"Friends, why are you doing this? We are mortals just like you, and we bring you good news…"
On the face of it, this story of how Barnabas and Paul are mistaken for two gods come to earth could be read as a sort of broad comedic interlude in the Book of Acts. Barnabas, because he is quiet and apparently possessed of greater gravitas is called Zeus by the crowds, while Paul, ever loquacious, is identified as Hermes. The two apostles are overwrought at the misidentification and tear their clothes in frustration. They have come to proclaim God's action in Jesus, not to be mistaken as gods themselves.
Yet, when you step back a bit from the biblical text, there is as always, much more here than we might first notice. There's something frankly attractive to the honesty behind the refusal of either Paul or Barnabas to accept the honors that crowd wants to give them. I imagine that if they had played along with the crowds idea they would have been given fine clothes, precious gems and whatever they had asked for from the community. But the apostles will have none of that. They rip the simple clothes they are wearing, ruining them in the moment, rather than accept the finery that might have been offered. They were scandalized that the crowd could be so wrong, missing the point of the action of a loving God by misunderstanding a simple healing miracle.
There are many people today who would not hesitate at all to accept the crowd's adulation. I expect, all things being equal, there must have been many people in Paul and Barnabas' day who would have as well. But the apostles won't go that route. They have too much integrity, and they are too focused on doing God's will to stumble into a trap of self-enrichment. As I write this note today, we are hearing about how the new Pope Francis is acting in a similar way; refusing to be trapped in the riches of the Office of the Pope, telling for instance his fellow bishops not to travel to his installation and give the money to the poor instead. The fact that this story is remarkable and being told on all the news channels is a reminder of just how unusual Paul's and Barnabas' behavior is in this chapter of Acts.
There's a second, more subtle message for me in this passage as well. The crowd is not simply going off on a random tangent when they decide that the gods had come to their city that day. There were numerous myths that described how Zeus and Hermes would take on human form and walk among mortals. And when they did that, they would reward the righteous people that they found and punish the wicked. When scholars began to rediscover those sorts of myths about the Greek and Roman gods, they wondered if the stories of Jesus, taking on human form to walk among us, might have been nothing more than a retelling of the older stories. And, on the surface, they were probably right to wonder that. There are many similarities in the story of Jesus' birth, death and resurrection to other stories in mythology. But the thing that is different, when you look at them all carefully, is that in Jesus' case, this is a self-emptying action of God on human behalf. The other stories require an action on human behalf to benefit the gods. If it really had been Zeus and Hermes come down to earth in the moments described in Acts, most likely the gods would demanded tribute and worship. Jesus, and his followers Paul and Barnabas, never demand that. The worship happens sometimes, but never on demand - always in response.
C.S. Lewis, a well known scholar of classical writing from this period, called the myths of how the gods acting in ways similar to how God acts in the Bible the "good dreams". He argued that God's actions in Christ defined human history and thought. And that because of that, we should expect to hear echoes of the Gospel, echoes of Jesus in all human literature. But all of the echoes, by their derivative nature, fall short of the full revelation of God that we encounter in Jesus.
When I was a boy I delighted in reading stories about the Greek and Roman Gods. I didn't know it at the time, but I now recognize that I was being attracted by the parallels, sometimes close, sometimes not so close, to the true story of God in Jesus. I wonder if you had a passion for a certain kind of literature or art as you were growing up, and if now you might see connections between that and what you have learned about God in the life of Jesus? How have you become the person you are today because of the stories or art you loved - or love today? Where do you find the good news in them that has brought you to the living God?
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