Biblion Bible Commentary
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Lystra: the gods have come down
Acts 14:8-18
8 At Lystra a certain man sat, impotent in his feet, a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked. · WEB
A healing is mistaken for an epiphany, and the first sermon to pagans has to start further back — with a Creator and the rain.
At Lystra the account pauses on a single man, described in the same terms used of the beggar at the temple gate: impotent in his feet, a cripple from birth, who never had walked. The parallel between Peter's ministry and Paul's is being drawn by the writer without a word of comment, and it is the closest of the several correspondences between the two halves of the book.
One detail is new and is the reason the healing happens. The man was listening to Paul speaking, and Paul, looking at him, saw that he had faith to be made whole. He was not asking for anything. He was listening, and something in the listening was visible.
The command is three words and the response is one leap. Then the town's interpretation arrives, and it is entirely wrong in a way nobody could have predicted: The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men. They cry it in the language of Lycaonia, their own tongue rather than the Greek of the marketplace — which is probably why the two missionaries take so long to understand what is happening. The crowd has been discussing this in a language the visitors do not speak, and by the time the priest arrives with oxen and garlands the arrangements are well advanced.
The identifications are pagan and specific. Barnabas is the senior god and Paul the messenger, because he was the chief speaker. Whatever the two men had said about Jesus, the town has fitted it into a story it already had, in which gods occasionally visit in disguise and the households that fail to recognize them are punished.
The reaction, when they finally grasp it, is violent. They tore their clothes and sprang into the multitude — the tearing is the Jewish response to blasphemy, and the springing is panic. This is the third refusal of worship in the book, and the most physical.
The sermon that follows is unlike anything earlier in the book because the audience is unlike anything earlier. There is no Scripture quoted, no history of Israel, no argument from prophecy — none of it would mean anything. It begins with the only thing the situation allows: We also are men of the same nature as you.
Then it goes back to the beginning. Turn from these vain things to the living God, who made the sky, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them. That is the same sentence the Jerusalem church prayed after its first arrest, and it is the ground floor of the whole biblical account — a maker, distinct from what he made, which is precisely what the temple in front of the city denies.
The treatment of the pagan past is remarkably free of contempt. God in the generations gone by allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways — a statement of divine patience rather than of indifference. Yet he didn't leave himself without witness, and the witness named is astonishingly ordinary: rain, fruitful seasons, food, and gladness. To farmers in a highland town, the evidence offered for God is the weather and enough to eat.
And it barely worked. Even saying these things, they hardly stopped the multitudes from making a sacrifice to them. The most successful missionaries of the age preached their hearts out and just managed to prevent a religious disaster.
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