The Worst Job in Rome (Part One)
Today, I have one of the best jobs on the planet, and I’m very happy about it. Today I get to share with you the gospel of Jesus Christ, not so much in a sermon but in other ways. Today we are going to sing our joys and lift our voices. Today we are going to celebrate baptism and its part in the great story that is the gospel. Helping people in and out of that water is one of my favorite things, so today I can honestly say I have one of the best jobs in the world.
On the other hand, one of the worst jobs you can have in this world is to be a prison guard. Being a prison guard comes with two main problems no matter where and when you make being a jailor your profession. First, being a prison guard requires being in a prison. Whether this is a holding cell, a supermax penitentiary, or even an ancient dungeon, prisons are bleak places. Though people live there, these are not homes. They do not exist to provide comfort for the people inside but rather for the people outside. The people outside want to feel safe by keeping the prisoners inside the prison. This is a place where freedom has been taken away, usually for a good reason. The decor is not soft fabrics and comfortable furniture. The prison is a place made for security, which means hard walls and cold iron bars. In a home, we arrange our spaces for freedom to flourish. In a prison, we design the space to emphasize a lack of freedom. In a home, we emphasize life. In a prison, it is enough just to survive. You want to be in a home but are often forced to be somewhere else. You are forced to be in a prison, and so it can never feel like a home. Even though a prison guard is not a resident of a prison, he spends a large part of his life in the prison. Even though he knows he gets to leave, he also knows he has to come back. As workplaces go, guarding a prison is one of the worst.
Second, being a prison guard means being around prisoners. We don’t typically put kind and compassionate people in prison. A person in prison is a person who has made the worst choices a person can make and are now being forced to pay for it. At best, a prisoner is remorseful, spending his days regretting his decisions. More often, a prisoner is resentful and belligerent. He hates the society that has condemned him and he hates the system that now holds him captive. This would make a prisoner bad company all on its own, but for the prison guard, the situation gets worse. The prisoner views the prison guard as the living representation of his prison. He often comes to hate the prison guard like he hates the hard walls or the iron bars. The prison guard lives with this contempt every day. There is a reason that sometimes prison guards themselves become corrupt or abusive. We put them in the worst places on earth and surround them with people that hate them. What do we expect these guards to act like in those situations?
In the ancient Roman world, there was at least one more factor that made life as a prison guard miserable. Any jailor is held personally responsible for the captivity of his prisoners. If a modern prison guard fails to keep the prisoners in, he will likely lose his job or face other punishments. If he helped the prisoner escape, he would be incarcerated himself. The same was true of a Roman prison guard, but the stakes were higher.
For example, the Bible tells the story of one occasion when King Herod Agrippa decided to put an end to Christianity in his region. He ordered that the apostle James, the brother of John, be captured and executed with the sword. He then arrested the apostle Peter, presumably planning to execute him as well. Until then, Peter was kept in a cell between two prison guards and bound by chains with additional prison guards stationed outside the door of the cell. That night, God reminded the world that he was a more powerful king than Herod. God sent his own version of a Roman soldier – an angel enlisted in the heavenly host – who released Peter from his chains and led him out of the prison so suddenly that Peter thought it had been a dream until he found himself safely outside.
In the morning, the guards received a shock and a sad reminder of the burden of being a Roman prison guard. The text of Acts 12 says, “Now when day came, there was no little disturbance among the soldiers over what had become of Peter.” I would imagine so, but the disturbance was not only about the missing prisoner. It was also about certain penalties for failure. The text continues, “And after Herod searched for him and did not find him, he examined the sentries and ordered that they should be put to death.” A modern prison guard who is incompetent is fired. A Roman prison guard who was incompetent was executed.
With that in mind, maybe you can begin to imagine what I mean when I say that being a Roman prison guard was just about the most miserable job a person could have. Today, before we celebrate our baptisms, I want to tell you the story of one such prison guard and how the gospel changed his life forever.
The Strangest Prisoners in Philippi (Part Two)
The prison guard I want to tell you about had a name, but we are never told what it is. He lived in Philippi, so for the sake of good storytelling we will call him Phil. “Phil the Philippian prison guard” has a nice ring to it. We only know a little about Phil. We know he was a prison guard, and I have already mentioned what that involves. We know he lived in Philippi. Philippi was a city in Macedonia that had been planted there as a Roman colony. It was a fiercely patriotic city, full of retired soldiers and their families. Maybe Phil had been one of those, a Roman veteran who had taken on prison guard as a later career. We know that Phil often worked the night shift at the prison – “prison” being a charitable name for what we would probably call a dungeon. Modern prisons are depressing places but at least they keep the lights on. Ancient prisons were dark and cold. The prisoners and the prison guards lived ugly lives among the rats and the filth and the darkness.
