Lowered in a basket
Paul escapes Damascus
Within days of his baptism, Saul is in the synagogues of Damascus doing what nobody expected — arguing that Jesus is the Son of God. The people who hear him are astonished. This is the man who came here to arrest these people. Now he is one of them. Saul the persecutor has become Saul the preacher, and he is apparently very good at it.
The city is not pleased. The Jews in Damascus plot to kill him. They are watching the city gates day and night — every gate, every exit — waiting for him to leave so they can take him.
The disciples have a plan.
In the ancient world, cities built along their walls. Houses were often constructed right into the fortifications, their back windows looking out over the outside of the city. One of these windows becomes Paul's exit.
At night, his new friends lower him down the outside of the city wall in a basket.
Paul — the trained Pharisee, the authorized agent of the Sanhedrin, the man who came to this city with letters and authority and chains — leaves it folded into a basket, dropped quietly over a wall in the dark by people who a week ago were his targets.
He arrives in Jerusalem a fugitive. Even the disciples there are afraid of him. They don't believe he is really a follower. It takes another act of courage — another ordinary person willing to vouch for someone dangerous — to get him through the door.
“But his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket.”
— Luke, Acts 9:25
“Through a window I was let down in a basket by the wall, and escaped his hands.”
Paul mentions the basket himself, decades later, in a letter to the Corinthians. He lists it among his sufferings — not his triumphs.
He had been a powerful man. Educated, credentialed, feared. And his first act as a follower of Jesus was to be smuggled out of a city in a laundry basket.
God seems to have a consistent interest in removing our dignity before he expands our influence. The basket came before the letters. The blindness came before the sight.
What is the basket in your story — the humiliating, unglamorous thing that comes right before the next chapter?