Untitled Sermon (6)

OVER COMING PRESSUARE

19 The good deed done to the slave girl was not at all to the liking of her owners; when Paul exorcized the spirit that possessed her, he exorcized their means of income: she could no longer tell fortunes. There is a literary parallel in one of the comedies of Menander in which a girl possessed not by Apollo but by Cybele laments the loss of her cymbals and tambourine and of her gift of prophecy, which depends on them. The righteous indignation of the Philippian slave girl’s owners was aroused at the missionaries’ wanton attack on the sacred rights of property (as they saw it). Moreover, the men who had infringed these rights were not Roman citizens like themselves (or so they thought); they were not even Greeks, like the population around them, but wandering Jews, engaged in propagating some variety of their own perverse superstition. They therefore dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates and lodged a complaint against them. Luke and Timothy were apparently unmolested: Paul and Silas were not only the leaders of the party but also most obviously Jews (Luke was a Gentile and Timothy a half-Gentile). Anti-Jewish sentiment lay very near the surface in pagan antiquity. 20–21 As Philippi was a Roman colony, its municipal administration, like that of Rome itself, was in the hands of two collegiate magistrates. The collegiate magistrates of a Roman colony were commonly called duumvirs, but in some places they preferred the more dignified title of praetors, and this is what the chief magistrates of Philippi were apparently called. Before the two praetors, then, Paul and Silas were dragged, and their accusers represented them as vagabond Jews who were causing disturbances in the city and inculcating customs which Roman citizens of all people could neither admit nor practise. Proselytization of Roman citizens by Jews was not positively illegal, so far as the evidence indicates, but it certainly incurred strong disapproval. The magistrates were bound in any case to take cognizance of such religious activity as threatened to provoke a breach of the peace or to encourage unlawful practices or organizations; and Paul and Silas were charged with precisely this kind of activity. 22 There was great indignation that Roman citizens should be molested by strolling peddlers of an outlandish religion. Such people had to be taught to know their proper place and not trouble their betters. There was no serious investigation of the charge: Paul and Silas were summarily stripped and handed over to the lictors—the magistrates’ police attendants—to be soundly beaten; the city jailer was then ordered to lock them up. The lictors were the official attendants on the chief magistrates in Rome and other Roman cities. They carried as symbols of office bundles of rods, with an axe inserted among them in certain circumstances—the fasces et secures—denoting the magistrates’ right to inflict corporal and, where necessary, capital punishment. It was with the lictors’ rods that the two missionaries were beaten on this occasion. It was not the only time that Paul had this treatment meted out to him: five or six years later he claims to have been beaten with rods three times (2 Cor. 11:25), although we have no information about the two other occasions. 23–24 When, after this severe beating, they were handed over to the jailer’s custody, he interpreted his instructions strictly and fastened their legs in the stocks, in the inmost part of the prison. These stocks had more than two holes for the legs, which could thus be forced apart in such a way as to cause the utmost discomfort and cramping pain. It was not the jailer’s business to take any thought for his prisoners’ comfort, but to make sure that they did not escape. He was possibly a retired soldier, and while service in the Roman army developed many fine qualities, these did not include the milk of human kindness. Yet this man is the third person in Philippi whom Luke describes as influenced by the saving power of Christ. He was a totally different character from both Lydia and the fortune-teller, and it took an earthquake and confrontation with death to make him take thought for his salvation; yet the same gospel as had blessed those two women now brought blessing to him. 6. Earthquake at Midnight: The Jailer’s Conversion (16:25–34) 25 At midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26 Suddenly there was a great earthquake; the foundations of the prison were shaken, all the doors were opened at once, and all the fetters were unfastened. 27 The jailer woke up; when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was on the point of killing himself, for he thought the prisoners had escaped. 28 But Paul called in a loud voice, “Don’t harm yourself; we are all here!” 29 The jailer then called for lights, rushed in, and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas; 30 he brought them out and said, “Gentlemen, what must I do to be saved?” 