The Girl with the Python Spirit

Scriptures: The Seventh Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In our readings from Scripture this morning, St Paul and his companions find themselves in a spot of trouble after encountering a slave-girl with a “spirit of divination”—or, more literally, the Greek actually says that she has a python spirit. Now that sounds kind of freaky, don’t you think? A girl with a python spirit! What exactly do you suppose is going on here?

The Acts of the Apostles is one of the most fascinating books of the Bible. It is, in effect, a sequel to the Gospel According to St Luke. That Gospel ends, as most of the Gospels do, with the Risen Christ returning to Heaven. But this, of course, is not the end of the story; why, it’s barely the beginning. Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, follows what happens to Jesus’ Apostles after His Resurrection and Ascension. It recounts the earliest days of the Church.

In this first generation of Christianity, two men come to the fore. One is Simon Peter, “the Prince of the Apostles,” whom Jesus named as the Rock upon which He would build His Church. In many ways, Peter is Jesus’ greatest champion. But the second man is much more surprising: this is Paul, the great persecutor of the early Church. He is tasked with rooting out the first Christians, dragging them before the judgment of those same authorities who offered Jesus up for execution. Yet, rather than strike Paul dead or rain down some similar judgment, Christ confronts Paul with miraculous mercy—and Jesus’ greatest opponent becomes reborn as Jesus’ greatest missionary. Who better than Paul, himself both a zealous Israelite and a Roman citizen, to unite Jew and Gentile together in one Church?

Luke, the author of Acts, was a traveling companion of Paul, and today he recounts for us the tale of their adventures in the city of Philippi. Philippi itself is an interesting place. Initially a Greek city founded by the father of Alexander the Great, it later became a Roman colony of retired veterans from Rome’s various civil wars. It was, in effect, a “little Rome” governed by the same laws as the mother city. Here Paul preaches his first public European sermon. It is at this point, then, that our missionaries encounter the girl with the python spirit.

A bit of background seems in order. You see, about 400 miles from Philippi lay the city of Delphi, considered by Greeks to be the navel of the world. And at Delphi lived the most famous psychic medium of all time: the Pythia. According to legend, long before the rise of Greek civilization as we know it, a great chasm had opened in the earth at Delphi, and the noxious vapors that issued forth allowed people to commune with the divine. Oracles under the influence of such vapors, it is said, could gaze into the past and future as easily as the present. Here, then, sprang up a cult to Gaia, goddess of the earth, supposedly guarded by her monstrous son: the earth-dragon Pytho.

Centuries passed, and a new cult conquered the old, rededicating Delphi to the god Apollo. According to myth, Apollo slew the dragon Pytho with his infamous arrows, and appointed a virgin to act as his prophetic priestess, the Pythia. The Oracle at Delphi now became the most trusted pagan oracle on earth. Aeschylus, Aristotle, Clement, Diodorus, Diogenes, Euripides, Herodotus, Julian, Justin, Livy, Lucan, Ovid, Pausanias, Pindar, Plato, Plutarch, Sophocles, Strabo, Thucydides, Xenophon—all the great Greco-Roman authors refer to it, and to the cryptic epigram inscribed upon the temple walls: Know Thyself.

So when Luke writes that in Philippi the Christians encounter a girl with a python spirit, what he means is that this is a trusted pagan oracle: a “reputable” psychic, as it were. She possesses a spirit from the center of the earth, a dragon spirit, a serpent spirit—something with legitimately bad juju. This is no mere circus palm reader. This poor slave is possessed by some dark power. She has a python spirit.

Imagine the stir it must have caused, then, to have such a slave—someone apparently feared and respected enough to exercise considerable autonomy—following around this group of Jewish proselytes fresh off the boat from the Holy Land, all the while loudly exclaiming, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaims to you a way of salvation!” Keep in mind that many pagan traditions believed in a Most High God far beyond the common pagan gods—take, for example, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover—but pagans then, as today, denied that the Most High would ever deign to bother with human needs or hopes. Better to stick with the lower powers of this world. Now, however, here comes a pythia, announcing that, whatever has enslaved her, these men serve a superlative power far beyond her python spirit.

