Homily 687 – Blind Man
Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church, Ames, Iowa
May 17, 2026
Epistle:  (38) – Acts 16:16-34
Gospel:  (34) – John 9:1-38

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Christ is risen!

Let’s spend a moment considering the Epistle reading from the Acts of the Apostles.  Paul and Silas were in Philippi in Macedonia.  This is probably 20 years after the resurrection of Christ.  Philippi is in the northeast of modern Greece, sandwiched between the Adriatic Sea and the Bulgarian Border.  It’s about 80 miles from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and about 75 miles from Thessaloniki.  It was, for St. Paul, the first foray into Europe with the Gospel.

With Paul and Silas were also others – including Luke, who wrote the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.  What we find in the narritave that St. Luke offers to us is a rather sudden shift in language.  Before the Council of Jerusalem, everything was “they” – they went, they did, they encountered.  But after the council, after St. Paul was sent to the Gentiles, suddenly it is now “we” did something.  St. Luke includes himself.  Suddenly, St. Luke isn’t just recounting what he was told.  He was an eyewitness.

They encounter this woman, who was a slave, and a fortune teller.  Her masters made money by charging for her services.  Something interesting happens when Paul and Silas encounter her.  Luke reports she had some sort of spirit within her, which he calls a spirit of divinization.  In fact, the Greek is much more specific.  πνεῦμα Πύθωνα (pneuma Pythōna).

This was from Greek mythology.  The oracle at Delphi was well-known in the area.  The guardian of Delphi was a serpent or dragon called Python.  Now, I’m not wanting to go too awfully deep here, but if you read the mythology, Delphi was the “center of the creation.”  Python’s mother was Gaia, which meant earth.  Apollo killed the creature, and assumed protection of the Oracle.

So, the people of the day would see this woman encountered by St. Paul and St. Silas to be a way to access the ancient Oracle, and at the center of the Oracle was the dominance of the earth itself.  This wasn’t just an ordinary case of visioning.  This was the preeminent visioner of the entire history of creation.

It’s notable that St. Luke, the physician, doesn’t use the word demon here.  He very well could have – and it didn’t really end up mattering, since St. Paul and St. Silus treated the spirit the same way.  Perhaps Luke was too scientific to blame demons for everything.  We don’t know.

In any case, the woman was following St. Paul and St. Silas around.  She kept crying out to any who would hear that “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to us (meaning mortals, those in the flesh) a way of salvation.”

So, this woman was proclaiming what is absolutely true.  This is in fact who St. Paul and St. Silas were.  This was their proclamation.  This irritated St. Paul to no end.  “Greatly annoyed” the text says.  St. Paul didn’t see this as validation.  He didn’t claim it.  He didn’t say “Look, even your own spiritual ones know who we are.”  It annoyed Him.

St. Paul commanded the spirit of the Oracle, the spirit of Pythona, to come out of her, in the Name of Jesus Christ.  We should note here a couple of things:  one, that the spirit was speaking Truth, but St. Paul saw that the credit for that truth, in the minds of those around him, was going to the Oracle and not to the Most High God.  He couldn’t abide that.

That is the definition of blasphemy.  Blasphemy doesn’t have to be false.  It is simply crediting God’s being to something other than God – in this case, the Oracle stone and by extension, the creaton.  Definitely not God.

The woman was freed.  Her masters, I’m speculating here, but perhaps they were priests from the temple of Delphi, and took offerings that people made in that temple, suddenly were without income, as the woman lost her ability to foretell the future.

There is so much for us to take from just this part of the story.  First and foremost, that all spirits are obedient to Christ.  Even invoking the name of Christ is sufficient.  And they leave.

We don’t always notice the spirits that possess us.  This spirit spoke truth.  This spirit was accurate.  There was no way to know that the spirit was using this woman as a puppet, a ventriliquist’s dummy as it were.

Finally, it is important that we always treat creation, earth, appropriately.  This spirit misused creation.  People were inclined to, as the hymn of Paschaltide tells us, worship the creature not the Creator.  That is idolatry.  Even though true.

Demons and spirits can and do lie to us – but they can often deceive us even while speaking the truth.  We always look at any information we have, anything we observe, anything we encounter, not to tell us about creation, but to tell us about God.  This is the way we treat everything – anything – we encounter.  Even the forces of evil arrayed against us tell us about God.

And if we make it about us – well, that is blasphemy.  We want to make it about us – we want to know how to rid ourselves of these spirits that bother us.  The answer is simple.  Maintain your focus on God.  The forces of evil win when they distract us from God and cause us to consider the impact on us, on our being, on our spirit.

That’s when they win.  When we focus on ourselves, the impact to us, and not on God.  Our gaze drifts away from our target, our Lord, our Love.  God no longer consumes us.

Genesis 1 and 2 is not about creation.  It is always about God.  Everything reveals God to us.  Genesis reveals God’s motives in creating the cosmos and humanity.  It reveals that we are the expression of God’s love.  The outpouring of God Himself was and is and will be the creation, with humanity its crown.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God. Christ is risen!