Acts 25:13-27

13 A few days later King Agrippa and Bernice arrived at Caesarea to pay their respects to Festus. 14 Since they were spending many days there, Festus discussed Paul’s case with the king. He said: “There is a man here whom Felix left as a prisoner. 15 When I went to Jerusalem, the chief priests and the elders of the Jews brought charges against him and asked that he be condemned.
16 “I told them that it is not the Roman custom to hand over anyone before they have faced their accusers and have had an opportunity to defend themselves against the charges. 17 When they came here with me, I did not delay the case, but convened the court the next day and ordered the man to be brought in. 18 When his accusers got up to speak, they did not charge him with any of the crimes I had expected. 19 Instead, they had some points of dispute with him about their own religion and about a dead man named Jesus who Paul claimed was alive. 20 I was at a loss how to investigate such matters; so I asked if he would be willing to go to Jerusalem and stand trial there on these charges. 21 But when Paul made his appeal to be held over for the Emperor’s decision, I ordered him held until I could send him to Caesar.”

22 Then Agrippa said to Festus, “I would like to hear this man myself.”

He replied, “Tomorrow you will hear him.”

Paul Before Agrippa
23 The next day Agrippa and Bernice came with great pomp and entered the audience room with the high-ranking military officers and the prominent men of the city. At the command of Festus, Paul was brought in. 24 Festus said: “King Agrippa, and all who are present with us, you see this man! The whole Jewish community has petitioned me about him in Jerusalem and here in Caesarea, shouting that he ought not to live any longer. 25 I found he had done nothing deserving of death, but because he made his appeal to the Emperor I decided to send him to Rome. 26 But I have nothing definite to write to His Majesty about him. Therefore I have brought him before all of you, and especially before you, King Agrippa, so that as a result of this investigation I may have something to write. 27 For I think it is unreasonable to send a prisoner on to Rome without specifying the charges against him.”



Dig Deeper
I recently had the opportunity to watch an episode of a rather old television sitcom that I had enjoyed quite a bit as a child. The show was called “The Facts of Life” and was a pretty big hit in the 1980’s. It was a comedy about four friends that lived at a posh boarding school and followed them on their adventures through the school and it even ran so long that they eventually all graduated from high school and the show continued to follow them through college and into adulthood. At the time, the ladies who starred in the show were fairly big stars and easily recognizable anytime they made appearances on other television shows, on awards shows, in magazines, and so on. The last year or two of the show a new character named “George,” who was a handyman who became friends with the four girls joined the cast. A few years later that same actor joined the extremely popular “Roseanne” show next to the wildly famous stars of that show as a side character named “Booker.” At the time, hardly anyone noticed this actor as he was a minor character in both shows and was seemingly a very unimportant actor.

That was then, though. Since then that actor, a guy by the name of “George Clooney” has become one of the famous, most influential, and most recognizable actors in the world. His career has far surpassed those that were once big stars on those television shows and most of those folks have since slipped off into obscurity. Now when those shows are rerun, the big selling point on commercials is that it “stars” George Clooney. I’m sure that if someone would have told the stars of those shows that this would be the case in the future, they would have been rather offended and not believed it. The passage of time, however, can do strange things like that.

An ironic shift of importance like that of the career of Georgy Clooney pales in comparison to the one that we have here. Paul was not considered highly in the first century. At best, he was a first-class nuisance, and at worst he was a crazy, blasphemous, trouble-maker. He was a rag-tag itinerant babbler who was quickly becoming a career prisoner. Yet he somehow kept finding himself in the presence of the high, the mighty, and the most powerful people of his day. In just this ongoing affair involving his arrest in the Temple, Paul has been dragged before the High Priest, the Governor Felix, the Governor Festus, and now he will come before King Agrippa and Bernice, who were something of superstars in their day. Soon he will be sent on to Caesar himself. All Paul had to him was this silly message about a resurrected Messiah that he kept rambling on about.

That was then, though. The high and mighty of Paul’s day would be shocked and scandalized, in fact, to find out that things have changed around completely. No one thinks of Paul as being so lucky to have come into the presence of so many great and mighty people. Most people now only know of Agrippa, Festus, and the others because of their brief encounters with Paul. “How lucky,” we think, “that they were actually in the presence of Paul.” That’s how dramatically time has changed things but we will miss some of the power of this scene if we don’t keep in mind that Paul was not the star in these encounters at the time. He was the no-name. Time and again, the Spirit had moved so that Paul would have chance after chance to proclaim the gospel to the most powerful and influential people of his time.

