Be Wise as Chameleons

Visiting Philippi on his second missionary expedition, Paul starts a riot. When he casts a python demon out of a young female soothsayer, her owners charge that he subverts Roman customs. A mob drags Paul and Silas through the streets, and city officials order them to be beaten, tossed into prison, and locked up in stocks. In the middle of the night, while Paul and Silas sing, an earthquake cracks the prison open, which leads to the famed conversion of the Philippian jailer.

After the strange events of the night, the city magistrates are eager to send them off. Paul won’t go, and to gain leverage he reveals he’s a Roman citizen. It’s as shocking to readers of Acts as it is to the Philippians, who violated his rights by beating him without due process. The leaders squirm, then accede to Paul’s demand that they lead him out of the city, a symbolic apology as public as the flogging. Paul also pulls the citizenship card in Jerusalem, when, as the Roman soldiers stretch him out for enhanced interrogation, he asks, all innocence, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman and uncondemned?” (Acts 22:25).

Paul the Roman citizen is a Jew when he needs to be. He circumcises his half-Greek assistant Timothy to defuse Jewish objections. To prove he hasn’t abandoned Torah, he agrees to pay for the sacrifices for four men who are completing Nazirite vows. When a Jewish mob attacks him, he begins a speech with, “I am a Jew . . . zealous for God, just as you all are today” (22:3). He divides the Sanhedrin with a more specific identification: “I am a Pharisee, a son of Pharisees” (23:6). Among Stoics and Epicureans on Athens’s Mars Hill, he does a passable impersonation of a Greek philosopher.

Paul is a chameleon—now a Roman, now a Jew, now a Pharisee, now a Greek. He’s shifty not because he’s self-protective or afraid. Paul knows as well as anyone that chameleons make everybody mad. He keeps his wits when mobs scream, “Away with him!” (21:36). It takes great presence of mind to know which identity card to show when. His craftiness serves a single-minded, fanatical purpose. “To the Jews I became as a Jew,” Paul tells the Corinthians, “to those without Law, I became as one without Law” (1 Cor. 9:20–21). No matter what color he turns, he has a single aim: “I do all things for the sake of the gospel” (9:23).

Christians should absorb political lessons from the chameleon Paul. We’re not free, of course, to promote or endorse evil. We should support candidates and parties that honor and protect the Church; that serve the interests of citizens, especially the poorest and weakest; that battle sexual perversion and sexual fascism; that uphold law and preserve peace; and that punish evildoers and promote the good.

Within these constraints, we have a lot of room to maneuver. Our identification with political parties and candidates must always be secondary to our identification with Christ and his Church, always a tool of mission. For some, advancing the kingdom requires a strong connection with a political party; for others, a looser link; and for others, investment in a new party. There will be moments when shouting “I am a Republican” advances the gospel. At times, we may need to say “My grandfather was a Democrat” or “I am a native Georgian.” There are even times when the best way to advance the gospel is to keep our political views to ourselves.

Paul’s politics are as effective as they are wily. When he first arrives in Philippi, a woman named Lydia converts and begins hosting a group of believers in her house. Paul knows they’ll be vulnerable if the charges against him are allowed to stand. Paul reveals his Roman citizenship and demands an official recantation to buy time for the Church to settle as an outpost for the gospel and worship of the true God. Because of Paul’s cunning, the magistrates permit an “alien” community to take root within the city. This proud Roman colony, the leading city of the region, buckles before the demands of an unknown Jew from Tarsus.

Learn the politics of Paul, following the command of Jesus, who almost says: Be wise as chameleons, innocent as doves.