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I always picture them singing a Wesley tune—"And Can It Be," let's say—but know that's impossible. So maybe they sang the hymn Paul taught the Philippians: Let your attitude be the same as that of Christ Jesus … who became in very nature a servant.

The point is, they're singing. And the gospel is doing its subversive, transforming work. Before the day's out (actually, this happens around midnight, so before it's barely begun), the jailer is on his knees, shaking from stem to stern, begging those two men, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"

Their answer is beautiful in its clarity and brevity: "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household."

Good News. The gospel. Just like I heard it, and embraced it, over 25 years ago.

I never want to make the gospel more complicated than that. I want to retain this gospel's deep simplicity for all time. Saved can never mean less than the forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life through faith in Christ.

But I wonder if God meant it to be more than this as well. The question that intrigues me is this: What did that jailer understand by the word saved? What did he want to convert to? What did he see in Paul and Silas that he himself lacked and now longed for?

Or, put another way, how big was the gospel he so desperately wanted to get in on?

Now it's possible that the jailer, like Nicodemus talking in the night with Jesus about rebirth, like the Samaritan woman at the well talking with Jesus about living water, is just confused. It's possible that his question and Paul's answer are miles apart—that all the jailer means is, "How do I get myself out of this mess?" and Paul seizes the moment to preach salvation.

It's possible, but I don't think so. I think the jailer has been listening and watching and calculating all night long. I think Paul and Silas embody something he is afraid to believe "because of joy and amazement" (). I think Paul and Silas are to him what all Christians are to be to the world: the fragrance of Christ.

Consider four things.

First, the jailer saw two men counting it all joy when they faced trials of many kinds, men praying and singing in the face of what would have left most men howling and cursing: bodily affliction and personal injustice. Paul and Silas, without due process, were stripped naked and "severely flogged" in public. The Romans had a special genius for this kind of thing (think the flogging scene in The Passion of the Christ). It was brutal torture joined to abject humiliation. The beating would scar or even maim them for life. Paul and Silas were summarily tossed in prison, locked in the inner cell, their feet put in stocks. Roman stocks were designed not just as extra security measures, but as implements of torture themselves.

How would I respond?, I wonder. How might you? Here's what they did: "About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them."

Listening indeed. Who among them had ever witnessed such peculiar people, singing and praying in the face of colossal personal disaster? Who had ever heard of a God who, seemingly absent from or indifferent to these men's suffering, nevertheless called forth from them such pure devotion?

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February 2008, Vol. 52, No. 2