Dionysus on a Bike

Acts 28:1-10 – 6/5/2026

Healing is quite common in the New Testament. Healing is used by the New Testament writers to validate divine calling and as a testimony to the power of the Gospel message. If Jesus is to be salvation then the worst ills of human life, death and disease, must be cured. To suffer fever and dysentery, as Publius’ father did, is to be in need of a savior. Here salvation takes the form of shipwrecked Paul, self-proclaimed Apostle to the Gentiles. Paul cures the man’s dysentery and fever by “praying and putting hands on him.” Nowhere does the text say that this was a miracle.

How did Paul cure? On the surface, it says that Paul prayed and put his hands on the sick man; by that he was cured. This tells only that Paul was not the healer per se, only a conduit for God’s healing. But this only displaces the question. We know how Paul cures and in what way he is a healer. How does God cure through Paul? How God effects the cure is not disclosed; this is probably because the write of Acts does not know how God acted, only that God did act at the time of Paul’s prayers and touch.

In one sense, it is not important to know how God cured the man. What matters is that God did cure him and somehow used Paul’s presence to do it. The problem arises when we think of cures and other “acts of God” as miracles, something that happens outside the ordinary unfolding of time, nature, and history. It’s not as though Publius was going to die and did not simply because God intervened with some kind of magical break into the unfolding of becoming. This makes God out to be a trickster God who comes and goes at whim and makes God’s healers and messengers out to be magic peddlers, in favor when their tricks land and out of favor when the cures start to dry up.

Rather, I favor another picture of God’s interaction with history and the healing an Apostle like Paul performs. Instead of God magically changing the course of becoming, Paul’s presence entered into the chain of becoming altering it through touch, presence, and prayer. Paul is not God’s miracle worker. Paul is another part of nature, another causal link in the chain of becoming. Here Paul’s effects on that chain of becoming while on the island of Malta were effects of salvation and healing.

Today we understand cause and effect much better than we ever did before, so cures and healing seem less miraculous. Their being miraculous was never the point. The point is that being healed makes life better, and being called to follow Jesus means trying to bring that healing and salvation to others. It’s nothing magic. It’s not an interruption of the laws of nature. God calls us to interact with nature so our fellow human beings can know love, joy, and peace.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.