It happened that as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave-girl having a spirit of divination met us, who was bringing her masters much profit by fortune-telling. Following after Paul and us, she kept crying out, saying, "These men are bond-servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation." She continued doing this for many days. But Paul was greatly annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, "I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!" And it came out at that very moment.
But when her masters saw that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market place before the authorities, and when they had brought them to the chief magistrates, they said, "These men are throwing our city into confusion, being Jews, and are proclaiming customs which it is not lawful for us to accept or to observe, being Romans."
My thoughts -
This is a very interesting healing. First, I wonder why Paul did it. Was it concern for the girl who was possessed by the spirit or was it just because he was annoyed?
Did Paul not want the spirit to proclaim who they were? Is that why he was annoyed? Or was it more that the woman was saying these words over and over again? That could drive anyone nuts.
Whatever Paul's primary motivation here and whatever annoyed him most the end result was that the girl was healed and that made her useless to her masters. Her possession was a cash cow. Without it there was nothing special about her. Nothing they could exploit for profit. There response to this was to claim Paul and Silas were stirring up trouble and to have them arrested.
Was the girl better off without being possessed? I would think so. But this was no concern to her masters. Heck, it may not have even been a concern to Paul. Maybe he just wanted her to shut up. He was only human, after all. But the girl's well being was no concern to her masters. They only cared about her ability to make them money. And it left with the spirit.
This reminds me in a way of Jesus's healing of Legion, found in Mark 5 and in Luke 8. The man was in a bad way, possessed with so many demons that he/they claimed his/their name was Legion, as there were so many of them. He was so stricken that he had to be chained, and even then he would often break the chains.
Jesus heals the man by casting the demons out of him and into a herd of pigs, who proceed to jump off a cliff to their deaths. Now, you'd think that the villagers, this man's friends and neighbors, would rejoice in his healing. You'd think they'd be happy to have him restored to them after all of the years of demon possession and chains. But no. They lost their livestock. This was a big part of their economy. The man was restored but the financial cost to the community was great. And so they tell Jesus to leave. They want no part of this man, healings or no, if it costs them their livestock.
Paul and Silas heal a demon possessed girl and for their troubles are reward with lies being spread about them and jail time. Jesus healed a man and was run out of town. In both instances the people who responded negatively valued money over people. The masters wanted to be able to continue to exploit their slave for the money she could make for them telling fortunes. The villagers may or may not have cared about the man who was called Legion. If they did they didn't care enough to tolerate his healing at the expense of their pigs. In both instances people place money above other people.
How often do we do the same thing? We can see that schools are failing. We can see an epidemic of unemployment and underemployment. We can see the link between health care and employment and identify that with high unemployment and underemployment comes a huge gap in coverage. We can see poverty and violent crime and drug abuse and hunger and homelessness and their relationships to each other and declare that something should be done. But don't take it from my check. Don't make me uncomfortable. I just want the problem to go away. I don't want to have to notice.
What would Paul think of us? What would Jesus think of us? When money becomes a greater concern than people the gospel is not being adequately preached. Where money is a greater concern than people Jesus, who told the rich man to sell all he had and whose early followers did just that (see Acts 2) is not being adequately followed.
The slave masters accused Paul and Silas of throwing the city into confusion, but they were the ones who were confused. They thought that money was more important than one of God's children. They were wrong. And we are, too, when we do the same thing. We are called to care for all of God's children. To be okay with doing anything less is to be thrown into confusion by a world that values money over people and over God.
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