we know that we are right beyond questioning, there is nothing. There is no hope.
This hopelessness is an attempt to free ourselves from the work that we are called to do in entering the great cloud of unknowing. Life is ambiguous. It has a lot of questions that do not have easy answers. There are a lot of decisions that really do not always have a right answer.
When we abdicate our agency and hide behind the scripture, the Spirit, or the facts and do not look at what is actually going on, we have pulled the mask of ideology over our eyes and pretend that it is clear in our vision.
Jesus said that we need to remove the beam from our own eye before we try to remove the log from our brother’s (Matthew 7:5). This is what he is talking about. We often cannot see clearly enough to know what is going on in our own lives because we are hiding safe and secure behind all the little lies that make the world seem predictable, easy, or at least comprehensible.
This is how we become the blind leading the blind. We do not deal with our own issues. And so some carve this beam in their eye into a statue of glorious certainty. It is the idol that they follow. After all, if the beam in your eye now has the shape of the god you worship or the ideology that you follow or the facts of how the world works, then you are not blinded to the world. You are just gazing at the face of God, even though you are really just wearing a blindfold.
The Revelation on the Road: When the Light Interrupts
Acts 9:1-2
1. But Saul, still breathing threats and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest,
2. and asked for letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
In Acts 9:3-6, on the road to Damascus, the beam falls from Saul’s eyes. The scales fall away and he is blinded by the light of day as if he had never seen the sun before. In that moment, he hears the voice of Jesus asking Saul, “Why do you persecute me?”
To Saul, this is a ridiculous question. Jesus is dead. He was crucified by the Romans. He is not persecuting Jesus, but these misinformed malcontents that believe he is still alive and that he is the Messiah. Saul is trying to protect the faith and the people from these harmful lies. And yet here is Jesus asking why he is persecuting him.
In that moment, Saul realizes he was the centurion who ordered the death of a fellow Jew. He was the soldier who put the nails in his arms and legs and the spear through his side. He was the Roman who beat this man for saying that the kingdom is not of this world.
Saul is not identifying here with the crucified Jesus, not yet. His realization is that he is the Roman. He is the one who is persecuting and bringing harm.
Eventually, he will come to understand that Jesus, the Christ, is the one who holds all the cosmos together, that he is the one who frames reality. But he does not know any of that yet. He is probably familiar with the works of Philo and those like him, who contemplated the idea of the Word as a divine being who helped to create the cosmos. He himself descended into the palaces of God and tried to ride the Merkavah chariot.
In this moment, he is caught up into the third heaven, and there he sees the mediator. To his shock and horror, it is the person of Jesus Christ who is asking him why he is working against him.
Saul had spent his life trying to understand the deep mysteries of God. Now, as the scales fall from his eyes, he realizes that he is a part of the same Roman machine, the same colonizing machine that has persecuted his people for so long. He is King Ahab, persecuting the prophets. He is not defending anything. He is merely doing harm and pretending that it is defense.
And he falls to the ground.
Blindness: The Unmaking of Certainty
In Acts 9:7-9, Saul loses his ability to see. Or maybe it would be better to say that Saul realizes he never saw the world and has to learn to see again. His certainty had blinded him long before he saw the light on the road to Damascus. His sense of autonomy, of power, the theology that he worked in, even though his own teacher told him not to do this, all fell victim to this identity that he claimed as protector of the faith.
What kind of weak god requires a human to defend them?
Saul is blind and cannot see, and for the first time has to be led around by the hand. He has to submit, to surrender. He has to give up the illusion of power that had guided his life for so long and encouraged him to do harm. He has to do the most terrifying thing he has ever done, and that is give up his sense of righteousness and autonomy to be led about by people he does not truly know or trust because he has lost his ability to do either.
Blindness marks the beginning of teshuvah. It is not punishment. It is necessary unlearning.
Ananias and the Risk of Welcome: Discernment as Love
In Acts 9:10-17, Ananias resists accepting Saul’s conversion, or even just to see that he may have changed. When the Spirit speaks to Ananias, he does not preclude any of these fears. They are true. They are honest. They are the doubts that have to be wrestled with if clarity can ever be had.
