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2 LIBERATION, LEADERSHIP AND THE CULTURAL AND

RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND OF THE PEOPLE

Text: Acts 14: 8-18

The Present Interest in Reading the Text

Today’s Bible study deals with the healing of a man who has been tied down and powerless throughout his life. It deals with the reaction of the masses to this act of healing, their enthusiastic response, their eagerness to treat their leaders as gods. It deals with Paul and Barnabas’ effort to witness to the living God in a cultural and religious environment which has not been shaped by any biblical tradition.

To me, this text Acts 14: 8-18 is particularly striking because in a way the same story has happened, and is happening, in a somewhat modernised version in Indian villages. I’m sure it happens in other countries in Asia and Africa. There is this problem of entering a village where one has never been before. One has to gain the confidence of the people. One may be rejected. But, someone does something which is experienced as a tremendous step towards liberation, or even salvation.

At once the problem of leadership arises. If the people are unprepared, they are eager to say: You be our leader. You have our loyalty. Do whatever you want. Take from us whatever we can offer. God has sent you. To us you are God.

India, as you may know, is a land full of godmen, a land in which miracles are performed. It is a nation where politicians like Gandhi, who had the halo of saintliness, could command the loyalty of the masses like nobody else. There is the problem of how to renounce this offer of leadership. And, there is the problem of how to get the message across, how to convey something to people taking their own cultural and religious background seriously, respecting it, even integrating into it and yet to try to say something which is radically new.

We have droughts every few years. Friends of ours were working in drought relief. As it happens, they were not able to organize the labourers at the relief site, but after a while it started raining and the people had the notion that they brought the rains with

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them to their dry place. The people started to believe that these friends could command rain. Last summer, when the monsoon seemed to falter and fail, the government ordered all the religious communities to hold prayer meetings. Later on, when the Prime Minister came to visit the South, rain fell and people believed that .she brought the rain and they were awed. Whoever thinks that this takes place only in a country with a low literacy rate is kindly requested to remember that highly literate and secular Germany ascribed absolute and nearly divine powers to a leader who was all too willing to play the divine role only forty years ago.

The Text and its Parallels

Let me simply go through the text verse by verse. In the beginning of the chapter, we hear Paul and Barnabas travelling and teaching and trying to encourage the people to organize themselves in parishes, to appoint elders, to live a new life of sharing and to spread the message of the promised new life. They had been preaching in Asia Minor in Iconium and had tried to convert the Jews there, but the Jews and Gentiles together mobilised their local leaders in order to get rid of them. And the local leaders hired goondas to use violence against them, and they threw stones on Paul and Barnabas and so Paul and Barnabas had to flee to Lycaonia, entering the cities of Lystra and Derbe.

The first thing which we hear of Lystra is that there is a man sitting who was lame from birth and had never been able to walk. There is a similar event told taking place in Jerusalem and there Peter and John are involved in the process of healing (Chapter 3). So many commentaries tend to say these are just parallel stories about miracle healing. The reaction of the people is certainly exaggerated and the story of the people trying to worship Paul and Barnabas as gods is only an exaggeration, trying to introduce and to prepare for the short piece of preaching to the Gentiles which the author of the text had to put somewhere. This preaching again is seen as parallel to another preaching of Paul to the Gentiles, namely, his preaching of the Areopagus in Athens which is described in Chapter 17, v. 16-31. While there is no doubt that these parallels do exist, I would like to emphasise my conviction that our text here in chapter 13 has a special message to convey which really comes out of this connection between healing and preaching, no matter whether the story has literally happened in this way. The events which are

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described here have happened a hundred times and are happening even now. They are happening to many of us if we start to be involved with people. Therefore, it is more fruitful to try to find out what the author tries to convey to us in this story than to ask which pieces of a prefabricated tradition he may have used.

Healing and Wholeness of Life

The man in Lystra is crippled, lame. He is powerless (advvatos) with respect to his feet; he has no command over them since his birth. So he has never experienced walking. He has never experienced the first exploring steps of a child, the sense of discovery, the capacity to satisfy one’s curiosity, the ability to go somewhere where one longs to go. He has been dependent and tied down throughout his life, relying on the mercy of others for his livelihood and for his barest physical needs. He was sitting in a public place where Paul was speaking. It is not reported what Paul was saying. But since this was a “Gentile city” a city with Greek traditions, we can assume from other talks of Paul which have come upon us that he may have witnessed of the one God who has given life and breath to people and also wants them to live a full, a fulfilled life. And when Paul looks up, he sees this cripple. There is something in this man’s attitude of listening which commands Paul’s attention so that he looks at him in a concentrated way and can see that this man believes that he can be saved. The text here uses a rather strong word sotenai which has the same root as the word ‘saviour’ (sotér). It means that this man believes that he can be healed from his handicap but it also means that this healing has a much more comprehensive connotation of wholeness also.

So Paul says to this man: “Rise up, on your feet, upright”. And he sprang up and walked. Again, strong words are used. “Rise up”. The same verb is used with respect to Christ’s resurrection in Acts 17.3. This scene described here is a prototype of an experience of liberation. To rise up and to walk upright – this has been used as an image by the Marxist philosopher of Hope and Utopia, Ernst Bloch and it has been taken up by Helmut Gollwitzer in his book Krummes Holz, aufrechter Gang, an untranslatable title which means that people grow like a crippled tree under oppression but that they are meant to walk upright.

