“Humanity
is fickle. They may dress for a morning coronation and never feel the
need to change clothes to attend an execution in the afternoon. So
Triumphal Sundays and Good Fridays always fit comfortably into the
same April week.” Calvin
Miller in The
Singer
“...Three
times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned...”
Paul, apostle of Jesus Christ as recorded in 2 Corinthians 11:25
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| "Welcome to Lystra" |
The day of the stoning, he and Barnabus had been in the area for
awhile experimenting with an entirely new approach to sharing the
gospel. Previously to this point, the normative manner had been to
share in the synagogue among their Jewish brethren and the assorted
God-fearers assembled there. But in Lystra they began making their
appeal directly to the Gentile population, something by today's
standards would be referred to as “out-of-the-box.” Though a
Roman colony, Lystra was off the beaten path a bit, some 20 miles
south of Iconium where the traveling missionaries had had to make an
expedient withdrawal some weeks before due to the unrest that their
presence was causing there. By coming to Lystra by way of the Via
Sebaste they were not only setting up shop in a different town; it
was an altogether different political district as well controlled by
another magistrate. Hopefully things would go better in “the
sticks” than they had "downtown."
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| Things started out so well... |
But
that's not how it played out. On an otherwise normal day half
way through a message Paul had been sharing with some of the locals,
the Lord had healed a lame man. After that, pandemonium broke out.
The word spread like wildfire. Everybody knew of this man and the
fact that he had never taken a step in his life. But now he was
walking around as if he had always done so. The crowd was delirious
with wonder. While usually they would have addressed the visitors in
Greek, the lingua franca of the realm, in their excitement they were
exclaiming things in their local dialect which neither Paul nor
Barnabus nor any of their party could understand. Of course, they
knew as well as anyone what awe Jesus created whenever he passed by.
But when the local priest of Zeus led out the sacred bulls to offer
them a sacrifice only then did they put two and two together. Someone
interpreted for them what the crowd had been shouting for awhile -
“The gods have come
down among us!”
- and that they considered Barnabus the incarnation of Zeus and Paul
Hermes, Zeus' spokesman. Good Jews that they were, I can imagine the
terror they felt as they worked feverishly to dissuade the crowd from
carrying out the ritual.
And that's about
the time that things began to go south for the duo. Sometime during
their appeal to the crowd some of the very people who had run them
out of Iconium a few weeks before showed up and began to harangue the
mob with their own tales of these traveling salesmen. If they're not
gods, they argued, they must be something worse – imposters or
workers of the dark arts. Soon after the stones began to fly.
 | |
| From a "How to" manual |
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| There is no "modern" way to kill someone this way |
Arguably the
world's oldest form of execution, death by stoning was – and still
is - a horrible way to go. While the Bible never describes how
exactly a sentence was carried out, Rabbinic lore is rife with
stories of individuals being tossed off a cliff or buried up to their
waist and then pelted to death with rocks, tiles and cobbles that
were the flotsam of the neighborhood in the ancient world. The idea
was to kill the person but in as slow a way as possible. It was more
torture than execution. It is easy enough to find stories on the
internet of stonings that still occur in certain parts of the Middle
East where sharia law is practiced today. I can't imagine that the
way its done today is all that different on how sentence was carried
out in Bible times. When Luke reports rather benignly that at the
stoning of Stephen, “Saul was there, giving approval to his death”
(8:1), he's really saying that he egged on the mob that murdered a
good man for preaching Jesus and enjoyed the sight of his public
lynching. I wonder if in that moment that Paul was tied up and saw
the blood lust in the eyes of the crowd that began to pick up rocks
from the ground if he had a flashback of that day when he had stood
where they were now.