Saul is responsible for so much harm to the community. If he has converted, then that is a huge win both for the safety of the people and for the movement itself. But Ananias knows that he has to be careful. He has to be discerning.
What is actually happening within him is not fear. It is discerning love.
True love casts out fear. What Ananias is experiencing here is the love for his community that causes him to hesitate, to examine, to test all things and hold to that which is true. Because if he welcomes Saul in and Saul is still hunting them down, he is just revealing the faces, the names, the identities, and the sanctuaries that the people go to so that he can destroy them.
If Saul has actually converted, then he is owed the same protections as everyone in the community. The problem is learning to understand and see whether or not someone has actually changed. To look within and not just rely on our own blinding sight that gives us some sense of certainty, but to see how they are actually acting and whether or not the change is genuine in them.
Ananias does not have enough information to know what to do. Until he knows that Saul is no longer a threat, he cannot welcome him in with open arms. But until he knows whether or not Saul has converted, he cannot send him away.
This discernment is necessary for both Ananias and Saul.
Baptism and Partial Restoration: Water Before Fire
In Acts 9:17–19, Saul regains his sight. He is baptized, and he begins to eat and recover. Baptism is a covenant oath between the individual and God that they are entering the waters of death with Jesus and rising again. They are passing through the River Jordan into the Promised Land, and they are becoming part of the beloved community. This is a personal act and not one that can be judged by the community.
In participating in baptism, Saul is accepting the forgiveness offered by God through Jesus. But just because that agreement between them has been reached does not mean that the faithful have to forgive and forget just yet. After all, it is easy to pass through the waters unchanged.
Jesus said that we must be born again to enter the kin-dom. We must be born by water and fire (Matthew 3:11; John 3:5). Saul has only passed through the water. The fire has yet to be seen.
Too many forgive at the moment of baptism. And yes, the point and purpose of baptism is to restore Saul’s position in God and Christ. It is a personal sacrament, not a communal one. As James reminds us repeatedly, faith without works is dead. While it is possible to see baptism as a work of faith, it is also a form of cheap grace because it does not cost a liar anything in their own mind to pass through the waters.
Costly grace requires us to change.
In the remission of sins offered by God in Christ, our sins are cast as far as the east is from the west and are remembered by God no more if our redemption is true and our repentance sincere. But for the community, they must see that that redemption is sincere. This is a hard thing to do.
If we are not careful, we as a community will fall into some semblance of purity culture, where we will set traps for each other and find ways to say, “Ah, but your grace is not full, your redemption has not yet come. You are not actually one of us.” It is easy for us to forget that none of us are pure. We are all imperfect agents working in the kin-dom to bring the grace of God here and now.
Especially with someone like Saul, who was running around as a ravenous wolf. If the church is not careful, they are welcoming in their midst a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If they confuse the forgiveness offered in baptism with reinstatement or acceptance into the community without any signs of true repentance and change from the harmful ways that he exhibited before, they are risking everyone and everything.
Zeal Without Shelter: Immature Conversion
Saul’s baptism leads him into the zeal of the converted. The former zeal that he had for the persecution of the church now turns outward into zeal for Christ and the gospel, the very gospel that he believes in his own heart has saved him and countless others from the harm that he would do.
The problem is, whether or not this is sincere on Saul’s part, it shows his very immaturity in the faith. He went from being the zealot proclaiming the error of the Way to being the zealot proclaiming the glory of the Way. He has not fully embraced the humility necessary to show a changed heart.
In Acts 9:19–23, Saul quickly begins proclaiming the gospel, and the people in Damascus are fearful and plot against him, even going so far as contemplating whether or not they need to kill him.
From their point of view, the zealot is still a zealot and could be running around calling out all those who are susceptible to the message of the Way so that he can know who they are and eradicate them in one fell swoop. He has not exhibited the care and concern necessary for the community that he harmed. He is acting recklessly. From their point of view, his personality is unchanged. It is merely pointed at the community differently. But that difference again could just be a mask.
It is not incumbent upon the community that was harmed to embrace the one who did them harm. It is the duty and responsibility of the one who did harm to show humility, repentance, and a changed demeanor so that the people will know that they sincerely regret the abuse they committed.
Regret is not enough. They also have to demonstrate to the community that they will not do harm again.
