Enforced Silence

I have often said that Acts is the funniest book in the New Testament, possibly in the entire Bible, with Jonah being a close competitor. Because Acts is a book of early church history, we often assume that it is boring and tend to avoid reading the entirety of the text. Nonetheless, some amusing stories still jump into our church services. We hear about Peter being left at the door while Rhoda tries to convince everyone that Peter is, in fact, at the door in chapter 12. We hear of Paul casually surviving a deadly snake bite and the drastic change in how the local people perceived him afterward in chapter 28. But there is an element of the story in chapter 16 that could be seen as either very funny or very serious.

In this chapter, a female slave possessed by a demon that gives her fortune-telling powers follows Paul and his companions crying out that they are “slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” Despite the fact that this is obviously good PR, the girl keeps this up for days, until Paul gets annoyed and banishes the demon. This part remains humorous to me. The proclamation becoming annoying is funny. Paul casting the demon out not because he is committed to casting out demons but simply because this girl won’t give him a moment of rest, is absurd. It’s even a little amusing to imagine this demon being very confused about how to do its job. Obviously, it seems to be helping the wrong side here. This sort of good-guy demon trope is something you might expect to find in a cartoon, not the Bible, but the story gets darker from there.

Seeing that their fortune-telling slave is no longer functioning, her masters put Paul and Silas in prison. They are flogged and jailed without a proper trial. God frees them in an impressive display of power, and they end up converting even the jailer and his household. The next day, the magistrates send police to free Paul and Silas, but Paul responds that he won’t let them get away so easily. Paul and Silas are Roman citizens, who were beaten and imprisoned without being condemned. This would be a major judicial problem for the magistrates. But we must ask the question, why didn’t Paul bring this up before they were beaten and imprisoned?

There are a few possible explanations. Perhaps Paul discerned that God wanted them in prison in order to witness to the jailer. That is probably the most standard theological answer. The funny answer is that Paul simply wanted to embarrass the magistrates. He wanted to pull a prank on them and have the last laugh as they came to him apologizing. Paul is just being a prankster here. But there is another way to read this that is significantly less amusing. What if Paul didn’t say anything because he never had a chance?

Considering that they were not condemned but still imprisoned, it sounds like the magistrates made some assumptions about Paul and Silas without really investigating deeply themselves. It is very possible that Paul tried to make an appeal only for his words to fall on deaf ears. The people who could help him weren’t present. The only people available were those who were beating him, and they didn’t care to hear his excuses. This event represents a failure in the Roman judicial system, and Paul and Silas suffered physical pain and unjust imprisonment for it.

Nonetheless, the magistrates do everything within their power to dismiss Paul and Silas quietly, privately apologizing and sending them out of the city to avoid a crisis. In this sense, the spirit of the injustice continues even after the apology because the root cause of the failure was a systemic concealment of the truth. The system doesn’t ask if Paul and Silas are actually guilty. The system doesn’t discover that they are Roman citizens or even give them a chance to say that. The system then tries to get rid of them without revealing the truth that injustice had been done. I refer to it as a system because it isn’t only the magistrates. The police, the people who flogged Paul and Silas, bystanders who could have reported these things, among others are all culpable to some degree. The entire judicial system failed to seek truth, acknowledge problems, and treat its victims fairly.

Some theologians speak about the crucifixion of Jesus as an unmasking of the earthly powers. In unjustly putting to death an obviously innocent man, the systems of authority that run the world demonstrated that they will be violent and unjust if it serves their own purposes. This is an uncomfortable thought. We don’t want to imagine systems of justice being unjust, punishing the poor and excusing the rich and powerful, putting innocent people to death or leaving them to suffer in prison unfairly. If these things are true, then that could happen to us. It is easier and more comfortable to believe that human justice is fair and right. All we need to do to avoid harm coming to us from the legal system is simply to obey the law. Unfortunately, we cannot look at what happened to Jesus, an innocent man, the Son of God, beaten and crucified, and still walk away saying that human justice is fair.

There are obvious problems with our justice system that many people could agree on. There are stories of people who have been unjustly imprisoned. There are stories of people who have been executed for murder with evidence coming out later that would have exonerated them. Somehow, despite everything, Earnest Jackson is still in prison. Until he is freed, Nebraska cannot possibly claim to have a good justice system.

But there are other problems with justice in our country that are more similar to the quiet dismissal of Paul and Silas, a covering of injustice through quietly ignoring the truth. There have been numerous protests demonized by their most fringe members. People working for racial justice, gender equality, fair pay and working conditions, and climate care are often dismissed because some people “take it too far.” The baby is thrown out with the bath water. A protest that is deeply rooted in the needs of a community with support and guidance from pastors and respected community leaders gets ignored or even condemned because of a few teens with spray paint tagging buildings the march passed by. A march becomes a riot due to news coverage trying to find the most controversial story for the sake of getting the maximum possible engagement. It isn’t just the judicial system itself. The way we talk about people standing up to injustice also silences them and hides the truth. Who now can tell how corrupt the system is and how many victims have been silenced by a world who simply never asks for the real truth?

Christians are not called to be anarchists, dispensing with all systems of government and authority. There are passages that openly endorse civil government, and certainly Lutheran theology allows for the existence of social systems created by God for the sake of justice and well-being. However, Christians must always acknowledge that sin isn’t only a problem on a personal level. The same sinful nature that corrupts us and causes us to do harm to others, also corrupts institutions on a large scale. We must put our trust in God and God alone. Human institutions can help but they must always be challenged and called to repentance. Otherwise, they will continue to silence victims, ignore truth, and crush the oppressed. Even if it is too late, injustice and beatings have already happened, we, like Paul, must assert the truth, so that victims need not be lost to suffering in silence.

If you want a lighter take on this same passage, I’ll leave a link here to a previous blog post that talked about this story without quite such a grim outlook.