Biblion Bible Commentary
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The prison found empty
Acts 5:17-26
17 But the high priest rose up, and all those who were with him (which is the sect of the Sadducees), and they were filled with jealousy · WEB
An angel opens the doors and sends them straight back to the temple, and the officers' report is a small comic masterpiece of institutional bafflement.
The motive is stated without diplomacy. The high priest and the Sadducean party were filled with jealousy. Not alarm at heresy, not concern for public order — jealousy, which is what a man feels when a rival is receiving what he believes belongs to him. The apostles are arrested and put in public custody, and the word suggests an ordinary jail rather than a temple holding cell.
The rescue is brief and undramatic in the telling. An angel of the Lord opened the doors by night and brought them out. There is no description of the angel, no dialogue, no reaction from the apostles. What there is instead is an instruction, and the instruction is the point of the whole episode: Go stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.
Every word of that sentence is a refusal of the obvious. They are not told to leave the city, not told to lie low, not told to be more careful. They are sent back to the exact location where they were arrested, to do the exact thing they were arrested for, in the most public possible posture. The deliverance is not from the work; it is for the work. And the phrase all the words of this life forbids editing — nothing is to be trimmed to make the message less provocative.
They obey at daybreak, which means they went from the prison to the temple and waited for the courts to open. Meanwhile the council convenes in full, with the whole senate of Israel, and sends to the prison for its prisoners.
The officers' report deserves to be read slowly, because the writer has plainly enjoyed it. We found the prison shut and locked, and the guards standing before the doors, but when we opened them, we found no one inside. Every security measure functioned perfectly. The doors were shut. The locks held. The guards were at their posts and had noticed nothing. The system was intact and the men were gone.
The reaction is very perplexed about them and what might become of this. It is an honest description of a court that has run out of categories. And then the second report arrives, from someone who has evidently just walked through the temple: Behold, the men whom you put in prison are in the temple, standing and teaching the people. They did not flee, so nobody had to search for them; they were exactly where the council's own guards could have found them by looking out a window.
The rearrest is made without violence, and the reason given is not restraint but calculation — the officers were afraid that the people might stone them. That is the second time in two chapters the authorities are governed by fear of the crowd, and the writer keeps noting it because the situation will reverse. Within a few chapters a crowd will be the instrument of a stoning rather than the reason one is avoided, and the man holding the coats will be introduced by name.
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