Saul has done none of this work, and the people still do not trust him with good cause.
Hidden and Lowered: Formation in the Basket
In Acts 9:23–25, both the community and Saul are protected from their own baser instincts. Saul is hidden in a basket and put through a window out of the wall and carried out so that people cannot find him, who wish to do him harm.
If they had not sneaked Saul out of Damascus, they would have opened the way for the church to do to Saul the same harm and abuse that he had done to them. If we are not careful, we can replicate the harm of our abusers in many ways. That is what we see the church almost doing here. The church has to be saved from its own baser instinct.
Saul also has to be saved. Because the zeal that defines his character has led him to run off recklessly in a way that is only stoking more animosity and distrust. Saul has to learn humility. That begins by having to hide in a basket and be carried away to safety, hidden and unseen.
He has to submit to the community.
He was a preacher who caused harm. He was an official who brought violence down on others. He has to learn the humility to stop believing that he has the authority to say what he can and cannot do. That misguided sense of authority is what caused all of the problems in the first place.
Throughout his life, Saul made himself the hero of his own story. As a child of both a Roman and a Jew, he had to justify his existence to both. He embraced a heroic devotion to the faith of his mother as a way to signal to others, “No, I am part of this community.”
That same insecurity arises within him in his conversion to Christianity. Now Saul is no longer just trying to prove his Jewishness, but that he is no longer the one that harmed the community. See, he is not trying to stop people from having faith. He is trying to spread the faith. Do you not see what a good boy Saul is?
He has to let go of that false sense of heroism and allow others to save him, to vouch for him, to discern whether or not he is sincere. This is not something he can do for himself.
The humility that that requires on his part is almost more than he can bear. Without it, he will never be welcome within the community he now longs so much to be a part of.
Rejected in Jerusalem: Memory Is Not Sin
In Acts 9:26, Saul returns to Jerusalem and hopes to be welcomed by the faithful there. They reject him. They remember him giving his blessing to the murder of Stephen. They remember his persecution of them.
How can they risk letting him in with no sign that he is truly one of them?
Again, this is loving discernment. Their fear that Saul is here to do further harm casts him out. He is the embodiment of their fear. That is why love cannot welcome him in.
Even if God in Christ has forgiven him, the community remembers what he did.
If they had accepted him with joy and gladness, they would have spit on Stephen’s grave. The church cannot ever excuse the harm done to any vulnerable person or community until reparation and repentance are done.
The church cannot welcome him in.
Barnabas: Repentance Must Be Witnessed
In Acts 9:27–30, Saul does the only thing that he can do, and that is help the community that he once harmed, preaching and giving aid to the best of his ability. His work does not go unnoticed.
Barnabas watches and witnesses the life of Saul and, through his actions, discerns his repentance, his change. Faith without works is dead. What Barnabas sees is actual works of restoration and repentance. He sees work that is healing and restoring to the community that Saul once harmed.
When Barnabas goes to the apostles and makes the case that Saul should be welcomed in, he is not acting out of a vague spirituality or a sense of inward guidance. He is relying on the evidence of his own eyes and the actions that Saul has done in the community to show that he has demonstrated change.
Saul needs an advocate like we all do. The first refuge of any abuser is to self-justify. If we allow a person to just excuse away their actions, it is possible that we are allowing them to continue to do them.
Barnabas exhibits the grace of the church in that he is willing to give Saul the chance to show that he has changed by his works.
This is not an orthodoxy or orthopraxy examination. It is not watching Saul to see if he is saying the right things or doing the right things. It is how we build trust in any relationship. Barnabas is watching for the little things that give signs of intention, of meaning, of devotion. He is looking to see if Saul honestly is weaving himself into the community, exhibiting the grace of a changed life and the desire to protect all of the people that are there.
Sight Fully Restored: Conversion as Reorientation
When Saul had his moment on the road to Damascus and saw the light, and the scales fell from his eyes, he thought that this was a simple matter of turning his head. He just had to stop looking in the direction he was looking in and look in a different one. He did not think he had to stop and change. He was wrong.
True conversion requires not just a cleansing of our vision but a return to right relationship. He just assumed that if he said the right words, his relationship would be restored, when he had already done so much harm to the community. He had to change not just the orientation in which he was living his life but the manner in which he was living it as well.
