Tuesday, 15th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 23:12-24
Morning Prayer

Just as Paul is in prayer and hears Jesus tell him that he will make it to Rome, a boy is going to the authorities with what he has learned of the plot to ambush Paul. Quite a coincidence or what some might call a “Godincidence.” William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the Second World War, once said, “When I pray, coincidences happen: when I stop praying, the coincidences stop happening.”

Of course, those 40 Jewish men probably prayed too. When they took their solemn oath not to eat until they had killed Paul, they did it out of a genuine belief that they were doing the will of the God of Israel. This man was undermining the traditions they had maintained at God’s command for thousands of years. Who was this man to set aside those traditions? So what happened to them after the Roman commander found out about the plot? To spoil the plot a little bit. The commander, deciding he’d had enough of this, decided to kick the problem upstairs. He sent Paul to the Roman governor in Caeserea, where Paul would sit for five days, then have a hearing before the Governor, who decided to keep him detained for two years.

Ok, maybe those 40 plotters could wait a few days to fulfill their oath. But two years? What did they do? Did they starve to death, leaving their families alone and penniless? Or did the Priests find a way of releasing then from their oath? I suspect that it was the latter. They would not be the last to have taken a rash oath. I wonder if they appreciated the irony of finding a loophole in the law, even as they condemned Paul for creating loopholes for the Gentiles.

Prayer is powerful. But prayer is a conversation between us and God. I try to incorporate periods of silence in my daily prayers, so that I leave an empty space to hear that still small voice in my head and heart that might occasionally say something quite different from what I might expect God to say. God answers prayer, but as those 40 Jews should have realized, not necessarily in the way we might have expected to God to answer.