Acts 16:16-40
Introduction
Last week we were introduced to Lydia and Paul and heard their stories of how faithfulness, prayer, and response to the Good News of Jesus.
This week, we look at what happened next for them. I’d hoped that I would be able to find coverage of the story on Television Philippi, but they didn’t cover the story. Which, when I thought about it, is probably unsurprising. As the next part of the story is pretty embarrassing for the city’s authorities
Remember that Philippi is a proudly Roman colony, settled by the Military veterans of past Roman wars. Any followers of the Jewish God are definitely in the minority.
In the Roman world, there were many gods, so they were broadly tolerant of other religions as long as they didn’t disrupt the well-oiled machine of the Roman way of life.
But we find is that the same Spirit of Jesus that opened Lydia’s heart to Paul’s message wants to set people free.
Start of the Story
Paul and his friends have been staying with Lydia, making tents and talking to people about Jesus of Nazareth. They regularly gather for prayer down by the river.
They’ve settled into a nice rhythm really.
Tents, talking, prayer, and eating at Lydia’s place.
Routines and rhythms are good things, aren’t they?
Do you have a daily or a weekly routine? A rhythm of life?
But there’s one wrinkle for Paul. One day, they start getting followed by this really annoying person who keeps shouting not at them, but shouting at everyone else about them!
When we take her words at face value, we could say, well, she’s right. Paul and Silas are servants of God Most High, and their message is a message of salvation.
But, because of who she is, a soothsayer, and where she is, others would naturally think the most high god would be Zeus or whoever else was the ‘top god’ in the Philippi Polythestic Pantheon.
It almost has echoes of the encounter Jesus had with the man with a demon in the synagogue, where the demon gave away who Jesus was, but in a way that wouldn’t have been understood well by the others there.
Have you ever had someone misrepresent your faith in God to others?
After several days, Paul gets really annoyed with her and commands the demon to come out of her in the name of Jesus Christ. It’s easy to see this as Paul’s work. Paul says some magic words, and it happens. But we must see this as an act of the Spirit of Jesus. That is what asking for something in Jesus’ name means. We are asking the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, to act. Even in this case of Paul’s annoyance, the Spirit is at work.
In this brief encounter, in this release from spiritual darkness, she loses her abilities as a seer. Abilities that had made her masters so much money.
The text wants us to see that by some dark power, this woman is able to predict the future. She doesn’t just make this stuff up. Scripture wants us to see that there is more to the cosmos than just what we can see with our eyes or microscopes and telescopes.
Not that we are to go around looking for dark forces. But to see that behind corrupt and exploitative systems and people, there is a spiritual darkness, working for chaos, disorder, and greed.
When your routine is interrupted, maybe by someone you meet or a news article or photo, have you seen signs of spiritual darkness?
Maybe Signs of exploitation, callous attitudes to other human beings, systems and agendas that prioritise money, sex, and power instead of the Divine Image in every person.
The acts of the Spirit of Jesus are, in the words of Isaiah, “to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”
Help is needed
But the problem is that this disrupts the programme, it goes against the grain of the smooth system.
The slave masters of the now former-soothsaying wojman aren’t in awe of God, they are not rejoicing. They are angry because they cannot make money from them anymore. They drag Paul and Silas before the Philippian magistrates.
“These men advocate laws and customs we cannot accept or practice,” they say. In other words, the message of these two threatens the way we do things in our city. Imagine if Rome caught wind of this.
We are great. We got here because we were stronger, we conquered, we took, we earned our place. No one has been more loyal to Rome than we have.
The Magistrates agreed, the Empire needs to let this little obscure Jewish sect know that if they want to be free to practice their religion, they need to do so on the Empire’s terms. Don’t try to interfere with the Greatness, the exceptionalism of Rome, and don’t do anything that would question loyalty to the Emperor.
So Paul and Silas are beaten with bundles of rods and thrown into the local jail and shackled in stocks. The message is loud and clear. You crossed a line. Don’t cross it again.
Have you ever seen the powerful react with violence, silencing those who disagree with them, squashing those who they think threaten their way of life?
Paul and Silas, it seems, have swapped places with the former soothsaying woman.
She claimed they were slaves of the Most High God, but now the Empire has struck back, and it seems they are slaves or prisoners of Rome.
Things are not looking good for them.
When we look around, we can feel as helpless to do anything about the injustice in the world as Paul and Silas were about their situation.
When we look at the military conflicts, the way the powerful scapegoat individuals or whole people groups, propose laws that seek to write out indigenous rights, and budgets that balance numbers by ignoring the imbalances of unjust pay practices.
We can feel like Paul and Silas. With our feet in those stocks, weighed down by chains.
A solution is offered
What to do?
It’s interesting that, at least in the way the Author Luke tells it, there is something Paul could have done that he chose not to do. Something that he will do later.
We’ll get to that in a moment.
But now, in jail, likely cold and hungry, Paul and Silas begin to pray and sing hymns, spiritual songs to God.
Like I said to the children, so often this is portrayed as Paul and Silas singing the hallelujah chorus, like they are so happy to be there.
With the rich range of prayer in the Psalms to call on, they likely did praise God. But I suspect they also poured out their disbelief and emotions before God, imploring God to Act.
We get the sense from Paul’s writings that he saw his own suffering as re-enacting, a sharing in the suffering of Christ. That as Christ came, challenged and suffered cruelty at the hands of an unjust humanity, so too Paul sees that the work of the Kingdom is not always well received, and there is opposition, even suffering.