Saul had to learn what it means to live in community. His mystical awakening was the start of the process, but it was not the end. He had to see the harm that he had caused, the people that he had put so much fear in, and the work that needed to be done for the kin-dom to spread in the world.
Saul’s experience of the inner light forced him to reassess everything about how he lived his life. He had to let go of the moral self-righteousness that governed so much of his thinking. He had to let go of the orthodoxy, the orthopraxy, and the many rules that he had set up for himself as costly signifiers that he was, in fact, good enough to be his mother’s son.
He, like all of us, had to learn that this is not about making another person happy. It is about our relationship between us and Christ, between us and God, between us and everything living in this world. He had to learn who his neighbors were and how to exhibit the three laws of love through his actions so that people could see the change that had already happened in his heart.
Teshuvah: Returning to Original Blessing
Teshuvah is not repentance, at least not in how most people think about it. Our ideas of repentance are born out of a fall-redemption, original-sin model of the cosmos that says we are inextricably broken and have to be fixed. Teshuvah knows nothing about that kind of brokenness.
Teshuvah is the practice of returning to our original grace, our original blessing, the state in which we were born.
Jesus’ most radical teaching on repentance is when he says that if we are not like these children, we will not enter the kin-dom of heaven (Matthew 18:3; Mark 10:15; Luke 18:17). Teshuvah is a return to our true self, who we are, pure and good, created in original blessing, possessors of original mind with access to original wisdom.
Teshuvah is returning to the soil of original grace and blessing and learning to grow again from that sacred source.
Teshuvah begins with the recognition that we did not do something we should have done, or we did something we should not have done. But we do not put on sackcloth and ashes and beat ourselves over the head about it. That serves nothing.
Once we notice that pain point, that regret within us, it shows us the way to change, what direction to turn toward. If we have caused harm, then we have to turn away from that harm and return to the better path.
Teshuvah is a practice of reorientation. Any pain or regret that arises within us shows us that we have gone off the path and into a bad way or just a non-optimal way. It contains within it the seed of truth of the way that we should go.
For Saul, he saw and regretted his certainty and the viciousness with which he enacted it in the world. He realized he had to open up his mind and bring more kindness and respect into his life. And thus he turned and returned to his original self.
These moments of regret and pain that inspire us into repentance also show us the way to change.
Teshuvah is not about sorrow. It is not about pain. It is about learning to turn around, to reorient ourselves, to return to that sea of grace that we arose from. Yes, we may need to do some repair and restitution along the way. We will definitely have to re-pattern our lives and find better ways to live that do not take us down the wrong paths. But what we do not do is beat ourselves up. We learn, we change, we grow in a different direction.
When we are dealing with someone who is going through their own teshuvah, we do not cast blame upon them. We do not cast judgment upon them. We help them to discern and find their way home.
The whole point of the spiritual practice in life is to find our way home.
Repair and Restitution: The Shape of Tikkun
For someone like Saul, whose violence and harm were public, public confession is necessary. Restitution is much harder to even conceive. How do you make restitution for giving blessing to the murder of Stephen?
Saul had to learn to relinquish his authority. And while he did, through service and time and the supervision of the community, earn it back, sometimes authority cannot be invested in someone again, lest it tempt them to go down the path of harm again.
Depending on the nature of the harm, counseling may be required. Turning oneself over to the authorities may be required.
What is important is that in this act of repair, both the community and the individuals involved are restored in some way, shape, or form. That will mean a certain amount of forgiveness, which is just letting go so that we do not carry the weight of someone else’s actions in our lives. It might also mean learning that an individual should not be entrusted with money, authority, or the care of others.
For most of us, our acts of teshuvah are about minor infractions or things that harm our conscience, or that breed regret within us. But for those who, through their greed, fear, or hunger for power, have caused real harm to the community, more is necessary to accept them back into the fold.
Each case will be different, but each case must take into effect what is right for both the individual and those whom they have harmed.
A Church That Learns How to Receive: Shalom Restored
In Acts 9:31, they accept Saul into their midst, and peace is restored. The church had peace.