31 “Believe on the Lord Jesus,” they replied, “and you will be saved—you and your household.” 32 Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him, and to all those who were in his house. 33 At that very hour of the night he took them and bathed their wounds; then he was baptized immediately, together with all those who belonged to him. 34 Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them. Having believed in God, he rejoiced with all his household. 25 This paragraph bears the marks of being an independent narrative, inserted by Luke into the record of events at Philippi. He probably derived it from another source than its context: if verse 35 had followed immediately after verse 24, the reader would have been conscious of no hiatus. But we may be glad that Luke did add it at this point: it enriches his account of Paul’s Philippian ministry. The double discomfort of the lictors’ rods and the stocks was not calculated to fill Paul and Silas with joy, but around midnight the other prisoners, as they listened, heard sounds coming from the inmost cell—sounds, not of groaning and cursing, but of prayer and hymn-singing. “The legs feel nothing in the stocks when the heart is in heaven,” says Tertullian. What sort of men were these? 26 Perhaps it was the awed impression which the two missionaries’ behavior produced on the other prisoners that enabled them to dissuade those others from making their escape while the going was good when a sudden earthquake shook the prison foundations, threw open the doors, and loosened the staples that attached the prisoners’ fetters to the walls. 27 The earthquake that rocked the prison foundations wakened the jailer out of his midnight sleep. Immediately he went to investigate his charge. The worst had happened: the prison doors were open; the prisoners, of course, had seized their opportunity and escaped. For a man brought up to a Roman soldier’s ideals of duty and discipline, only one honorable course was open—suicide. 28 But as he stood there, by the outer door of the prison, about to drive the point of his short sword into his throat or heart, his hand was arrested by a voice from the darkness within: “Don’t harm yourself; we are all here!” While he could see nothing as he looked into the darkness, those inside could see his figure silhouetted in the doorway and could see what he was about to do. Not only were Paul and Silas still there, but they had apparently restrained the other prisoners also. There was something uncanny about these two men! 29–30 So, calling for light, he rushed into the prison and brought Paul and Silas out. First, according to the Western reviser (who probably imagined what he himself would have done had he been in the jailer’s shoes), he prudently secured the other prisoners again. Then he earnestly asked Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved?” How much he meant by this question it would be difficult to determine. He might have heard (or heard about) the fortune-teller’s announcement that these men had come to proclaim a “way of salvation”; if so, he might have seen in the earthquake a supernatural vindication of them and their message. What was involved in this salvation would not have been clear to him, but he was thoroughly shaken, in soul as well as in body, and if anyone could show him the way to peace of mind, release from fear, and a sense of security, Paul and Silas (he was convinced) could do so. 31–32 There and then the two missionaries assured him that faith in Jesus, the Lord whom they proclaimed, was the way of salvation for himself and his family. What was meant by faith in Jesus as Lord they proceeded to make plain to the whole household, presenting the gospel to them in terms which they could readily grasp. 33–34 This was the message they had lived for! With joy they embraced it at once. The jailer bathed the wounded backs of the two men, probably at a well in the prison courtyard, and there too he and his household were baptized. “He washed and was washed,” says Chrysostom: “he washed them from their stripes, and was himself washed from his sins.” If nothing is said explicitly of their receiving the Holy Spirit, this is implied in the emphasis on the rejoicing which filled the house. There, in the jailer’s house, into which Paul and Silas were brought up, they received hospitable treatment: food was set before them, and hosts and guests exulted together, united in Christian faith and love. The jailer was guilty of no dereliction of duty in thus taking two prisoners into his house; his responsibility was to produce them when called upon to do so. He had no reason to fear that they would run away and leave him in the lurch. Luke’s third example of the power of the gospel at Philippi is the most wonderful of all. And perhaps Paul and Silas reckoned the rods and the stocks well worth enduring for the joy that they shared in the jailer’s house. 7. Paul and Silas Leave Philippi (16:35–40)

Bruce, F. F. (1988). The Book of the Acts (pp. 314–318). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.