If he said
anything to them as they carried out the sentence, Luke does not
record it. John Stott opines that maybe he prayed Stephen's prayer as
they pelted him insensible. The fact that they did not do anything to
Barnabus tells me that someone whisked him away to safety before the
pot boiled over. Or maybe they just couldn't bring themselves to harm
the grand old man. In any case, when it was over they unceremoniously
dragged Paul outside the city gates like yesterday's garbage. I try
and put myself in the shoes of Paul's new disciples who had hung low
until the wave of fury had subsided. There lay Paul out in the field,
his body bloodied and broken maybe in a hundred places for preaching
such scandalous doctrines. They timidly gather round to look upon the
man who had spoken of a freedom they had never contemplated before.
And then incredibly his eyes open and in a little while he is helped
to his feet. “...he got up and went back into the city” (v. 20)
is maybe one of the most remarkable understatements of the whole
story. It's wondrous enough that he survives the ordeal but then to
actually reenter the lion's den seems foolhardy and nigh unto
suicidal. Why tempt fate? But its just for the night, just so his
wounds can be tended to and he can rest a bit before moving on down
the road to Derbe.
After his body healed, what other wounds did he carry with him the rest of his days?
Ajith Fernando says this,
In
my study of this verse [i.e., v. 19b; cf 2 Cor 11:25] I consider the
psychological factor behind (though avoiding psychologizing) by
meditating on what it must have meant to be treated in this way. What
must Paul have felt as he was being stoned? The results of my
meditation were shocking. We usually hurry through this passage to
look for some devotional or theological application. But in order to
enter into the spirit of Acts, it may help us to sense what the early
Christians went through, for that will give a key to how the gospel
went out in its first few decades. When a person is stoned until he
becomes unconscious and is then dragged out of the city, perhaps
deeper than the physical pain is the mental anguish and the pain of
utter humiliation. (The
NIV Application Commentary of Acts, p. 399)
Former Pharisee that he was, how did he swallow the fact that he had
done nothing deserving of such treatment as prescribed in the Law and
the Prophets such as breaking the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36), being a
medium (Leviticus 20:27) or blasphemy (Leviticus 24:10-16, 23).
Perhaps he rejoiced for suffering for the Name. Perhaps, just
perhaps, he saw his experience as penance for his part in the death
of Stephen.
Ultimately, he carried on as did the gospel. Despite how things went
down, the ministry in Lystra was not a bust after all. In fact, he left behind
the beginning of a fellowship of believers who had been given a vivid
first-hand demonstration of what was required of a disciple of Jesus
Christ. A few years later, when back in town to follow-up on the
fledgling church, he finds the individual who, in time, will become
his right hand man in gospel work. Timothy is the grandson of a woman
named Lois who maybe was one of the first ones to believe in Lystra
and who had perhaps ministered care to him following his brutal
treatment by the mob?
Years later, as he languished in a Roman dudgeon, he reminded Timothy
of the cost of faithfulness:
You...have followed my teaching, my
conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my
steadfastness, my persecutions and sufferings that happened to me at
Antioch, at Iconium, and at Lystra–which persecutions I endured;
yet from them all the Lord rescued me. Indeed, all who desire to live
a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted... (2
Tim 3:10-12, NIV).
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| The day after the stoning he was back on the road |
By comparison to
Paul, I live a soft life. I don't know what it means yet to suffer
for Jesus. I have not been the victim of torture. I have yet to be
shouted down at a worship gathering or run out of town. If our
fellowship suffers from lack of money right now it's the same all
over. It's not the economy so much as misplaced and misguided
priorities by those of us who call ourselves Christians. Or the fact
that we're a small fellowship made of people living in a socioeconomically depressed area. So when disciples seem fewer and
therefore offerings lower I'm brought back to the counsel that Paul
gave the first believers in Lystra upon his return to that city
several weeks after the stoning: “We must go through many hardships
to enter the kingdom of God” (14:22). The fact that it's in
quotation marks tells me that this is a quote verbatim spoken with
authority by someone who knew exactly what that meant. It is a
reminder to me that faithfulness at all times and in all seasons despite the way the wind is blowing is required of a disciple of Jesus Christ.
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