Peace is shalom. Peace is a wholeness that only exists when we live in right relationship with each other and the world. It is a completeness that brings rest and recuperation. Peace can exist in the middle of conflict, as everything is held together within it.
Too many read this passage and this story as a tale of sentimental harmony, of quick fixes. It is not. It is not even a story about the end of conflict. Because Saul, now Paul, will go on to have many arguments with James and Peter. But those arguments are not born out of a fracture in unity, but in hopes of helping it to grow.
Peace is what we are called to. Blessed are the peacemakers, Jesus said, for they shall inherit the kin-dom of heaven. If we are going to do the work that we are called to by the gospel, if we are going to inherit the kin-dom, we have to be peacemakers.
This is the peace that passes all understanding. The one that helps people understand that they are complete, that they are whole, that our communion is whole and complete. Nothing is missing. Nothing is broken. Nothing is lost. There is no original sin that needs to be healed.
Once we find that peace, it is our duty to protect it from harm, internal or external. We do that through living in right relationship with one another and with the world.
The Kin-dom Pattern Revealed: Discern Without Casting Out
The story of Saul’s conversion to Paul is core to what it means to be a community and what it means to develop the kin-dom in this world. Every person called to the Way comes from a different life with different circumstances and different challenges. If we do not have a way to actually live out the forgiveness that we proclaim, then our sanctuaries are empty, and refuge will not be found amongst us.
Our work is to free people from the narrow place of Mitzrayim and to free them from the harmful cycles of Babylon. We have to do that without importing those things into our sanctuaries and refuges. It is so easy for us to think that we are operating for the good of all when our motives are selfish, and we are perpetuating the sins of our culture and replicating the harm that is done outside our walls within them.
For the kin-dom to truly rise in this world, then we have to accept that teshuvah is an ongoing process and that tikkun is the work that we are called to. This is a ministry of reconciliation, as Paul would eventually call it. If we are not about doing the work of restoration, then what are we actually doing?
The heart of the message that Jesus taught is: repent, for the kin-dom is at hand. We have to return if we are going to find the kin-dom. And then we have to return together, for where three or more are gathered in his name, there is Christ in the midst of us. There we build our sanctuaries and refuges and invite more and more people in, all the while calling them to repentance and kin-dom living.
This is not the repentance of the Imperial Church. Their repentance has no place for simcha, joy. Every story Jesus tells about teshuvah has celebration as part of it. The prodigal son’s return is celebrated. When one repents and is brought back to the Way, Jesus says the angels celebrate (Luke 15:10).
In the world that we live in today, there are many Sauls running around. Many people who, through delusion or deception, have been lured off the path and are doing harm in the name of God and in the name of Jesus. Some of them have had their road-to-Damascus moment. They might show up at our door at any time, asking to be let back in.
We, like the earlier practitioners of the Way, need to be cautious and discerning. But at the same time, we have to not cast them back out into the darkness.
This may be the hardest thing that we do on the Way. If we believe that grace is available to all and that redemption is available to everyone, when someone comes to us who has done us real harm and claims conversion, if we cast them out, we are betraying the Christ we serve. But if we just welcome them in with open arms and not discerning careful action, we could be harming the vulnerable amongst us.
We have to discern without casting out.
We have to be able to say to people honestly, “I hear you. I hear that you have changed your ways, and I hear that you are trying to restore what you harmed.” That is the grace that we must offer first. But then we have to be honest and say, “I need you to show us by your works that your faith is true. Show us the peace that you are able to build. We will help you to find your way, but we cannot just let you in until we know that it is safe for you and for us.”
Even those in our communities who have practiced and rooted themselves in the One Life are not free from the instinct of revenge. And so, by not welcoming people in too easily, we are protecting them from us so that we can discern and heal ourselves. We also have to ensure that they are willing to join us. It is easy to say, I do not believe that we should continue in this strife and pain. It is much harder to stop engaging in it.
This is what outreach and missions are for: to help people discern, grow, and go through the formation they need to bring reparation for the harms they have brought to the world. If we do not discern like the early church did, we cannot be surprised that the wolves keep getting in the door.
The Way is the path home, and the kin-dom is our birthright.
Teshuvah and tikkun are our way home.
For more watch the episode discussion: