Hilton Head Island, SC – September 12, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Acts 24:22-27; Acts 26:24-32
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And as Paul thus made his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, “Paul, you are mad; your great learning has made you mad.” – Acts 26:24 (RSV)
To be forewarned is to be forearmed. You need to know at the outset that this will be a didactic sermon. The word “didactic” comes from Greek, and it means “teaching.” There will be no theological insights that knock you off your feet, but I trust most of you will learn things about the New Testament Church and about the apostle Paul that you may not have known before.
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles is the indispensable historical source book for how the New Testament Church of Jesus Christ came into being. Several of the disciples are told about there, plus some individuals who were not identified in any of the Gospels. But the primary character in Acts is Paul, who became the apostle to our ancestral forebears, the Gentiles. Peter was the apostle to the Jews, and Paul the main preacher to the Gentiles.
A period of about thirty years is described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. Initially, Jews and Gentiles got along fairly well in the earliest years of the Christian religion. Most Jews considered Jesus and Christianity to be an odd offshoot of Judaism, but they were willing to put up with it. Over time, however, from the viewpoint of traditional Jews, some Jews in effect defected to Christianity, and this created a growing alarm among the Jewish leaders.
As large numbers of Gentiles became Christians, the Jewish authorities were greatly concerned the rapid growth of the new religion might overpower their own religion, and they concluded they needed the help of the Romans to thwart the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. We are told that some of them were so threatened by Paul that they wanted to kill him. People in that part of the world the world may be excessive in their religiosity. Paul’s enemies were like the Taliban or the ISIS of that time. They arranged for the Romans to arrest and temporarily imprison Paul.
Because Judah was occupied by Rome, Jewish law had no authority to adjudicate such a dispute. Therefore the high priest and the members of the Sanhedrin, the high council of Judaism, requested that the Roman governor should try Paul for treason against Rome. It was clearly a trumped-up charge, but they assumed if they got rid of Paul, they would also get rid of Christianity. All this, by the way, occurs prior to the two passages from Acts I read earlier.
The governor before whom Paul was put on trial was a man named Felix. Paul didn’t say very much about what he believed or what he stood for, but the ever-suspicious Felix thought it could be a threat to Rome itself. He was so worried that he ordered Paul to be kept in jail, where he had to cool his heels for the next two years with no charges levelled against him. Habeas corpus had not yet been invented. Still, Felix was intrigued with Paul, and he had him brought to him on a regular basis for some intellectual sparring sessions. In one appearance before Felix, Paul explained his association with what Acts calls “the Way,” which was one of the names used to identify Christianity. Earlier, it says that Christians also were known as “Nazarenes.” Nothing Paul said seemed to warrant his being put on trial. However, perhaps wanting to appease the Jews, Felix left Paul in prison
Then, as happens in an imperial bureaucracy, a new governor of Judah was appointed. Felix was sent back to the Foreign Ministry in Rome, I surmise, and a man named Portius Festus became the new governor. And if you’re wondering that’s where Matt Dillon’s deputy sheriff got his name, you’re probably right, except for the Portius part.
The Jewish religious council attempted to convince Festus that he should put Paul on trial, having failed to accomplish that with Felix. Because Paul was a Roman citizen, Paul insisted that he be sent to Rome to stand trial before the Roman emperor himself. Festus agreed to Paul’s demand. In the meantime, however, Festus had been introduced to Agrippa, the king of Judea. Festus had told Agrippa about Paul, and Agrippa said he wanted to interrogate Paul, about whom apparently he had heard much. (The plot is getting thicker and thicker here, as you can tell. If you don’t remember the particulars, don’t worry. Just know that this is leading somewhere.)
The Damascus Road Experience was the basis for Paul calling himself an apostle, so he felt compelled to tell it to King Agrippa, with Festus listening in on his testimony. Paul said to the king, “Wherefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but declared first to those at Damascus, then at Jerusalem and throughout all the country of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God and perform deeds worthy of their repentance. For this reason the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me. To this day I have had the help that comes from God, and so I stand here testifying to both small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: that the Christ must suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to the people” [meaning the Jews] “and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:19-23). Thus in one fairly brief paragraph (at least for Paul), Paul expresses his understanding of the entire Christian Gospel to the Jewish king and to the Roman governor.
We may properly assume, as Paul also assumed, that Agrippa knew something about Christianity, but that probably this was the first information of any kind that Festus had heard. Festus’s response was instantaneous. “Paul, you are mad; your great learning is turning you mad” (26:24).
To us that may seem to be a very hasty judgment. How could Festus deduce that on such slim evidence? But put yourself in the governor’s boots. He was a Roman. Romans believed in many gods, and here was Paul, hinting that there is just one God, and that God’s anointed, Jesus Christ, had to die on a Roman cross. That likely did nothing to implant noble thoughts about Jesus in Festus. And as though all that Paul has said was not sufficiently outside the realm of possibility, Paul also declared that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that his resurrection was a message of great light to both Jews and Gentiles. Paul’s proclamation was far too much for a pagan prince to absorb in one fell swoop.
To the declaration by Festus that Paul is insane, Paul responded, “I am not mad, most excellent Festus, for I am speaking the sober truth.” Paul didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. He knows how to butter up his betters, starting with “most excellent Festus.” Then, not to omit the king from his flattery, he said to both Festus and Agrippa, “The king knows about these things, and to him I speak freely; for I am persuaded that none of these things has escaped his notice, for this was not done in a corner. King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe!” (26:27)Paul had spent his early years studying the Torah, the biblical law. Here he seems to be also well acquainted with the criminal law, and he is defending himself very adroitly as his own defense attorney.