We also know that Phil was a family man. After a night shift, Phil would return to his family and remind himself why he worked an unpleasant job. I suspect he loved his family, and when he returned home from a late-night shift, they would be getting up and around to start their day. As he went to bed, they go on about their lives far from dungeons and prisoners. That was why he did it. It wasn’t fun, but it provided for his family. And that was enough.
One night, a peculiar set of prisoners took up residence in Phil’s prison. They were unlike the other inmates. They did not seem particularly mean or violent. They did not treat Phil with any malice or even disrespect. Even the story of how they had come to be in prison was a strange story.
It turns out that in the city of Philippi, there was a well-known slave girl who might be the only person in Philippi with a job worse than Phil’s. We don’t know her name either, but she was possessed by a demon or some such thing. Her owners paraded her around and had her tell people’s fortunes for money. They kept the money of course and she kept the demon. It was as good an arrangement for her owners as it was a terrible life for her.
That particular day, she had caused a scene that had led to the arrest of these two recent prisoners. The slave girl had started following around two foreign visitors to Philippi and was heckling them or something like that. The foreigners themselves were apparently Jewish men teaching some version of their strange religion. They were mostly harmless except that they claimed that some Jewish peasant was Lord of the world instead of Caesar. It was absurd but harmless nonsense.
However, the two foreigners surprised everyone by casting out the spirit that had possessed the slave girl. That might sound like a nice thing to do, but for the slave owners, it meant the end of a profitable racket they had been running. They went to the city magistrate and accused the foreigners of teaching anti-Roman religious beliefs and causing problems. By the time Phil had arrived, the mob was already beating the two men senseless. The magistrates ordered their own guards to strip the men naked and beat them some more. After that, the poor foreigners were handed over to Phil with an ironically silly command to “keep them safe” after almost beating the men to death. But Phil was the sort of guy who followed orders, and he took the two men to his prison, put them in a cell, put their feet into stocks, and tried to forget the whole business.
None of this mattered much to Phil the Philippian Prison Guard. It was just another miserable night in a miserable prison with miserable people. Except the prisoners weren’t miserable on that night, and this was the first of many strange events that would change Phil’s life forever. The prisoners – usually rude and belligerent – were singing. And they were singing obscene songs about the guards either. They were singing hymns of joy to their God. The happy voices of the two foreigners carried down the stone halls and echoed the sound of praise where there had only been despair before. He could barely understand the words and definitely didn’t understand the message, but he knew that the singers were doing the unthinkable. They were expressing gratitude to a god that had left them in a prison cell. They were unquestionably the most unusual prisoners that Phil had ever been made responsible for. He should have known then that this night was going to be different from any other.
Our songs probably sound a little different today, but they also probably sound a lot the same. What the jailer did not yet know is that those men in that cell were singing for the same reason we are. They were singing because God was good and his son is risen. Whether in prisons or churches, our joy is the same and so we sing.
The Happiest Man on Earth (Part Three)
At midnight, as the prisoners sang, the walls of the jail began to gently tremble. At first, Phil thought it was just the echo of more singing, but the trembling increased. The ground beneath his feet began to shake and his cup fell off his table and bounced across the floor. He soon followed, tumbling to the ground himself. The whole earth quaked. The iron bars clanged like church bells and the chains rattled in chorus. The iron doors of the cells flung open as if opened by mighty and unseen hands. For one terrifying moment, the whole creation seemed completely out of control. The shaking continued on and on for what seemed like an eternity.
And then as quickly as it began, it stopped. Phil stood and got his bearings again, at which point the sickening reality set in. The doors to the cells were open. Phil had one simple job given to him under penalty of death – to keep the prisoners in their cells. Now, through no fault of his own by an act of the gods of heaven or hell, those cell doors were open and every prisoner in his charge that night would have already run out into the city streets of Philippi.