Just as demons proclaimed with fear that Jesus was the Son of the Most High, so here we have a truthful utterance wrought from a lying spirit. Indeed, the great enemy of the early Church was the notion of divination: Christians vehemently forbade any attempt to divine the future, as it denied both the freedom of God and the free will of Man. The Church gave no quarter to fatalism for Jesus brought liberation to all. Even so, Paul grows vexed at the persistence of this python spirit, and at last blurts out an exorcism: “In Jesus’ Name, shut up and get out!” And that, it seems, is all it takes. Suddenly, the slave girl is liberated from the python about her neck. Suddenly, the most trusted source of divination, derived from the navel of the pagan world, is dismissed with but a word. Here, my friends, is where it all hits the fan.

The people of Philippi must’ve been worked up enough by a pythia pointing them to strange Jews from across the sea. But to have this same pythia forever silenced by the mysterious and offhanded power of their Jewish God—this was too much! The Philippians, outraged at the loss of income that their oracle brought in, drag Paul and Silas before the magistrates, who severely flog them as disturbers of the peace and advocates of non-Roman pieties and practices—when in fact all they’d done was to liberate a slave from evil. But we all know that there is much profit in sin.

Stripped, beaten, and whipped, Paul and Silas find themselves thrown in jail and locked in a stockade. This proves a great injustice, not only against the Church of God but even against Roman law—for in their fury, this colony of veterans never stopped to think that these Jews might be Roman citizens themselves. And Roman citizens, such as Paul and Silas, are by law exempt from such harsh treatment.

And the adventure continues! As Paul and Silas sing hymns and pray through the night, a great earthquake splits the jail asunder, allowing the prisoners to escape. The jailor, knowing that he will most likely be executed for incompetence, prepares to kill himself—only then to hear Paul cry out that they have chosen not to flee. Gushing with gratitude, the jailor and his entire household are baptized into the Church, and they welcome the missionaries no longer as criminals or foreigners but as brothers in the Lord.

So then—what are we to take from this astonishing tale of the girl with the python spirit? Perhaps the most striking feature of Paul’s adventure in Philippi is the sheer level of disruption unleashed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A simple act of truth and liberation shakes the very foundations of the pagan world, putting to flight the most trusted and profitable spiritual powers they know. And when the bedrock of a society’s spirituality shifts, everything atop it shifts as well.

The mere presence of Silas, Paul, and Luke, preaching in Jesus’ Name, disrupts the economic, legal, and moral levels of Philippian society: the pythia is cured by a greater power from the east; the economy must now seek income apart from divination; the magistrates must come to terms with their “little Rome” having illegally tortured and imprisoned law-abiding Roman citizens; and the supremacy of their Israelite God, who ever stoops to care for the forgotten, challenges the entire moral structure of Rome’s fiercely hierarchical society. Such is the power unleashed by invoking Jesus’ Name.

Our world, of course, is not so different from Roman Philippi. No century has so resembled the First Century as our own Twenty-First Century. More than ever, our society is driven by the false and profitable gods of exploitation, dehumanization, fatalism, injustice, violence, and immorality. More than ever, we yearn for liberation, for exorcism, against python spirits of our own. Yet rejoice, brothers and sisters, for as endemic as human sin remains, God’s grace proves yet more constant and superabundant. Liberation comes from unexpected quarters and unexpected servants, wielding afresh the power of Jesus’ Name.

Our cells will yet be shattered, our fetters yet unchained. And we will look no more to the earth with its Delphic oracles but to Jesus’ Cross as center and navel of the world. And so, to the powers that enslave us, we cry: “Shut up. And get out. In Jesus’ Name.”

Amen.