Acts 18:17 Then all the Greeks took Sosthenes, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and beat him before the judgment seat… 1. The things for which Gallio cared nothing were in one sense none of his business. He was the Roman proconsul of Achaia. As elsewhere, so at Corinth, the Greeks heard Paul, and were attracted to him. The Hebrews heard him, hated him, and dragged him before Gallio. But the question being one with which he had nothing to do, Gallio promptly dismissed it. But this was not the end. The Greeks on this occasion believed in the right of free speech, and, like a great many other champions of free speech, they proceeded to proclaim their sympathies by an act of personal violence (ver. 17). And though it was without the smallest legal warrant, though it was even a more gross and disorderly breach of the peace than that which had preceded it, "Gallio cared for none of those things." These dogs of Jews and these emasculated Corinthians, so long as the peace of the empire was undisturbed, what mattered it how much they quarrelled? 2. This is a picture of an amiable and cultivated indifferentism. Its conspicuous characteristic lay in this, that it betrayed an utter insensibility to the simplest principles of justice. Sosthenes and his co-religionists had undoubtedly done St. Paul a wrong; but they had done it under legal forms, and had appealed to the proconsul for their authority. The Greeks, on the other hand, had deliberately taken the law into their own hands. Undoubtedly, in a technical sense, this was no concern of Gallio's; but, in another and very real sense, his indifference was neither wise, nor loyal, nor manly. If Gallio had really cared to win for the empire the trust and loyalty of her conquered peoples, he would have seen to is that no blow should be unjustly struck, nor any meanest citizen of Corinth, whether Jew or Greek, lightly or lawlessly wronged. But to have done this would have been to break through the crust of that passionless indifference which was the mark of culture in those days. 3. "But that," we say, "was a pagan culture, and its fruit "was worthy of the tree. We are not pagans, but Christians, and are bound inflexibly to repudiate the principles of such a man." But what are the facts? One distinguishing mark of our Christian civilisation is a development of individual reserve. We learn to conceal emotions, or at least to chasten their expressions. Tell someone a story of wrong, or want, or sorrow, and the chances are you will get the answer, "Really, how very unpleasant. Can you not find something more agreeable to talk about than that?" Nor is this wholly surprising or without excuse. My neighbour is thrown into a spasm of torture by a musical discord, which my less tutored faculty scarce perceives. It hurts him; and, to leave that fact out of account in judging of the way in which he endures a series of discords, is neither just nor kindly. Now then, it is a result of culture that it makes the sensibilities infinitely more susceptible to external impressions. And therefore it is not unnatural that some natures should be unwilling to hear of the miseries that are torturing so many of their fellow men, nor that, refusing to know about such things, they cease, before long, to care about them. It is the old picture of Gallio watching through the parted drapery the scourging of Sosthenes in the street. It is not an engaging spectacle. Here at hand is the last chronicle of the busy and brilliant life of Rome. Here is the last roll that has come from the pen of Seneca. How much pleasanter to lose one's self in the pages of Ovid or Lucullus or Martial, instead of going out into the hot sun to stop a street fight between a herd of fanatical Israelites and Corinthians! And so, today, there is a large class that finds it far pleasanter to draw the curtains upon the crime and sorrow that are without, while they have the freshest voice in song or story to beguile them. 4. And yet how utterly is this to miss the noblest end of culture, whose function is not merely to train the powers for enjoyment, but first and supremely for helpful service. And then what is the religion of Jesus Christ but to bring Christ into our common life, and so ennoble that life by the sweetness and sanctity which He alone can shed upon it? Shall we selfishly turn to Him to comfort us, and catch no impulse from His life to reach out and comfort our brethren? Did He come only to teach us how to build handsome churches and keep them for ourselves? Oh, no; it was not merely for you and me that Christ died, but for humanity. Into the culture of that elder time He came to put the one ingredient that it needed supremely to ennoble it — a Divine unselfishness. He came to kill out that torpid indifference that could see cruelty and injustice, and "care for none of those things," and to supplant it with an inextinguishable and self-forgetting love. Every now and then our ears are startled by some brutal deed, that makes us shudder for our kind. And, reading of it amid our own safe and comfortable surroundings, we cry out, "How shocking! How barbarous! Where were the police?" At best a municipal discipline, however admirable, can only repress and punish the outward manifestations of our social evils. The medicine that shall heal them must be drawn from the Cross. And Christians must be the channels through which the throbbing tide of sympathy shall reach and heal the sorrows and the sins of our fellows. The other day, in Wales, the waters broke out in a colliery. There were four hundred men at work below the surface, and, panic stricken, they rushed to the mouth of the pit and touched the telegraph, when, to their horror, they remembered that that morning the signal wire had parted, and had not yet been mended. With the energy of despair, one of them, trained at sea, flung himself against the rugged sides of the shaft, and, with a grasp that seemed a superhuman endowment given him for the moment, scaled the perpendicular wall until he came to the break in the wire. The parted ends hung within a few inches of each other, but how was he to join them together? To let go his hands and strive to reach them thus was death to himself and death to those below him. Suddenly, with an inspiration born of the dire peril, he grasped one end in his mouth, and reaching then with agonising effort for the other, caught the two between his lips, reunited thus the parted wire, and re-established the electric current that told to those above the danger and signalled swiftly back again the coming of deliverance. What he climbed up to do you and I must climb down to do. There is a vast multitude below us that our lips and hands and feet must bring into living and saving relations with the Son of God. 5. Not to care when others, no matter how obscure or remote from us, are going down to hell, is not Christianity, but paganism blank and heartless; and such paganism is very full of peril. The social problem now confronting us is one of the gravest and most threatening problems of our time. The labourer does not love the capitalist, and the capitalist does not always understand the labourer. But we shall not finally silence the heresies of the communist with the bullets of the militia. Over against the unreason of the working man we must rear something better than the stern front of a stony indifference. If his misfortunes are not our fault, none the less he himself is our brother. And somehow — anyhow — we must make him feel that we account him so. (Bp. H. C. Potter, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then all the Greeks took Sosthenes, the chief ruler of the synagogue, and beat him before the judgment seat. And Gallio cared for none of those things. |
    |