It must have been very dark in that quiet room outside the cells of the Philippian prison. It must have been very quiet after the roar of the earthquake ceased. Phil the Philippian prison guard stood alone in the dark and the silence facing his worst fear. The man with the world’s worst job would not be going home to his family in the morning. He would be blamed for prisoners running loose in the streets. He would soon take their place and then he would be executed as an example for whoever the next guy was to have the world’s worst job. His family would be dishonored or worse. His doom hung over him with terrible certainty.
It must have been very dark and very quiet that night when the prison guard gave up all hope. The world closed in on him. He was a prison guard in a prison that he would never leave. I don’t know if we can imagine how he felt as his trembling hand pulled out his Roman gladius from its sheath. He held it out in front of him and prepared to take his own life, saving some other guard the trouble of having to execute him and perhaps saving his family from a little shame. He took a deep breath and prepared to thrust. And it was at that moment he heard a sound more shocking than the roar of the earthquake. It was a calm voice with an unfamiliar accent. It echoed down the hall from the open cell door.
There had been a few happy sentences in Phil’s life before this. His wife had “I do” when they had been married. The local midwife had said, “It’s a boy” after the birth of his first son. But on that night, the sweetest words he had ever heard came from the voice in that prison cell.
It said, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
Phil dropped his sword and with it all his despair and instead grabbed a torch and a little hope. He ran down the hall into the cell of the two foreigners. And there they sat, unchained, unmoved, almost unconcerned. Phil found himself falling again as he had at the earthquake. He was once again afraid, once again terrified. But this time, his fear was different. He was no longer afraid of the shuddering earthquake. He was no longer afraid of the dark prison walls. He was no longer afraid of the death penalty that loomed over his own life. He was not even afraid of Rome or its armies or its emperor. No, this was a new fear. Phil was afraid to imagine a power so violent it could shake the earth but so good it could spare the life of a Philippian jailer. He was afraid of a God so powerful he could unlock chains and prison cells, and so kind he would instruct his servants to remain in their cell of their own free will. Surely, this was the greatest power in all the creation. The earth stood still, but Phil trembled.
Phil could think of no other words to say but one simple question. “Sirs,” he said politely to his prisoners, “what must I do to be saved?” He did not know what his future held but he knew that these men would have the answer. These men, foreigners or not, served the God of this prison and the God of the whole world.
The two foreigners, whom he would soon learn were named Paul and Silas, gave him a simple answer. They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” Jesus, that Jewish peasant whom the jailer had thought laughable, was now his only hope. At that moment the jailer made the only choice he had left. He decided that day that he was no longer a servant of a Roman emperor. He was the servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He took Paul and Silas to his home, a place to which he had thought he would never return. He treated the wounds that he had helped to inflict on the men, and as he bandaged them up and washed them clean of the prison’s filth, Paul and Silas told Phil and his family the story of Jesus. They told of his lowly birth in Bethlehem and how he became a teacher in Judaea. They told of his simple message of love and his powerful working of miracles. They told how he had been sentenced to die by the Romans, just like the jailer would have been if the prisoners had escaped. But unlike the jailer, this Jesus did not escape death. He faced it and defeated it. He rose up from the dead and left his tomb, like a man freed from a prison cell never to return. Now that same man sat at the right hand of God in heaven, ruler of the world and Lord even of prison guards.
The entire family listened intently as Paul and Silas explained that now all people were summoned by this Jesus to imitate his life and share in his victory. As Jesus had once died, the family was told to leave behind their life of fear and hopelessness. They were told to bury it in a tomb, not of stone but of water. Buried in the water, they would die with this Jesus, and coming out of the water they would live with him once more.
As family, the whole family surrendered themselves to this Lord Jesus. Just as the church can be one big family, that night a family became a little church. On that night, Phil the Philippian Prison Guard – or whatever his real name was – was the first in line to be baptized. He had not died in prison when he decided to take his own life. No, he died that day in a pool of water. And then he lived. He came out of that water neither a prison guard nor a prisoner. He came out of that water very much alive and now also free. He was free from a prison of his own making and unshackled from chains he had never seen.
That day the man with the worst job on the planet became the happiest man on the earth.
But we do not have to merely imagine his joy. You are about to see it, and you are about to share it. We have people today who are ready to leave their own prisons behind and begin a new life with our Lord Jesus. I’m going to ask them to come up now as we sing this next song, but they don’t have to be the only ones. Are you ready to admit you are in a prison of your own making? Are you ready to be set free and be brought to life in Jesus? Are you ready to reenact the gospel in baptism and begin a life of joy?