Agrippa, or Herod Agrippa II, was born Marcus Julius Agrippa and was the great-grandson of Herod the Great. He was a rising star in the Roman empire and was the Rome-appointed ruler over Judea at this time. He grew up in Claudius’ court in Rome and was so favored by the Emperor Claudius that he wanted to make Agrippa King when he was just 17. He was talked out of this due to his youth and inexperience, but Agrippa was eventually appointed King by Nero. Bernice was actually his sister. She was something of a socialite and scandal magnet in the first century. In between a number of high profile marriages and affairs, including Titus (who was the son of Vespasian and brother of Domitian and who would later become the Emperor of Rome), there were persistent rumors that Agrippa and Bernice were embroiled in an ongoing incestuous relationship and that her marriages were merely fronts to quell those rumors. But make no mistake they were superstars in the ancient world and when they showed up to establish a relationship with the new Roman Governor of the region, there was quite a splash that would have been made that would have stood in stark contrast to the prisoner Paul who was brought before them in what was quite likely his prison rags.

Having Agrippa in town was quite beneficial to Festus who really wasn’t quite sure what to make of Paul and perhaps this would be an opportunity to not only get some help from Agrippa but also forge a bond between the two men. Festus’ reasoning that he laid before Agrippa was that there were no specific charges against Paul and it wasn’t wise or right to send him to Caesar with nothing to charge him with. Throughout his explanation, though, it is clear that Festus was attempting to make himself look as good as possible, massaging the truth at every opportunity, including claiming that he would not hand Paul over with out facing his accusers when the truth was not quite so noble as Luke has already made clear that his motivations had much more to do with keeping favor with the Jews than some sense of justice.

What is truly fascinating in this scene is to see Paul from the perspective of the Romans. He was not the highly revered apostle and man of incredible depth and wisdom that Christians spanning from the first century to the twenty-first would view him as. Nor was he the incredibly dangerous blasphemer, spewing out lies that could be damaging to thousands and who must be stopped before he became too influential and powerful, as the Jews viewed him. He wasn’t even a dangerous rebel leader that needed to be dealt with by Rome. From the Roman viewpoint he was little more than a Jew of some sort who was claiming that some man named Jesus was still alive. That is all. Festus really couldn’t figure out why this man would be at the center of such a storm of controversy. He seemed harmless enough to him.

Two important historical points jump out at us here that should not be missed. The first has to do with the insignificance that Jesus had in Roman eyes. Today, many critics of the Bible argue that if the Jesus of the biblical accounts really existed then there should be much more written and known about him in non-biblical sources. Although there actually is an impressive amount of non-biblical material on Jesus, relatively speaking by first-century standards (there are equal number of non-biblical sources about Jesus and Tiberius Caesar, who was Caesar at the time of Jesus’ death, within a 150 years of their lifetimes). The Romans didn’t write about Jesus because those who didn’t come to faith Christ saw it as foolishness and nothing worth writing about. That doesn’t lessen the impact of Jesus, it simply explains the Roman malaise towards him and early Christianity. It wasn’t until Christianity began to really turn the world upside down and become a threat to Rome, at least in their eyes, that Rome truly took full notice of the Christians.

The second important historical note is that the resurrection that Paul was preaching was a physical one. Jesus was really alive was his claim. This was no mere spiritual vision or some type of spiritual resurrection as some today claim. Jesus walked out of the grave in full bodily form and Paul was preaching that those who entrusted their lives to Christ would do the same one day.

Festus didn’t know what to do with Paul because he was looking at him from a human point of view, just as Paul had once looked at Jesus (2 Cor. 5:17). No one in the room that day would have looked at the less-than-impressive Paul and the super couple, Agrippa and Bernice, and surmised that they would one day be known to history almost exclusively because their lives had crossed paths with this strange little man that was proclaiming that some Jewish would-be Messiah had resurrected from the dead and because of that the new creation of the one true God was available to anyone who would enter into his family. It was just one more way that the gospel was turning the world upside down and it serves as a reminder for us to be careful how we view the things of the world. We can so easily become far too impressed with the things of the world but as the old hymn, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” says “the things of this world will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”


Devotional Thought
Are there any things in the world with which you can get impressed and see from the world’s perspective rather than God’s? I’m sure that Paul was tempted to fee intimidated and small but he continued, in faith, to see things from God’s perspective. That’s why he was able to turn the world upside down and it’s the same thing that will enable us to do so.