Chapter 7
1. Luke does not spare Paul’s blushes. The apostle to the Gentiles may be the main subject of Acts, at least in its second half, but there is a tale now to be told from which nobody comes out well. Paul will later characterize his vocation as “the ministry of reconciliation.” His whole theme in Galatians and in all the activity that surrounded it had been the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles in the single messianic family. But when it came to reconciliation, Paul must always have had a sense of shame and failure. He and Barnabas had a falling-out.
- What details do you recall of this event?
2. Timothy was the son of a believing Jewish woman and a Greek father. So, says Luke, Paul circumcised him “because of the Jews in those regions, since they all knew that his father was Greek.”5 Paul’s action here has perplexed many readers. We cast our minds back to the time when Paul and Barnabas, going to Jerusalem with famine relief, took Titus with them. Despite intense pressure from the hardline Jerusalem activists who wanted to have Titus circumcised, Paul stood firm. Paul stressed this point when writing to the Galatians. In his mission in Galatia and then back in Antioch, Paul had stoutly resisted any suggestion that Gentile converts should be circumcised. He had gone to Jerusalem to argue for this principle and had won the day. But now he circumcises Timothy.
- “Why? Is this not inconsistent? What is Paul’s justification?”
3. I think Luke knew that when Paul, Silas, and Timothy reached Troas, they were weary, disheartened, and puzzled. And I think that the reason Luke knew this was because this was the point at which he joined the party himself. This is far and away the simplest explanation for the fact that his narrative suddenly says “we” instead of “they.” Paul had a vision in the night (as so often, one receives guidance when it’s needed rather than when it’s wanted). A man from Macedonia was standing there, pleading, “Come across to Macedonia and help us!”
(This itself strengthens my view that Paul had not previously thought of doing this, but had hoped to this point to plant more churches throughout what we now call Turkey.) So, says Luke: When he saw the vision, at once we set about finding a way to get across to Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the good news to them. Luke turns up among those sending greetings in three Pauline letters (Colossians, Philemon, and 2 Timothy). We cannot be certain, but the signs suggest that the person who joined the party at Troas was the same person who later on wrote the story down.
- What do you surmise to be the value of Luke’s participation here?
4. One might think that there was little harm in this poor girl shouting after the group day after day, but it was not the kind of attention Paul and his friends wanted. Eventually, as with the magician in Cyprus, Paul turned to the girl and, in the name of Jesus, commanded the spirit to leave her, which it did then and there. One can imagine the looks passing between Silas, Timothy, and Luke. Was this another case of Paul blowing his short fuse and getting himself and everyone else into trouble? So it seemed. It didn’t take the girl’s owners long to realize that their line of business was finished. She wasn’t going to be giving any more oracles or telling any more fortunes; they wouldn’t be making any more money from her special ability. But instead of complaining that Paul had taken away their livelihood, the girl’s owners jumped straight to a charge that was, in our terms, both “civil” and “religious,” though with the emphasis on the first. They grabbed hold of Paul and Silas (why them; did Timothy and Luke melt into the crowd at that point?), dragged them into the public square, and presented them to the magistrates. “These men,” they said, “are throwing our city into an uproar! They are Jews, and they are teaching customs which it’s illegal for us Romans to accept or practice!” Without waiting for any formal process—an omission that would come back to haunt them—the magistrates had Paul and Silas stripped, beaten with rods, and thrown into prison.
- Describe what happens next and to what end.
5. These short references, an intimate exchange very soon after Paul’s initial visit, tell us a great deal about Paul’s way of life, his style of teaching and pastoral engagement—and also perhaps about his own personal needs. The split with Barnabas, the long and apparently aimless journey through central Anatolia with all its nagging uncertainties, the sense of arriving in a new culture, the shock of public beating and imprisonment—all this would have left him vulnerable at quite a deep level. In that context, to sense the genuine, unaffected love and support of people he had only just met, to discover through the work of the gospel a deep bond for which the language of “family” was the only appropriate description—all this must have given him comfort and strength.
Can you relate to a similar time in your life? What happened for you?
6. It is worth laboring this point, because when people in our own day wonder what made Paul the man he was and ultimately why his project succeeded, it has been fashionable to suggest that he was a difficult, awkward, cross-grained customer who always disagreed with everyone about everything. There is no doubt that he could come across like that, especially when he could see straight through the fudge and muddle of what someone else was saying, whether a senior apostle like Peter or a local magistrate like those in Philippi.
But—and it is perhaps important to stress this before we see him move on to southern Greece, where relations were not always so easy—all the signs are that in the northern Greek churches Paul quickly established a deep and lasting bond of mutual love and trust. He would say, of course, that this came about because of the gospel. The power of the spirit, through the message and the strange personal presence of Jesus, transformed not only the individual hearts, minds, and lives of those who received it, but also the relationships between speakers and hearers. “Sharing not only the gospel of God but our own lives”—that line tells its own story.
- How does the gospel allow us to share “our own lives?”
- What is the effect of such transformation relationally?
7. Yes, it is of course Paul himself who is saying this. But it is hard to believe that Paul could write that to a group he had been with only a few weeks earlier unless he knew that they would know it was true. When we wonder what most strongly motivated Paul, we must put near the center the fact that at a deeply human level he was sustained and nourished by what he came to call koinōnia. As we saw earlier, the normal translation of koinōniais “fellowship,” but that coin has worn smooth with long use. It can mean “business partnership” too; that is part of it, but again it doesn’t get to the heart. And the heart is what matters. When our words run out, we need images: the look of delight when a dear friend pays an unexpected visit, the glance of understanding between musicians as together they say something utterly beautiful, the long squeeze of a hand by a hospital bed, the contentment and gratitude that accompany shared worship and prayer—all this and more.
The other Greek word for which Paul would reach is of courseagapē, “love,” but once again our English term is so overused that we can easily fail to recognize it as it walks nearby, like a short-sighted lover failing to recognize the beloved; what we so often miss is that it means the world, and more than the world. “The son of God loved me,” Paul had written to the Galatians, “and gave himself for me.” What we see as Paul makes his way around the cities of northern Greece is what that love looks like when it translates into the personal and pastoral ministry of the suffering and celebrating apostle.
- How would you describe your experience of koinonia and agape in the church over your lifetime?
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