The Serpent of Apollo

Pythia, by Apnoia

  

Propers: The Seventh Sunday of Easter, AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

Apollo was a complicated fellow. Unlike other Greco-Roman gods, whom often we could summarize in a phrase—god of war, god of death, and so on—Apollo possessed many, often contradictory, attributes. He was god of plague, and god of healing; god of poetry, and god of reason; god of truth, yet source of cryptic prophecy; god of beauty, yet often jealous and petty. Little wonder then that the Roman Emperor Augustus claimed Apollo as his patron and his father. With a deity like that, you would be able to find an excuse for just about anything.

Early Christians practiced pragmatism when it came to our inheritance of the classical world. “Test all things and keep the good,” we read in I Thessalonians. “All truth is God’s truth,” after all, affirms Augustine. Greeks and Romans, for as cruel as they could be, also had a lot of good ideas. No sense throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Philosophy proved remarkably ready for baptism, such that we wondered whether Plato hadn’t read Moses.

We grandfathered in some sundry gods as well. Athena, for example, goddess of civilization and wisdom, easily illustrated for us the feminine Wisdom of God as found in Scripture. Dionysus, that most human of the Olympians—who offered up his blood as wine?—he reminds us of this other guy we like. John’s Gospel especially draws parallels. And believe it or not, one of the earliest depictions of Christ as the Good Shepherd paints him in the image of Apollo: a divine and beardless youth also known as a shepherd-god.

Now, the story goes that Apollo—along with his twin sister Artemis—was the product of an illicit affair between Zeus and the goddess Leto. Hera, his queen, understandably upset, sent the dragon Python to prevent Leto from giving birth to Zeus’s children. Alas, it didn’t work, and the hunter became the hunted, with the newborn Apollo chasing Python all the way back to Delphi, to the sacred shrine of Python’s mother Gaia. There he slew the dragon with his deadly little arrows and cast him down beneath the craggy earth.

As the dragon then decayed, noxious fumes arose from fissures in the ground beneath Gaia’s temple. Apollo assigned a prophetess, the Pythia by name, to inhale these vapors and enter into an altered state of consciousness; whence she would prophesy in riddles and double-meanings, the truths of Apollo to be interpreted by the priests of the Delphic Oracle.

Of all the sacred sites of the ancient world, the Oracle at Delphi held pride of place. They considered it the ὀμφαλός, the center of the world. The fact that Apollo’s Pythian prophecies tended to be rife with twists and double-meanings only emphasized the cleverness, the wittiness, the wiliness of the gods. Of course the Pythia speaks in riddles! How else could one verse the divine?

Some 300 miles from Delphi, in the time of our New Testament, lies the Roman military colony of Philippi. Guided by a vision in the night, St Paul has come to Philippi, in the province of Macedonia, to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ in both word and deed. Having had some early success in baptizing the household of Lydia, a woman who deals in expensive purple cloth, Paul and his fellow Christians suddenly find themselves accompanied by an enslaved girl who has, we read, “a spirit of divination.”

Only it doesn’t say that in the Greek. What it really says is that she has πνεῦμα Πύθωνα, a “python spirit.” The slave-girl is a pythia! Now, in calling her this, Luke doesn’t mean that the sacred Oracle at Delphi was sold into slavery and shipped off to Macedonia. But everyone knows what a pythia is, whose a pythia is. The Girl with the Python-Spirit is a prophet of Apollo. So what does the pagan god of light and truth herein have to say?

“These men are slaves of the Most High God!” cries out the slave of Apollo. “They proclaim to you the Way of salvation!” And she keeps saying this, keeps declaring this, at the top of her lungs, for days, following the Christians around like a carnival barker. Until at long last Paul grows annoyed, turns around, and says to the spirit: “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And that very hour, the python-spirit leaves; much to the chagrin of the slave-girl’s owners, who thereby lose a valuable investment.

It’s a curious incident, wouldn’t you say, to have a pagan god preaching Jesus Christ? And Paul, who apparently could’ve ended this episode at any given time, allows it to go on like this for days. Why was that? Because the people respect the pythia perhaps? Or because for once one of them wasn’t prophesying double-speak and riddles? And if Paul let it go on for days, why exorcise it now? What was it about this truth that so annoyed him?

Perhaps a broken clock is still right twice a day. Christians never denied that there were slivers of truth in the pagan faiths of Rome, which wise men could discern as did the Magi from the East. The Sibyls were said to have prophesied the coming of the Christ. We still find sanctuaries with Hebrew prophets depicted on one wall and pagan Sibyls along the other.

But as this passage in Acts continues, I think the context reveals our answers. Slavers arrest the Christians once their Gospel disrupts revenue. What annoyed Paul wasn’t the pythia speaking the truth; all truth is God’s truth, after all. No, it was the fact that she was doubly enslaved, both in body and in spirit. She’s forced to be a prophet for profit, as it were. By freeing her from Python, Paul removes the reason why she’s kept enslaved. A normal, well-adjusted woman isn’t worth a psychic medium. Where’s the money in that? What are they going to do with her now, sell her, set her free?

And Rome responds how she always responds to those who disrupt trade: with violence. Paul and Silas find themselves arrested, imprisoned, and bastinadoed. For what? For being Jewish, being foreigners, and for adversely affecting the colonial bottom line. So how do they react to these injustices, to being held and beaten for the demonitization of a slave? They sing! They pray. They respond to imperial bullying with serenity and song. And everybody notices: the prisoners, and the guards.

And then there’s an earthquake. As though things couldn’t get any wilder! An earthquake shakes the foundations of the prison and shatters all the fetters from their frames. Yet when the guard, in his agonies, seeks to take his own life—knowing that he’ll be held responsible for their escape—Paul calls out, “Don’t do it! We’re all still here!” And the guard responds as if Paul saved his life, which of course he has. And he takes the prisoners into his house, washes their wounds, and begs them to baptize his family.

Moreover, when the colonial magistrates learn of this, Paul informs them that he is, in fact, a Roman citizen, and that what they have done—beating and imprisoning a Roman without cause—is thus life-threateningly illegal. Suddenly the authorities are grovelling. Paul is no coward, no wilting lily. He speaks truth to power. Yet his true strength he reveals in showing the mercy of Jesus Christ. For a perfect justice culminates in forgiveness.

In short, then, it seems we have a parable, or perhaps a manual, for how to live as Christians under empire: how to liberate our neighbor, both in specie and in spirit; how to respond to militant violence with faith and hope and love; how to stand for dignity and justice in the face of dehumanization; and how to trust in truth when all about you speak in lies.

Yes, it’s true that the Emperor’s patron deity fled at the name of Jesus Christ. But the deeper imperial powers—of state-sponsored cruelty and religious exploitation, in the service of rapacious profiteering—those must tremble as well, when a Christian comes to town. Because all that they have is violence. All that they have is a cross! And now they know, as do we all, that can’t keep Jesus down.

The spirit of a python told me so.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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