As Jesus famously said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be” (Matthew 6.21). In other words, we will all follow the thing that is really the most important to us. We all have the hill we’ll die on, the bridge we’d rather burn than cross. We are generally happy to live and let live until something happens that threatens what we value most. In the context of Matthew’s Gospel, he’s talking about money, and with good reason. For many of us, both in the first century and today, money is that one thing we won’t let anything get in our way of — and certainly not pesky things like ethics. (It’s rarely the case for those who are actually living in want to have money be their treasure, but only those who already have more than enough.) We see a great example of this phenomenon in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. And through the story’s use of dramatic irony, we see that all too often, our treasure doesn’t actually free us, but keeps us in chains of our own making.
The story starts like this:
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. (Acts 16.16-24)
So we have a young enslaved woman with uncanny abilities who shirks her normal duties to follow the Apostles around town (likely Philippi in what is now northeastern Greece). Her divinatory power recognizes their message for truth and can’t keep silent. But she is not freed by this realization; rather she is caught in an endless loop of prophesying about them. Finally, Paul gets annoyed and exorcises the spirit. This frees her from her spiritual bondage, but makes her utterly useless to her slavers: She is ‘the talent’ so to speak behind their fortune-telling business and now she’s lost her powers. And it’s this — Paul’s interference in their business — rather than the religious motivations they claim that lead them to have the Apostles arrested and sent to prison. As much as we may shake our heads at them, this attitude is alive and well today. Preaching Jesus’ teachings about money and justice is the quickest way to get yourself labeled a ‘Communist’ by fellow ‘Christians’; and people are happy to talk about Indigenous reconciliation or environmental concerns until they bump up against resource extraction or challenge our relationship to the land. It’s easier to silence the ‘troublemakers’ than allow our easy lifestyle to be questioned.
But of course, for Paul and friends, this is not the end of the story. It continues:
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God. (16.25-34)
It’s fascinating how the theme of bondage and freedom pervades the story. The apostles free a woman from an evil spirit, but her slavers then have them put in prison. They are subsequently freed, and then free their jailer from his own kind of bondage. At the end of the story, the only characters who aren’t ‘free’ are the money-obsessed slavers. Everyone else has been freed.
It’s a great reminder that most of us, if not all of us, are in bondage to something from which we need to be freed. Perhaps like the enslaved woman, it’s systemic and spiritual oppression. Perhaps like her slavers, it’s easy money. Perhaps like Apostles, it’s the rule of an unjust criminal justice system and those who would abuse it. Perhaps, like the jail guard, it’s fear, power, or misplaced duty. But no matter the chains we’re in, God longs for us to be freed from them. Remember: the founding story of the whole biblical tradition, the Exodus, is about God freeing an enslaved people! And Jesus took on as his own manifesto, Isaiah’s oracle about giving sight to the blind, freeing captives, and preaching good news to the poor. This is the very heart of the Christian tradition and nothing is truly Christian without it. So the question before us — each of us — today is this: What is it from which I need to be freed right now? And we must trust that, no matter what the appearances may be, God is on the side of our freedom: not the selfish so-called ‘freedom’ preached by libertarians, but the freedom to truly be ourselves and to love others without fear.
May the God of freedom release us all from what is keeping us small, weak, and fearful. Amen.
Matthew Root 