of stories and spirits

 

To begin with, the growth of the church was, with a few notable exceptions, a renewal movement among Jews. People who shared a mythos — stories by which their world was formed and sustained and navigated — in common: the patriarchs, the exodus, the wanderings in the wilderness and the land promised to Abraham’s descendants, the exile. Preachers like Peter and Stephen rehearsed those stories, and showed how Jesus fulfilled them.

But mid-way through Acts, Luke pivots from Peter to Paul, and from a mission primarily to Jews to church-planters increasingly hitting up against Greco-Roman culture, and an entirely different mythos. In Lystra, Paul and Barnabas are assumed to be the Greek gods Hermes and Zeus.

In Philippi, the church-planters meet a slave-girl who possesses, or is possessed by, the spirit of Python. Python was the giant serpent who guarded the stone at Delphi, the centre of the world. This stone was precious to Zeus, for his father, the titan Chronos, had swallowed the first five of his children, whole, at birth, to prevent any of them from usurping him. But he had been tricked into swallowing the stone instead of his youngest son, allowing Zeus to grow up to rescue his siblings and overthrow the titans.

Zeus’ wife, Leto, conceived twins, the goddess Artemis and the god Apollo, incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus’ principal wife, Hera. Hera ordered Python to abandon his post, and pursue and kill Leto and her offspring. Python caught up with them with the infants were four days old; but from his mother’s arms, Apollo fired arrows at the serpent, killing it.

When Paul defeats the spirit of Python with the arrow that is the name of Jesus, Luke’s audience might well expect the crowd to assume that Paul was Apollo in their midst. But because his actions have cost a group of (essentially) bandits — a popular enemy of the heroes or mortal children of the gods — their income stream, Paul and Silas are thrown into Tartarus, the deepest prison chamber of the underworld, where the titans had imprisoned monsters, and the Olympians, in turn, had imprisoned the titans.

Only two mortals had ever returned from the underworld, the realm presided over by the god Hades and guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus. One was Theseus, a son of Poseidon (god of the sea) who had ventured into the underworld on a quest to abduct Persephone, the wife of Hades. Theseus was the hero best known for killing the Minotaur. (Persephone only lived in the underworld for a third of every year, but Theseus and his bestie Pirithous are not the sharpest crayons in the crayon box.) The other was Heracles, a son of Zeus (god of the sky) and another object of Hera’s wrath. She had caused him to go mad, and in that state kill his wife and children; and, seeking penance, had forced him into a series of increasingly impossible tasks, culminating in kidnapping Hades’ hound Cerberus. Heracles succeeded, rescuing his cousin Theseus, who had been trapped in the underworld since failing in his own quest, as an added bonus. But he was prevented from also rescuing Theseus’ friend, Pirithous, by an earthquake.

However, it is an earthquake that liberates Paul and Silas from prison, and creates the opportunity for an encounter with their jailer whereby he, too, comes to put his trust in Jesus. Just as death could not keep hold of Jesus, so it cannot keep hold of Paul and Silas. They are participating in the resurrection. And just as Jesus’ risen life meant life for others, so did their participation in that risen life.

We create and sustain our world through stories, whether the great myths or the social media posts of a deranged president, whether the sacred libraries of religious faith or the daily news corporations. And those stories have life breathed into them by certain spirits, whether the spirit of Python, that purports to tell us our fortune, or the Holy Spirit, who empowers us with the risen life of Jesus, or some other spirit.

Which stories will you choose to be shaped by? Which spirit will you seek to be inspired by?

Where will that story, and that spirit, take you?