Let Down in a Basket

Midnight in Damascus. Guards are watching every gate. High on the city wall, a window creaks open. A large basket, with a man folded up inside it, is lowered slowly down into the dark on a rope.

Years after that night, Paul is writing to the church in Corinth. Some visiting teachers there have been showing off. They boast about their Jewish heritage, their speaking skills, their spiritual experiences, and they look down on Paul. Paul calls them, with a touch of irony, super-apostles. He hates boasting. He calls it talking like a fool. But the Corinthians seem impressed by it, so Paul decides to play along, just this once. If they want credentials, he'll give them credentials. Just not the kind they expect.

Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I'm talking like a madman now, Paul says, but I am more. And then he lists his record. Worked much harder. Been in prison more often. Beaten more times than he can count, often near death. Five times he received the synagogue punishment of thirty-nine lashes. Three times beaten with rods. Once stoned. “Thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep.” A whole night and day adrift on the open sea.

The list keeps going. Journeys again and again. Danger from rivers. Danger from robbers. Danger from his own people and from Gentiles. Danger in the city, in the wilderness, at sea, and from false friends. Hard work and weariness, many sleepless nights. Hungry and thirsty, often going without food, cold, without enough clothes. And on top of all that, every day, the pressure of caring for all the churches. “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” he asks. When anyone stumbles, I burn inside. Then Paul says the thing that turns boasting upside down. “If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern mine infirmities.” If I have to boast, I'll boast about how weak I am.

And for his final proof, Paul tells the oldest, most embarrassing story of all. Back at the very start, just after he met Jesus, he had been preaching in Damascus. The book of Acts tells us that people there plotted to kill him, and watched the city gates day and night. Paul adds that the governor under King Aretas had the city guarded to arrest him. So one night, his friends took him, put him in a basket, and lowered him through a window in the wall. “And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.” Not a heroic charge. A great apostle, curled up like groceries, escaping in the dark.

Roman readers would have caught a joke here. The Roman army gave a special award, the mural crown, to the first soldier to climb up and over an enemy's wall. The writer Aulus Gellius lists it among Rome's military honours. Paul's proudest wall story is the opposite: he was the first one down the wall, running away in a basket. Some scholars think he chose this story deliberately, to poke fun at boasting itself.

Let down in a basket. You'll find it in Second Corinthians chapter eleven, verses twenty-one to thirty-three, and in Acts chapter nine, verses twenty-three to twenty-five. A man who could have boasted of many things, but chose to boast of weakness, because his strength came from God. So here is a question to carry with you. What would it look like for you to stop trying to impress people, and trust God with your weak spots?