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.”
The book of Acts tells of two prison nights, and they go very differently. In the first, Peter is sleeping chained between two soldiers in Jerusalem. An angel comes, "a light shined in the prison," and "his chains fell off from his hands." He walks out before the guards know he has gone.
Philippi is the second prison, and nothing like that happens there. Paul and Silas have been dragged into the marketplace, stripped and beaten, and Luke says "they had laid many stripes upon them." Then they are thrust into the inner prison with their feet made fast in the stocks, and the jailer has orders "to keep them safely." No angel comes and no light shines. Instead Luke writes, "And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them."
Think of anyone who has spent a night on a hospital ward. By the small hours they know every sound the place makes: the buzzer, the trolley, the cough two beds down. If somebody began to sing quietly in the dark, the whole ward would listen. That is the scene Luke records. Down that corridor were men who knew every noise a prison makes after dark, and they had never heard this one. In the book of Job, Elihu speaks of "God my maker, who giveth songs in the night," and complains that nobody thinks to look for Him there. Then comes the earthquake. Every door opens and every prisoner's bands come loose, and yet the escape is the thing that does not happen. "Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here." The singing had made the prison a place where men were willing to stay.
So here is the blessing this passage gives. May you have a song at midnight that you did not have to make up that evening, because God is the One who gives songs in the night. May the people near you hear it. And may whoever holds the keys in your hard place be the first to ask, as the jailer did, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" Every part of that blessing happened once, to two men with their feet fast in the stocks, and the same God is listening at your midnight.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 142 is Go in Peace (Mark 5:34).