Shayne Looper: The surprising place where God shows up

The Book of Acts recounts the arrival of the Apostle Paul in the great city of Corinth. It was a Roman colony, which meant there was a large military presence there. Prostitution was ubiquitous and sexual immorality was more prevalent than any place Paul had ever been. It was the Las Vegas of the ancient world.

Paul entered this city and did what any devout Jew traveling alone would have done. He went to find a synagogue. In a city the size of Corinth, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, there were probably several, and it was not long before Paul had found one.

A synagogue in the ancient world was not like a church in modern America, which only fills with people on weekends. A synagogue was more like a community center. Everything in the Jewish community revolved around the synagogue. On Sabbath days there were religious services, but there were people hanging around every day of the week.

It was probably at the synagogue that Paul met Aquila and Prisca. Aquila was from Pontus, a city on the southern shores of the Black Sea. He and Prisca were also Jews and may have been, like Paul, Jesus-followers. They had recently arrived from Italy, forced to leave Rome by the decree of the Emperor Claudius.

That biblical note ties into secular history. Scholars know that Claudius issued the deportation order in the year 49, possibly because of conflicts between traditional Jews and Jewish Christians. The Roman historian Suetonius, writing 70 years later, says the conflict was over someone named Crestus, which seems to be a reference to Christ. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that Aquila and Prisca were Jews who had already acknowledged Jesus as the Jewish messiah.

Paul hit it off with them right away. Both men were from what is now Turkey (Aquila from the north and Paul from the south.) Interestingly, Paul usually refers to Prisca by her nickname Pricilla, which would be like calling Susan, “Suzie.” Paul, like all rabbis, had been schooled in a trade: tent-making (or leather craft, since ancient tents were usually made from leather), and Aquila and Pricilla made tents.

Tent-making was probably a thriving business in Corinth, because so many visitors came to the city for the Isthmian Games (second only to the Olympic Games), and to the religious festivals that drew pilgrims from all over Europe. So, Aquila and Pricilla offered Paul a place to stay and gave him a job, and on weekends he went to the synagogue and taught about Jesus and tried to persuade both Jews and God-fearing Greeks to believe in him.

All this calls for reflection. Paul had found the perfect couple to stay with. Aquila already had a tent-making business and needed to increase his workforce. Pricilla was an intellectual who shared Paul’s love of the Scriptures. Ironically, the reason Paul ran into these people in just the right place at just the right time was because of an ugly ethnic prejudice and a distant Roman emperor’s unjust and inconvenient decree.

Perhaps that sounds familiar? It should. Once, about 50 years earlier, God made use of a town’s unfriendly attitudes and a different Roman’s emperor’s unfair and enormously inconvenient decree to move a young pregnant woman to a little town called Bethlehem, which was just the right place, at just the right time for the savior of the world to be born.

That is how good God is at what he does. He holds Roman emperors in his hands. And Turkish tentmakers. And people like us. Both the accidents of nature and the circumstances of life are forced to do his bidding. We’d prefer to see his hand when everything is going well, but it is often when we’re stuck at the intersection of unfair and inconvenient that God shows up.

If Paul had been on a mission to secure a comfortable station in life and settle down, he would not have had the opportunities he had to see God’s providential work. It is those who seek God’s kingdom, not their own comfort, who find God waiting for them with gifts in hand.

— Find this and other articles by Shayne Looper at shaynelooper.com.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: The surprising place where God shows up