An Earthquake Frees Us from our Worldly Prison
About midnight, while Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God as the prisoners listened, there was suddenly such a severe earthquake that the foundations of the jail shook; all the doors flew open, and the chains of all were pulled loose.
– Acts of the Apostles 16: 25-26 – 6th Tuesday of Easter Season, Year A
In Philippi, Paul and Silas had success in leading one family to Christ and expelled an evil spirit from a slave woman “with an oracular spirit.” When the owner of the woman lost his income derived from his slave’s “fortune-telling,” he accused Paul and Silas of 1) being Jews disturbing the city and 2) advocating customs contrary to Roman law. For this, the city’s magistrate and citizens beat Paul and Silas with rods and imprisoned them under “maximum security” with their feet chained to a stake.
Instead of succumbing to the pain of their wounds and despair, they prayed and were singing hymns to God. Not only did other prisoners listen, but presumably also the jailer, perhaps the most imprisoned of all, since jail guards have no release date from the dehumanizing conditions of their jail.
What was it like for the prisoners and the jailer to hear the optimism and hope of Paul and Silas when they had been locked up in the strictest possible way by the world’s standards? How did it challenge their assumptions about the power of material conditions of imprisonment compared to the spiritual freedom in the attitudes of Paul and Silas?
Then an earthquake intervenes, breaks down the foundations of the jail and rips them from their chains. Yet they do not voluntarily leave, thereby saving the jailer from the death penalty that the jail guards of Peter suffered. Their kindness may well have proved the final act that led the jailer to ask for salvation from them and become converted.
In a spiritual interpretation, this passage is a meditation on how we are freed from our bondage to self and released into the eternal world of the spirit. The jail represents this world, ha olam ha zeh, in Hebrew. This is the world of material appearances, the apple that delights the eyes and the temptation to “understand good and evil” in our own self-centered, human way. This is the world where we seek to be gods unto ourselves. It appears to us as freedom, but actually is the false freedom of licentiousness. This world – ha olam ha zeh enslaves us to a sterile life of self and a dying material reality – known in Hinduism as maya and blinds us to the eternal ha olam ha bah, the world to come.
In a way, the citizens were correct. In showing their power to free people spiritually from the illusion of appearances, Paul and Silas were attacking the citizens’ reality. Naturally, the world’s system, enshrined in Roman law, responded with the weapons at its disposal – pain, humiliation and prison.
What must happen to break the power of the world’s system? The destruction must fall on “the foundations of the jail.” Pain must be met with praise, humiliation with dignity, physical confinement with spiritual freedom, despair with hope in “things not seen”.
This is spiritual power, apparently weak and trifling compared to this world’s power, but in fact, in its weakness, it undermines the tottering Goliath of worldly power. In the end, the jailer himself is baptized, and perhaps with the water used in baptism, he bathes the wounds of Paul and Silas.
‘A beautiful exchange,” the Venerable Bede remarks in his Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles 16.33. “for them (the jailer) washed the wounds of their blows, and through them he was relieved of the wounds of his own guilty acts.”
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