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The Difference between Godmen and the Incarnation

Of course one can argue that this has nothing to do with liberation but is just an ordinary miracle. It is quite normal and human to argue like this, because this is obviously how the people understood the event when they witnessed it. But the whole preaching in Chapter 3 and here in Chapter 13 precisely discourages this understanding. In Chapter 3, the whole point is that people should change their life and accept Christ whom they had formerly rejected, and in Chapter 14 the witness is to the living God who has not left himself without a witness among the Gentiles.

These masses, the crowds, seeing that Paul and Barnabas had done, cried out: “The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.” So they gave them the names of their gods, Zeus and Hermes, mobilised the priest, brought oxen and garlands and wanted to offer sacrifice. This is the sort of event in which godmen are born. Something exciting happens, the people offer worship, the god-man accepts. I think this also gives us an important key to the understanding of the incarnation. In a religion like the Greek or like Hinduism it is not particularly difficult to think of gods being present among people. It is frequent that men and women become gods to people. God becoming man even to the point of dying as a criminal is something different.

The Vanity of Personality Cult

Barnabas and Paul do not succumb to the temptation of becoming god-men. They tear their garments as a sign of distress and cry out against the people’s devotion: “Men, why are you doing this? We are men of the same nature like you. We bring you good news so that you may turn away from these vain things.”

It is interesting to look at this word which means idle, empty, fruitless. If we look where it is used in the Septuaginta, the Greek version of the O.T., we get the fuller meaning of this word, comparing it with the Hebrew roots for which it is used.

The most frequent root for which it is used has the meaning evil, wickedness, destruction, falsehood, lie, emptiness, vanity, nothingness, spoken of that which deceives hopes. The second root for which it frequently stands indicates breath, vanity, transient, frail, vain, empty, worthless. So, obviously Paul and Barnabas say: Leave this

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empty nonsense which will only deceive hope. Of course many people have tried to read this as a reference to gentile religion in general. But the further text shows clearly that this is not the case. The vanity which deceives hopes is the personality cult which leads to the worship of leaders and makes people dependent.

I would like to illustrate this point. Three years ago I did a survey among the landless labourers, untouchables in East-Thanjavoor. These people have their own village religion, mainly a village goddess who can be good or evil and they were according to modern enlightened standards quite superstitious. Yet, as it happens, they were politically organised and in the course of many years, they had learned to fight for their own rights, not to be dependent, to walk upright. In another village, there were other untouchable landless labourers and as it happens, they were Christians and had a parish priest who had a strong hold on them, and besides was hobnobbing with the big wigs of the village. So the people were not organised. They could not fight for their rights, they were depending on the religious and secular leaders who were exploiting them. So obviously Christianity in this case was more oppressive to them than the popular village religion. And I think that this teaches us if we deal with religion, inter-religious dialogue and culture, not only to deal with theologies and the content of creeds and rituals but also with the more fundamental question: What does religion do to people? Does it deceive their hopes or does it help them to walk upright?

God’s Witness in the People’s Religion

It is important to look at the witness which Paul and Barnabas give, referring to the cultural background of the people. Paul first talks of the living god who has made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them. The same sort of reference is made in chapter 17.24. God’s presence in the cosmos makes the shrines obsolete, it is said there. This is a thought very true to the O.T. but also found in other religious. He did not leave himself without a witness, it is said, for he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness. This is to say that nature is meant to be at man’s disposal as a source of plenty and as a source of joy.

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The people of Tamil Nadu have just celebrated their harvest festival, Pongal. And all this festival wants to express is this joy of plenty in which, as the text says. God is present. And if nature is meant to be a source of plenty and of joy, then this also gives us a critical understanding of man-made scarcities of droughts which could have been prevented, had the forests not been eroded or had the irrigation dams been built in time. It gives us a critical understanding of man-made floods which could have been prevented had canals •been built or had the waters not been released without warning the people who were going to be submerged as it recently happened in Madras. It also gives us a critical understanding of a technology and a technocracy which is about to destroy nature and man by its unlimited greed for growth. God allowed the nations to walk their own ways it is said in v.l6. And yet he did not leave himself without a witness. In Acts 17, it is said (v.26f) that he made every nation allotting specific boundaries to them to live in and allotting their own periods of time to them so that they may seek God in the hope that they may feel after him and find him. God wishes to be found among the nations whom he has allowed to go their own way. How he is found, is also up to us to discover and we have not taken too many pains so far to discover him among the nations.

People’s Organisation and Dialogue

Perhaps one of the reasons why we are not very good at discovering God among the people is the fact that often all our inter-religious dialogue has an obsession with theology and philosophy and no real concern for people. We negotiate dogmas and we tend to forget that the religious theories, be they Christians or whatever religion, are often made by an elite which has an interest to domesticate and contain the masses. If common people of different background get involved in liberating action, there is a mutual discovery of God which has a different dimension than mere theologising.

Our story of Acts 14 ends in an unspectacular way. Paul and Barnabas scarcely succeeded in convincing the people not to worship them. In the mean-time, the goondas from Antioch and Iconium arrived and stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city thinking he was dead. But the disciples, the faithful people, gathered around him and he was able to enter the city again. They went on to work in Iconium and Lystra, in Antioch and Derbe and the work grew and was consolidated despite tribulations.