St. Barnabas 22. Lystra and the Pagan Response.
St. Barnabas and St. Paul next came to
Lystra (Ac 14:6). They may have done their usual initial preaching in the
synagogue, but this time St. Luke indicates it was more of street preaching.
When Paul saw that a man who had been crippled from birth “had faith to be made
well,” Paul told him “in a loud voice” to stand up – and he did, now cured (Ac14:7-10).
Well! The Gentile pagan crowds – who
obviously hadn’t heard Paul’s and Barnabas’ preaching sufficiently well –
exclaimed that the gods had come down! They called Barnabas “Zeus” and Paul,
“because he was the chief speaker,” they called “Hermes” (Ac 14:11-12). Zeus
was the lead or head god ruling all other gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus,
and Hermes was the herald or messenger of the gods. The Roman equivalent would
be Jupiter and Mercury. The priest of Zeus was so enthralled (or perhaps,
corrupt) that he brought oxen for a sacrifice to them. Horrified, Barnabas and
Paul tore their garments – a sign of utter distress – and rushed out to the
people to tell them about the true, living God and to restrain them from
offering sacrifice (Ac 14:13-18).
Note that St. Luke returns to putting Barnabas first before Paul (Ac 14:12, 14). Similarly, the people refer to Barnabas as Zeus, the head of all the gods. This naming of Barnabas would have been an acknowledgment of Barnabas’ leadership and authority. Also, because of this incident, it has been said that Barnabas’ later followers would repeatedly say to the pagans, “No one has ever seen God” (Jn 1:18), in order to instruct them that humans were not gods – only Jesus was both God and man. [1]
There is a bit of irony here. The people
failed to grasp the meaning of the sign of the miraculous healing of the crippled
man as pointing to the one God Almighty; but they did grasp that the miracle
pointed to the divine. Their exclamation, “The gods have come down to us in the
likeness of men!” (Ac 14:11), is not too far from St. Paul’s words, “God sent
his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Ro 8:3) and of Christ “being born
in the likeness of men and being found in human form” (Phil 2:7-8). The
Christian belief as stated in the Creed is that Jesus Christ became incarnate
from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became human. The one true
eternal God did, indeed, become a man; but the early Christian apologists had
to carefully distinguish Christ’s incarnation from these mythological legends.
Yet in a further twist of irony, while Barnabas and Paul stressed, “We also are men, of like nature with you,” St. Peter would also say that the Divine power of God has granted to Christian the power to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), or as the early Church Fathers would say, to be “divinized.” The Fathers would say, “God was made man that we might be made God.” [4] The Lysterians, mistaken as they were, were not too far from the Kingdom of God (Mk 12:34).
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church is located in California City, CA. Visit our website at ollcalcity.org.
Dibby Allan Green has a BA in Religious Studies (Westmont College, 1978) and MA in Theology (Augustine Institute, 2019), is a lay Catholic hermit, and a parishioner of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish.