Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 142 · May 22
Heard at Midnight
“And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them.”
In 1738 Charles Wesley wrote a hymn whose best known verse is set in a jail cell. Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night. Then the light, and the line everybody remembers: my chains fell off, my heart was free. The picture behind it is Peter in Acts 12, where an angel comes, a light shined in the prison, and his chains fell off from his hands.
Philippi is the other prison and nothing of the kind happens there. Paul and Silas have been stripped in the marketplace, beaten with many stripes, pushed into the inner prison, and put in the stocks by a jailer under orders to keep them safely. No angel arrives. And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them.
Luke could have stopped at sang praises. He records the audience instead. Somewhere down that corridor are men who know every noise a prison makes after dark and have never heard that one. Job asks about a God who giveth songs in the night and says nobody thinks to look for him there. Then the earthquake, every door open, every band loosed, and the escape is the thing that fails to happen. Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here. The singing had made a room men were willing to stay in.
Something to sing at midnight that you did not have to compose that evening. Thin walls where you are. And whoever is keeping you there asking, first of anybody, what he must do to be saved. That is the blessing on this passage, and every part of it happened once to two men with their feet fast in the stocks.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 142 is Go in Peace (Mark 5:34).