But Agrippa will have none of it. “And Agrippa said to Paul, ‘In a short time you think to make me a Christian?’” (26:28). From a certain standpoint it is almost comical. Here is the Jewish-Christian apostle to the Gentiles trying to make a quick convert of the King of the Jews! In the commodity of chutzpah Paul had a truckload. So, in typical Pauline fashion, Paul answers, “Whether short or long, I would to God that not only you but also all who hear me this day might become such as I am --- except for these chains” (26:29). We don’t know how many other people were in the room when Paul was giving this testimony, but we do know that Festus was there, and Agrippa was there, and Bernice the queen, Agrippa’s wife, was also there. At a minimum Paul was attempting to score an evangelical three-fer.
In these four sermons on Paul, I have been trying to convince you, if you need convincing, that without Paul, there would be no Christianity. Whatever we may think of his ideas and his theology, he was nothing if not a persistent preacher for Jesus Christ. He became the apostle to the Gentiles, and by the end of the first century Christianity was completely a Gentile movement. Nevertheless, Paul never gave up trying to convert anyone within sound of his voice, and his voice sounded loudly and frequently wherever he was.
As the postscript to this long episode, it says that as they left Paul, Festus, Agrippa, and Bernice all agreed on one thing: “This man is doing nothing to deserve death or imprisonment” (26:31). Then, ever the politically savvy monarch, so as to avoid any allegations that might fall on himself from any quarter, Agrippa said to Festus, “This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar” (26:32).
Paul was a brilliant defendant, and Festus, new to his position as the Roman governor or Judea and to the peculiarities of the Jews (at least to the Romans), was a somewhat bewildered judge of just who this Roman citizen of Tarsus was and what this new religion of Christianity was, of which Paul seemed to be a chief spokesman.
Luke, the man who wrote the Gospel of Luke, was a Gentile. Luke also wrote the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. It took a Gentile fully to comprehend the uniqueness of the Hebrew biblical tradition as it applied to the Greco-Roman world, but also to grasp the unique role played by each of the people referred to in the Book of Acts, especially Saul of Tarsus.
It is so ironic, though! Paul was not the most humble man who ever came down the pike. Had he not demanded to be sent to Rome to be tried there by the emperor, he would legally have had to be set free. As it turned out (and these events are recorded in the last two chapters of Acts), Paul was put on a Roman ship that was sailing for Rome. On the way a Mediterranean hurricane struck it, and the ship began to sink. The sailors were terrified, but Paul told them an angel in a dream had told him that he must appear before the emperor in Rome. Though the ship would be lost, Paul told the sailors, everyone on it would come through alive. One of them, coincidentally, was Luke himself, who was telling the story first hand. The ship ran aground on the island of Malta. Later Paul went to Rome, as we are led to believe God had intended all along.
In Rome Paul went to the synagogue, and there he preached Jesus Christ to the Jews of Rome. Luke tells us, ”Some were convinced by what he said, while others disbelieved” (28:24). To the skeptics Paul derisively said, “Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen” (28:28). Then Luke concludes the sole essentially historical book in the New Testament with these words: “And (Paul) lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ openly and unhindered” (28:29-30).
That is the last thing the Bible tells us about Paul. Tradition has more to say, however. A man named Eusebius was the fourth century bishop of Caesarea, the Roman city on the Judean shore of the Mediterranean. He is known as “the Father of Church History.” Eusebius wrote that Paul was beheaded in 67 CE by Nero during that infamous emperor’s persecution of the Christians. From the standpoint of Acts, however, it was imperative that God wanted Paul to go to Rome before his life ended.
In seminary, I remember reading that a theologian had defined the doctrine of providence to mean that “God uses human decisions and ordinary events for His own purposes.” I love the definition, but sadly I have never remembered the name of the theological definer.
In any case, Paul ended up in a Judean prison because some Judean Jews convinced the Roman governor Felix that he should be held captive there. As a full-fledged Roman citizen, Paul insisted that he should be tried by Caesar himself in Rome, and not in Caesarea by anyone in Judea. The next governor, Festus, agreed with Paul’s demand, as did the King of Judea, Agrippa. Providentially, all three of these men, plus Paul’s ironic insistence of an imperial trial, ultimately placed Paul in Rome in the final years of his life. Thus the apostle to the Gentiles ended up in the capital of the Gentiles, preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles.
If there is any kerygma in this sermon (another Greek word which means “preaching,” as distinct from didache, teaching), it is this: God’s providence is at work every day in the lives of all of us. He takes our decisions or the decisions of others or events which happen regularly to everyone, and He uses them for His own purposes.
God’s providence never ceases. Nothing that happens, no matter how awful or painful, is beyond the scope of God’s providential goodness. A bad decision we made can nonetheless still result in a good outcome. Immediately prior to the crucifixion, Peter denied three times that he knew Jesus. But he became the apostle to the Jews. A careless mistake can lead to a great advancement. Alexander Fleming left some staphylococcus microbes on some glass slides he neglected to wash. A few days later he came back to his laboratory, and he decided to look at the microbes under a microscope. To his great surprise, a mold had developed, and he saw that the mold had killed the microbes. Thus from that mold was penicillin discovered. Robert Crost wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -/ I took the one less travelled by/ And that has made all the difference.”
The apostle Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus. After many hiccups and false starts, he became the apostle to the Gentiles. Surely there was no one better suited to that task than the brilliant tentmaker from Tarsus.