Canter Bridge

It is possible for an ancient text to narrate community well-being and miraculous healing in one breath.

It is not so easy for us. Whether we are liberated or hamstrung by our naturalistic convictions is an open question.

The remarkable fact of today’s text is not so much that a profound sharing of life and resources coexists with the healing of a temple mendicant. It is rather that these events are presented as matters of the public record.

Peter and John, with nothing else to give to the man who lies at the gates of the temple in his daily quest for alms, heal the man and make alms unnecessary. The incident is not so much unique as representative. By the time we reach that public spectacle, the text has already alerted us to the face that ‘fear’ was in each one of the Jerusalemite followers of Jesus because ‘many signs and wonders were happening through the apostles’.

There is a matter-of-fact quality about it all, if that is not too reductionistic a term. Even the mediating role of the apostles in the prose description of miraculous deeds works to counteract any heroic status that might be afforded them. What is more, the people—including the walking, leaping, formerly lame man in the temple—praise God for what has happened to him, not Peter and John.

This theocentric report may even be underscored by the summary statement about the reaction of onlookers. Their astonishment is registered in terms of what had happened to the lame man. Peter and John are nearly relegated to the status of bit players.

Perhaps this odd narrative approach is an outworking of the community’s health, for they gave what they had to those who had need. A kind of mutual appreciation appears to have pervaded their shared life, an oddity of communal existence that was not lost on the public.

The early Jesus movement in Jerusalem was emphatically a matter of public record. The assertion of what we call miracles would have been eminently refutable—indeed ridiculous—if nothing at all had occurred.

They would all too soon become known as a sect. For the moment, Jerusalem’s Jesus people lived in the public light. It could hardly be otherwise. A lame man leaping about in the temple is a difficult thing to hide.