Acts 20:19

Acts 20:19. Serving the Lord.... with many tears. Three times in this short report of Paul's farewell words at Miletus are ‘tears' referred to: tears of suffering and pain (Acts 20:19); tears of pastoral solicitude (Acts 20:31); tears of natural affection and friendship (Acts 20:37. See also 2 Timothy 1:4; 2 Corinthians 2:4; Philippians 3:18; and also Acts 21:13). The intense sympathy and love among the early Christians is most noteworthy. It was something strange and fresh in the old selfish world, and this sweet spirit which seemed after the crucifixion to have taken up its abode in the hearts of men and women, was no doubt one of the most powerful agents in the rapid spread of the new doctrines. The revelation that God could so care for men as to weep (John 11:33-35) for them, taught men the glorious beauty of mutual sympathy. Paul's intense sorrow for ‘souls that will not be redeemed' has been imitated and copied faithfully by many a noble heart in the long eventful story of Christianity.

Ages before, the sore need of this sympathy had been felt and dimly groped after, but never found, and therefore never imitated. See, for instance, in that moving scene which closes the Hippolytus of Euripides. In the midst of his extreme suffering, Hippolytus addresses Artemis (Diana) with

‘(Divine) Mistress, do you see me, how wretched I am?'

And the goddess answers,

‘I do; but it is wrong for these eyes of mine to shed a tear.' Hippolytus of Euripides, 1395, 1396, edit. Dindorf.

A God who could ‘weep with those that weep' was a sublime conception to which the old heathen world was never able to attain.

Lucretius, who lived some three-quarters of a century before the Christian era, coldly though very grandly expressed the same view of the disregard of the immortals for human woes and sufferings (see, for instance, De Rerum Natura, Book i. 57-62); while in Juvenal, who wrote after the Son of man had come and had begun to change the whole tone of thought even of the heathen world, we see, or perhaps rather feel, the dawn of the new day (see, for instance, Juvenal, Satire xv.).

Which befell me by the lying in wait of the Jews. There is no special mention of a plot against the life and liberty of the apostle during the Ephesian residence; their hostility is, however, alluded to in Acts 19:9. No doubt at Ephesus, as at Corinth, Thessalonica, Antioch in Pisidia, and Jerusalem, the same sleepless, relentless hostility on the part of a section of his countrymen marred and hindered his work.