Acts 26:1-26 - Homiletics

The apology.

We are struck with a contrast between the conduct of our Lord when he stood before the bar of Caiaphas and of Pontius Pilate, and that of St. Paul when he was brought before Festus and Agrippa. It is written of Jesus, when the Jews accused him before Caiaphas, that "he held his peace." And again, as he stood before Pontius Pilate the governor, when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, that he answered nothing. And even when Pilate himself appealed to him, he gave him no answer, not even to one word; but, like a lamb dumb before the shearer, opened not his month. St. Paul, on the contrary, when his enemies launched vehement accusations against him, stood boldly on his defense. With infinite wisdom, eloquence, and spirit, he rebutted their charges, and asserted his innocence of them. Both before the Sanhedrim and before Felix, as well as before Festus and Agrippa, he maintained his own cause with consummate skill and dignity; not cowed by their violence, nor losing his temper in meeting their attack; but confronting them with the boldness of a pure conscience, and with the energy of an invincible courage. Can we assign any reason for this remarkable difference between the conduct of the Master and the servant under such similar circumstances? It is, of course, possible that the patience and silence of Jesus was the result of that conscious innocence and perfect sinlessness which belonged to the Son of man alone, and could not be shared by even the holiest of his servants. As he would not allow his servants to draw the sword in his defense, so neither would he speak a word to vindicate his innocence and uphold his cause. It may have been part of his Divine mission of suffering to be absolutely passive in receiving injuries by word, as he was in enduring the shame and agony of the cross. Unresisted slander, unresented blasphemies, undenied accusations, may have been as truly parts of the Passion, as the spitting, and the smiting on the cheek, and the crown of thorns, and the piercing of the hands and feet were. His answer, his apology, his acquittal, were to be the resurrection from the dead; and, awaiting that apology at the hands of his Father, silent endurance was to be his part. The difference between his sinlessness as the Son and the inferior goodness of the apostle mixed with sin, and between the vindication of the Son to be proclaimed by the resurrection and the vindication of the apostle to be effected by ordinary means, may be one ground of the difference, which we are considering. But there is another obvious difference between the two cases. Christ must suffer. According to the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, Jesus was to lay down his life as a sacrifice for sin. And he was willing to do so. His own will was one with the Father's will, that thus it should be. As, therefore, he would not pray to his Father to send him twelve legions of angels, to free him from his enemies, so neither would he resist his condemnation by assertions or proofs of his sinless purity. He was silent before his unjust judges, as he bore his cross, as he stretched out his hands upon it, as finally he bowed the head and gave up the ghost. It was otherwise with St. Paul. He had no life to give for the world's sins, nor was he yet to die at all. He had more years to run in his Lord's service, nor did he know when his time would come. He must live and work awhile for the souls of Jews and Gentiles, and must leave no stone unturned to exhibit his integrity before mankind. Apart from the natural feelings of the man, it was his duty to repel those charges which would hinder him in his work. Hence his noble apology. A free confession of his errors and his faults; a lofty assertion of the integrity of his course; a lucid narrative of his wondrous life; a bold confession of the change in his soul; a holy boast of his faith in Jesus and the works which were its fruit; a pregnant proclamation of Christ's gospel in the ears of his accusers and judges; and a fervent appeal to Festus and Agrippa, such as an archangel might address to the sons of men from the heights of heaven, so grand is its superiority;—these make up that apology which has a moving eloquence in it as fresh to-day as eighteen hundred years ago; an apology which gives us a portraiture of the apologist well calculated to rivet our affection to him, and to command our admiration of a character to which, in the whole range of secular and sacred history, we can scarcely find quidquam simile aut secundum, worthy to be placed by its side as a rival in Christian heroism..