Persecution, in the Acts of the Apostles, is never the end of the story. It is a doorway to the next city, the next hearing of the word. Driven from Pisidian Antioch, Paul and Barnabas simply moved on to Iconium, where they spoke so persuasively that a great number of both Jews and Greeks came to believe.
Opposition arose there too, but St. John Chrysostom observes that they had been attacked, not yet driven out — and so they stayed on “for a considerable period, speaking out boldly for the Lord, who confirmed the word about his grace.” Their boldness flowed from the certainty that the Gospel truly is the word of God’s grace, sustaining their preaching from within.
It is worth pausing on why people resist the Gospel at all. Beneath many of the intellectual objections raised against the Church lies something quieter: an unwillingness to let grace touch one’s life. It is not uncommon that once a person makes a sincere and complete confession, the supposed difficulties with the faith dissolve like smoke, because those difficulties were serving chiefly to conceal a moral struggle rather than a doctrinal one. Archbishop Fulton Sheen, soon to be beatified, spoke often from his own experience of exactly this pattern.
At Lystra, the story takes an unexpected turn. Paul heals a man crippled from birth, and the crowd declares the two missionaries gods, come down in human form. The scene deliberately echoes an earlier healing, in chapter 3, when Peter cured a man crippled from birth at the Temple gate.
St. Bede draws out the parallel: “Just as the lame man whom Peter and John cured at the door of the Temple figured the salvation of the Jews, so too this sick man figured the salvation of the Gentiles, who were for a long time remote from the religion of the Law and the Temple.”
Since Lystra lay in pagan territory, the healing there prefigures salvation extended to the nations, just as the Temple healing had prefigured salvation for Israel. Luke also notes that Paul had discerned this man’s faith beforehand — the physical healing follows upon a faith already awakened in the heart.
Yet the crowd errs immediately, turning worship toward the two men. St. John Chrysostom observes that just as the miracle dismantles idolatry at the front door, the devil tries to slip it back in through the back — this time aimed at Paul and Barnabas themselves.
The missionaries tear their garments in protest. Where Paul had earlier addressed a Jewish audience through salvation history, here he turns to the testimony of creation itself (natural theology): one Creator gives “rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.” Even without the Scriptures, creation outside us and conscience within us both speak of God, together with that deep-rooted human longing for lasting happiness. Chrysostom notes that Paul’s aim was not to increase the crowd’s guilt but to lead them back to the true source of every gift.
The crowd’s mood proved as unstable as it was enthusiastic. Jews arriving from Antioch and Iconium turn the same people who wanted to worship Paul into a mob that stones him and leaves him for dead outside the city — a sober reminder that faith resting on spectacle alone is fragile, and that real faith must engage both mind and will, not sign and wonder only.
Paul then gets up and walks back into the city. Coming after being stoned and given up for dead, this recovery is itself a kind of resurrection — a living illustration of what Paul would later hear from the Lord: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Paul and Barnabas then retraced their steps through Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch, strengthening the disciples and telling them plainly, “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” The Gospel was never presented as an easy road.
Notably, they returned to the very cities that had expelled them — not to preach publicly again, which might have stirred fresh unrest, but to minister quietly to the believers already there, so the faith already planted might take deeper root. Zeal, here, was matched by prudence.
In each community, they appointed presbyters, commending them to the Lord with prayer and fasting — ordained shepherds continuing the apostolic mission entrusted to them at Antioch.
At last they returned to Antioch, the community that had sent them, and reported all that God had done through them — not their own achievements. Luke tells us they stayed there “no small time” with the disciples. Even great apostles need rest and the support of the Christian community before the next mission begins.
St. Josemaría Escrivá frames the whole arc well: before any mission, there is prayer and atonement, and only then, action — and once underway, the disciple should expect nothing less than the Master’s own path: “Cross, toil, anguish — such will be your lot as long as you live. That was the way Christ went, and the disciple is not above his master.”