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Devotion by N.T. Wright
On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and he prolonged his speech until midnight. There were many lamps in the upper room where we were gathered. And a young man named Eutychus, sitting at the window, sank into a deep sleep as Paul talked still longer. And being overcome by sleep, he fell down from the third story and was taken up dead. But Paul went down and bent over him, and taking him in his arms, said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” And when Paul had gone up and had broken bread and eaten, he conversed with them a long while, until daybreak, and so departed. And they took the youth away alive, and were not a little comforted (Acts 20:7-12).
This is the touching story of Eutychus, his name, a common slave’s name, means ‘Lucky’, and on this occasion he was. This account both lightens the mood and gives us a telling insight into the life of the early church. In church there is always plenty to talk about, questions to address, biblical passages to puzzle over, and everything we know of Paul makes it extremely likely that, given half a chance, he would go on to midnight and beyond. (It is fascinating, as one of my teaching colleagues once observed, how an idea which presents itself to your mind as a complete, small, satisfying entity can take five or ten minutes, or even half an hour, to explain even to someone very intelligent who wants to understand it. The colleague in question was a mathematician.) And, given that Eutychus may have been working all day (it was a Sunday, but of course that was an ordinary working day, and the church would meet either very early in the morning or very late at night, or both), and that there were oil lamps burning in the room, it is hardly surprising that he nodded off and fell out of the window where he was sitting. A sudden apparent tragedy to cast a gloom over everything. But no: Paul, like Elijah (1 Kings 17:21), seized him and hugged him and found him alive. Then they celebrated the meal which speaks of the dying and rising of Jesus himself (Acts 20:11). The talking continued until it was time to go.
The book of Acts is a story of journeys. The great story moving across land and sea and bringing the hero safely through to his destination despite it all, catches up within it these sharply described moments of death and life, of worship, fellowship and celebration. Somehow the church is called in every generation to keep its eyes both on the larger horizon and on the immediate, practical, homely, personal and often pressing calls on our time, prayer and attention. The slave-boy in the window and the thousand-mile journey, are of equal significance.