Contrary to what Paul might have expected upon his return to the mother city Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement greeted his report of God’s work among the gentiles with jubilation and prudence. Capable of welcoming the complexity of a generous redemption that included the unwashed and impious in its broad embrace, they nonetheless advised Paul to take precautions against the arousal of zealous violence by Jerusalemite Jews of a less ecumenical spirit.
Arguably, such generosity of spirit and tactical posturing kept the Jesus movement intact as it was buffeted by the early crosswinds of ethnic complications. The reader is well advised to linger over it, to palpate the absence of rigidity that it implies, to sense the shrewd care of it all in the face of multiple threats to the movement’s integrity.
Yet providence also shows itself capable of a complexity that is both pleasing and baffling. As Paul’s visit lurches into a lynch scene, it is occupying gentile force itself that saves him from dismemberment at the hands of his ethnic brethren. The Romans hurry buckshot and strong arms to spirit Paul into a quiet refuge where he can be duly interrogated by a process somewhat more serene than the one the crowds outside would apply to him.
A man whose zeal was less tempered by wisdom might have objected to the ignominy of having his life saved by Romans, of owing his future to the kind of people whom he himself had to stoop to introduce to the God of Jacob’s anointed one.
The soldiers carried him through the sea of curses, we are told, ‘so great was the violence of the mob.’
Providence shows itself thick with unanticipated resources, layered with a multiplicity of unknowing allies.
Canter Bridge 
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