This story about Paul and Silas in prison is a strange one. It reads more like Christian gossip to me than Church history, with each claim more outrageous than the last: “Did you hear that Paul got arrested for driving a spirit out of a slave-girl?” “Well, *I* heard that he converted all of his fellow prisoners *and* the prison guard!” “Oh yeah? Well, *I* heard that God sent an earthquake so big that it knocked all the doors of the jail off their hinges and even loosened the prisoners’ chains!”
When we encounter an incredible story like this in the Bible, the question inevitably arises, “Is it true?” Did it really happen? Some of us put in a lot of time and effort trying to explain how these events could be logistically possible - tracking down historical earthquakes, for example, or finding scientific studies about the effects of shaking on mechanical locks. But honestly, none of this is what makes this story hard to believe for me. Natural disasters happen. Physics can be surprising. And of course, at the end of the day, “Nothing is impossible for God.” The part of this story that IS difficult to believe, the part that’s most unfathomable to me, is what Paul did AFTER the earthquake. Or rather, what he *didn’t* do.
I mean, think about what *you* might have done in his shoes. Imagine that you’d been unjustly beaten by a mob and then thrown into the deepest, darkest part of a prison, not only behind bars but also chained up within your cell for good measure. Then suddenly, in the middle of the night, a miraculous earthquake rocks the prison doors off their hinges and even somehow causes the chains that are binding your feet to malfunction. I’m willing to bet that 99.99% of us would immediately make like a banana and split. Make like a tree and leaf. Make like a check and bounce.
You get the idea.
The vast majority of us would escape without a second thought. After all, you were unjustly imprisoned, so why WOULDN’T you take advantage of the situation? It’s human nature to want freedom. But that's not what Paul does. Against all odds and contrary to human nature, Paul remains in his cell all night. And not only that, but he somehow manages to convince all of his fellow prisoners to stay, too. We don’t know for sure why Paul made this strange choice, but scripture seems to imply that it was for the jailer’s sake: if Paul and the others had escaped, the jailer would be punished. If the prisoners gained their freedom, he would lose his. And Paul wasn’t willing to let that happen.
The “why” of Paul’s decision to stay almost seems stranger than the fact that he would make that choice in the first place. Most of us share the jailer’s assumptions - that freedom for one person necessarily comes at a cost for someone else. In our world, freedom is a zero-sum game that has winners and losers, and you’ve gotta do everything in your power to make sure you wind up as one of the winners. Think about the fact that for most of history, humanity’s primary tool for achieving freedom has been war. Think about how every major human rights movement has been met at one point or another with violent resistance. Think about the near-universal understanding in our culture that “Freedom isn’t free.” As a species, we’ve decided that freedom cannot come without a cost to someone, to the point that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But that’s a decidedly human way of thinking about it. In the beginning, God created humankind to be utterly and completely free with virtually no conditions - free to fill the earth, free to name and care for all plant and animal life, free to eat almost anything they wanted, free from hierarchy or domination, free from danger or want or shame. THIS is God’s crowning achievement in creation; THIS is what took it from good to SUPREMELY good.
But this literal paradise wasn’t enough for us. Human beings spoiled all of it, because we wanted MORE. MORE than what we’d been given. MORE than what we needed. MORE than we could ever even use. And in our pursuit of MORE, we rejected this perfectly balanced life of freedom that God had created for all of us. In its place rose a system of competition, of winners and losers, of putting ourselves first.
Which brings us back to the jail in Phillipi. According to human expectations, Paul and Silas’ freedom meant that someone else would have to pay a price. The scales needed to be balanced, and the jailer’s failure to protect the system, to keep the undeserving in their place, meant that he was the obvious fall guy. And that wasn’t something that the jailer could live with.
But thanks to Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, he was no longer interested in preserving his own freedom at the cost of others’ lives. He had set his sights on God’s kindom, stubbornly pursuing an edenic reality instead of settling for the expectations of this world. Yet he knew that he couldn’t overthrow the existing system if he continued to operate within the bounds of its rules. And so, Paul and Silas somehow managed to convince all of their fellow prisoners to risk their own freedom for the sake of the very man who had taken it away from them in the first place. It was the only way to break the cycle.
Paul couldn’t abandon the jailer to his fate because he knew what kindom-seekers throughout human history have known. From Emma Lazarus decrying the Jewish pogroms of the late 19th century to Fannie Lou Hamer fighting for gender equality in the 1970s all the way to Maya Angelou in our own century, this truth has echoed through the ages: “None of us are free until we all are free.” No matter how secure we might feel in our own freedom, it will NEVER be assured as long as we allow the human system of winners and losers to go unchallenged. Ours will ALWAYS be at risk as long as there is someone else still striving for their own.
Anything that says otherwise originates in sin. Sin disguised as practicality tells us that freedom for everyone is great in theory, but it’s just not realistic. Sin disguised as patience tells us that until someone else changes the system, we might as well play the game. Sin disguised as self-care tells us that it’s okay and even holy to put ourselves first. Sin disguised as theology tells us that God plays by these rules, too, requiring Jesus to “pay the price” for our freedom from sin.
Sin lies. None of us are free until we ALL are free.
And so, as people of faith, we work to break the cycle. This is not easy. It requires persistence, determination, and risk, often with a cost that’s higher than we anticipate. Jesus lived his entire life this way - refusing to play the game that the authorities kept trying to draw him into, breaking rules and conventions in order to include the scapegoats of society. And as we know, his rejection of the system had an imaginably high cost - capital punishment by death on a cross. Yet even then, Jesus refused to save himself from this consequence, because he, too, knew that none of us are free until we ALL are free.
But as costly as it can be to resist the system - it works. The Resurrection proclaims it, and the endurance of Christ’s message proves it. God’s kindom is a door-busting, chain-breaking, system-disrupting reality that can change the world right here and right now. So we have to get started. Right here and right now, we have to believe that something better IS possible. Right here and right now, we have to reject everything that stands in its way. And right here and right now, we have to take real, definitive action to make this possibility a tangible reality.
The current system is intolerable to God, and it should be to us. So how are we working to break the cycle TODAY? Where are the opportunities for us to practice what we preach - to give up some of our own freedom so that we can stand with those who have none? We cannot let our human siblings suffer so that others might succeed. Because none of us are free until we all are free.
I always find comfort in Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. This is true, but it’s also true that things bend more easily when constant pressure is applied to it. So, we keep pushing. We resist. We sacrifice. We encourage one another. We refuse to benefit at the cost of even one person’s suffering. We give up our privilege, and we stand alongside those without. We do this because we know that none of us are free until we ALL are free. And with God’s help, we can be. Amen.
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