New Testament Reading: Acts 16:16-34
For Sunday, May 12, 2013—Easter 7
Wow. This is a pretty exciting story, like worthy of the Homer. It even takes place in the same region as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Except they were written eight hundred years before the book of Acts and Acts is not written in dactylic hexameter—for which I am grateful. Still this is one of the epic-worthy sections of Luke’s follow up to Luke.
A Little More Lydia?
I will quibble with the Lectionari-eers once again and amend their pericope trimming. This story really needs to start in verse fifteen and end with verse forty. Then this reading would be clearly bookended with the references to Lydia and her home. To leave out the Lydia verses in this reading is to miss a critical juxatposition.
Yes, Lydia is important, just look her up, she has a town in Louisiana named after her, AND, as Mary Ann McKibben Dana recalled in her THQ post for Easter 6, Lydia is celebrated as the first European convert to Christianity. Lydia was a seller of purple cloth (Rich? Royal? Righteous?) and a “worshiper of god.” What “god” the text doesn’t really say, but the argument is made for the most-high God which seems okay, contextually speaking. Paul and Silas talk to her and she converts and they stay at her house—a saint is born. Both the Western and the Eastern Church have canonized the lady.
But What About?
The next day they were walking through the city and they met a slave-girl, “who had a spirit of divination, and brought her owners a lot of money by fortune telling.” This slave-girl immediately begins to follow them through the street proclaiming, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”
Amazing, the slave-girl seems to get it without even hearing what Paul and Silas have to say. Is that because of her spiritual connection—her knack for divination? She is bearing witness to their bearing witness to the way of salvation—cool. Well, no.
The text says that Paul finds her annoying; seriously, Paul is very much annoyed and turns to her and casts the spirit of divination out of the slave-girl. Then her owners get mad because she can’t make any money for them telling fortunes anymore, so they make trouble for Paul and Silas for messing with their lively hood and their property and have them beaten and thrown in jail.
Totally Epic, Dude
Now it really gets epic. They are in jail; they pray and sing. This produces an earthquake and the prison bars fly open. The jailer thinks they escaped, but they didn’t and this make the jailer believe in Jesus and so they baptism him and his family. Paul and Silas are free and everyone apologizes to them and they go and stay at Lydia’s house.
What a gnarly demonstration of the power and glory of God, right?
In Luke’s gospel the author uses the same structure, to make a similar point as he has done here in Acts. In the eighth chapter of Luke, the author bookends the story of the healing of the hemorrhaging women with the story of Jairus’ daughter. Jairus is a wealthy leader in the synagogue and the woman with the hemorrhage is ritually unclean and therefore an untouchable and all alone. In this story Jesus steps in to act on her behalf and heals her—a real valuing-of-the-least-of-these kind of story.
While the structure is the same in the Acts story the outcome is different. The story of the least-of-these-slave-girl may be at the center of an inclusio formed by the story of the purple-selling-house-with-a-couple-of-guestrooms-owning woman, but in this case what does Paul do? He baptizes the privileged one and literally casts out the spirit of this poor slave-girl because he is annoyed.
Don’t you think that the bleeding old lady who kept trying to touch Jesus in the middle of a crowd could have been annoying as well?
The Hardest Question
Lydia went on to be a legend and a saint—what happened to the slave girl?
History never heard from her again. Her disappearance makes Paul and Silas’ miraculous story of the power of God, probably recounted over drinks at Lydia’s house, a little less impressive.
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
