Canter Bridge

If God were to act within the small parameters of ordinary people, what evidence would be left in the wake of his visit?

Peter has done the unthinkable, crossing lines of demarcation that had been conceived, established, refined, and maintained with impeccable care and unspeakable cost. That he should do so is all the more unthinkable for his own dedication to divisions that he and his people considered the opposite of arbitrary. The delineation of two virtual races of humanity—Jew and gentile—was hardly regarded as a national choice. It reflected, rather, the path of the Creator’s scalpel.

The dietary laws were to die for not for nutritional or even mere religious reasons. They were, rather, the most concrete and universal of ways—for who does not eat, and that every day?—of observing what God has done.

In this light, the agility of Peter’s turn is stunning. One wonders by what transforming insight—for it would have required no less than that—Peter moves from the costly and resolute stewardship of God’s redemptive footpath to embracing the entrance of God’s non-people into the family.

How does a man of Peter’s self-evident convictions move from ‘Never, Lord! For I have never eaten anything impure or unclean!’ to messing about in a centurion’s living room with uncircumcised pagans who wouldn’t have known a holy thing from unholy if it hit them over the head.

From within the narrative trajectory of the book of Acts, one finds the evidence that Peter has judged compelling in the presence of God himself. This experiential hinge deserves to be considered carefully.

A full-blown trinitarian theology would resist conception for another three centuries. There was no well-defined complexity of the deity available to Peter for the sorting out of circumstances that must have seemed as though they’d rushed upon him with soul-consuming force. Yet Peter did participate in the centuries-long expectation that in the in final stage of his labors over humankind, the Lord would pour out his spirit on humanity. The bizarre events of Pentecost—only those fortunate enough to understand that God’s character makes even chaos coherent could see order and hope in them—had initiated the early, Jewish church’s opinion that those ‘last days’ had now begun. Yet Peter and others appear not to have lingered over the more universalistic notions that cling to Israel’s restoration in a minority of the sacred texts. The fall of God’s spirit upon non-Jews seems to have taken him entirely by surprise.

Yet what he observes in Cornelius’ home is clearly the same generous exuberance—not for nothing is ‘to pour out’ an operative term here—that had fallen upon Jewish pilgrims during the Feast of Pentecost.

Peter follows the evidence. His understanding of God’s purpose does not so much alter as it does widen. The crucial question now becomes a different one: ‘How can any man resist what God has so obviously given?’

Once the link has been established between the evidence of ecstasy and the enduring promise of Peter’s sacred texts, he is prepared to step out of the way of divine intervention.

So if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?

The logic will seem rare to those with no story line to undergird their reading of biblical texts. It will appear naive to those who rule out a priori the notion of divine intervention. It will frighten those whose faith reduces to the maintenance of orthodoxy.

It will cause one, sometimes, to wonder whether this spirit makes rounds somewhere even now.