The ancient city of Philippi, today
During the Easter season—which we will conclude this coming Sunday with the great feast of Pentecost—, at Mass we have been reading the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Every year, when we engage in this exercise of reading continuously the second volume of Luke’s story, one is amazed at the depth, the narrative richness, and the wisdom of this account. Today I would simply like to focus on a scene that we find in chapter 16: the conversion of the Philippian jailer.
Let us remember the episode: Paul and Silas are in northern Greece, in the city of Philippi, «the main Roman colony in the district of Macedonia» (16:12). There, Paul expels an evil spirit from a slave who, with her talents for fortune-telling, until that moment had brought great profits to her masters. These, «seeing that all hope of earning money was gone» (16:19), accuse Paul and Silas of altering the city’s peace. Consequently, the magistrates order that the two Hebrews be flogged. After receiving many lashes, they are sent to prison. The jailer is asked to keep a close eye on them.
At night, an earthquake shakes the foundations of the prison, opening up its doors. The jailer, assuming that the prisoners have used the opportunity to escape, is about to commit suicide when Paul, from his cell, warns him that no one has escaped. The man, stupefied, throws himself at the feet of Paul and Silas and asks them how he can be saved. Then they proclaim the Gospel to him. Immediately afterwards—and this is what we wanted to underline—, the jailer takes them with him, washes their wounds and is baptized along with his family (16:33). Before being baptized, he cleans the wounds of Paul and Silas. These are the same wounds they had when they entered the prison, the result of the beating they received before being entrusted to the jailer. These are the wounds he completely ignored when hours before he hastily locked them up. Those wounds to which he did not give the slightest importance then, now touch him. Even more: now they are an emergency. The priority is to wash the wounds; then he can be baptized.
The way the jailer looks at Paul and Silas’ wounds is important. What was invisible before his change of heart—the bruises, the open flesh, the blood—later becomes essential. Perhaps this good man (dedicated to a profession as hard and dehumanizing as that of locking up criminals), draws with his own process an itinerary in which we can all see ourselves reflected. It is also an itinerary that establishes an infallible criterion to evaluate our degree of understanding of the Gospel. Probably, all of us can recognize ourselves in the jailer when we think of those times when other people’s wounds seemed invisible. All of us can think of instances in which God manifested himself to us precisely through wounded people. And perhaps we can remember with joy those moments when the wounds of others moved us, and we wanted to do something to heal them.
In the jailer’s journey we discover the fundamental criterion that distinguishes a person who lives the Gospel from a person who does not: the second is indifferent to the wounds of others. The first, on the other hand, does everything he can to alleviate the pain of those who suffer. The converted jailer, eager to follow Jesus, does not fall on his knees, overcome with piety, and praise God with half-closed eyes, nor does he run to the temple to offer a sacrifice, nor does he lose himself in complicated theological sermons: he rolls up his sleeves and cleans the wounds of his brothers.
The extent to which the wounds of others move us or not will always indicate, with surprising precision, the quality of our faith.