The prophetic voice that stands against oppression and calls out injustice generally is not popular.
But they also knew that the God who was faithful to Jesus would be faithful to them, because of Jesus’ faithfulness.
When things are not going the way we think they should, when life starts closing in around us, when the world seems to have gone mad, we can ask What can we do? What can we do? Sometimes the answer ‘well, we can pray’ can seem a bit, well, trite.
But to pray, to direct our hearts toward God, is an expression of faith in the source of all goodness itself, the only one who can Act, did act in the person of Jesus, and has promised to act in renewing and restoring the world and hearts to God.
As they sing and pray, there is an earthquake. The region is known for earthquakes. That wouldn’t be unusual. But this is a strange sort of earthquake. An earthquake that causes the doors of the cells to fly open and the stocks and shackles to unchain themselves, but no other damage is reported.
We can see this as a natural phenomenon, but often in scripture, an ‘earthquake’ or something like it, can reveal the presence of God at work.
God is revealing in our three-dimensional realm the true nature of things. Paul and Silas are servants of God, not prisoners of Rome.
The Spirit of Jesus Acts again.
The Jailer wakes up, sees the open doors, and realises he’s as good as dead. The Roman way of life he knows does not tolerate weakness or mistakes, even ones outside of your control.
The action of falling on his sword could have been a matter of honour and shame. It seems extreme to us.
But shame and reputation still have a way of dogging us today, even if it is unspoken and part of our inner world.
Paul calls for him to stop! We’re all here. Don’t do anything rash!
Bewildered and relieved, the jailer falls at their feet. Something has happened that he cannot explain. First, the gods have freed these men, and then they have not fled.
When we hear his plea, What must I do to be saved, we quite possibly hear it like something out of an evangelistic crusade.
But what he likely has in mind is how do I get out of this mess I’m in! I’m a jailer, whose prisoners are outside when they should be inside. Whatever divine deliverance you’ve experienced, Paul, let me share in it. Don’t leave me for dead, lead me to life.
Paul again points to God. Trust in the Lord Jesus and you’ll be saved, or as The Message Translation puts it, “Pour out your entire trust in the Master Jesus. Then you’ll live as you were meant to live”.
Problem Solved
Paul and Silas go with him to his house, where, like Cornelius before him, the Jailer and his whole house are baptised. They share their hospitality with them, and he washes and cares for their wounds. But he and his house received a better washing.
A washing that brought them reconciliation with God, and also brought together the enemies of the jailer and the prisoner. Those who were separated were brought together. Released from the chains of their expected roles. Freed from the shackles of the shame of weakness and failure.
Have you experienced this great reconciliation that spans national, personal, cultural, and gender boundaries? This great reconciliation between a broken humanity and a holy God?
Are there places or situations you long to experience this drawing closer?
End of the Story?
Morning comes, Paul & Silas return to the prison, knowing that the Spirit has acted, that whatever the morning may bring, they are not really prisoners.
When the magistrates send the local police to release them, we get this curious scene where Paul pipes up and demands an apology, revealing he is a Roman citizen.
Under many ancient Roman law codes, a Roman Citizen could not be whipped except for a very few tightly defined circumstances and never without a full hearing, something Paul and Silas were denied. Now the shoe is on the foot. Instead of Paul and Silas contravening Roman custom, the irony is that the Magistrates are guilty of very un-roman behaviour! They are to protect Roman citizens from injustice!
This plot reveal could be something out of a modern TV series. Perhaps it seems like Paul has been deliberately holding an ace up his sleeve, and he is now using his rights to get back at his captors.
Have you seen people use their position or their rights to hold others over a barrel or get back at someone?
But Paul had good reason for not asserting his rights as a Roman Citizen. This fact would not have saved him from imprisonment, it would not have made the upside-down news of the Gospel more palatable to his accusers. In fact, it likely would have confused the situation. When Paul proclaimed that Jesus is Lord, the flip side to that statement that would be apparent to everyone was that Caesar was not. To then, in the next breath, assert your rights as a Roman Citizen could confuse his loyalties in his accusers’ minds. Is Jesus really your Lord, or only when it’s convenient for you, Paul?
This Jesus movement is still in its infancy. It’s not well understood by many, and Paul is aware that his new friends in Christ, Lydia and the Jailer among them, will have to live in Philippi long after he is gone. We sadly don’t know what became of the Soothsaying woman. She was quite likely cast aside by her masters. Perhaps we can imagine that she found a place with Lydia and the Jailer in God’s freed family in Philippi.
Far from making a power play and using his position for personal advantage, he has done the opposite, putting aside his personal rights to preserve the message of Jesus, for the sake of the little church seedling that has been planted in Philippi by the Spirit.
This echoes that hymn Paul later quotes in his Letter to the Church in Philippi. That Jesus rather, “made himself nothing, by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”
Paul’s example to us is complex and doesn’t give us a road map or template for when we find ourselves in complex situations. But I think what Paul would ask us is, who has unchained us, who has set us free? And so, who then has our loyalty, who do we confess is our Lord, with our lips and our actions, our whole being, our whole life?
The Spirit of Jesus is at work setting people free.
The Spirit of Jesus continues setting people free, disrupting and dismantling darkness, even when things appear hopeless.
By the Spirit of Jesus, we can recognise Christ as Lord. AMEN