Canter Bridge

Jerusalem must have throbbed with the potentialities of conflict as the city fathers struggled to cope with the relatively unlettered but highly motivated followers of yet another dead messianic pretender.

Put simply and in words easily understandable to those tasked with administering the status quo, these men could not be stopped.

It was not so much that they were assertively dismissive of the authorities. One senses that they were not.

Rather they were so convinced that YHWH had restored the crucified Jesus to life and was even now pulling off similarly unconventional stunts like making a man who hadn’t walked for decades stroll around the city’s streets like you or I would do. The crowds are stirred in the direction of sympathy and enthusiasm. The text has even the religious and civic authorities recognizing that no one can plausibly deny the miracle.

No doubt the only tool left that might turn the crank back towards normalcy was intimidation. One imagines men entrusted with public peace and civic decorum holding their breaths to see whether it might work but already doubting that it would:

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them:

‘Rulers and elders of the people! If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was healed, then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. He is “the stone you builders rejected, which has become the capstone.” Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.’

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. But since they could see the man who had been healed standing there with them, there was nothing they could say. So they ordered them to withdraw from the Sanhedrin and then conferred together. ‘What are we going to do with these men?’ they asked. ‘Everybody living in Jerusalem knows they have done an outstanding miracle, and we cannot deny it. But to stop this thing from spreading any further among the people, we must warn these men to speak no longer to anyone in this name.’

Indeed, no plan could work. These men were too infused with conviction about what they had seen and experienced. That certainty issued in extraordinary courage and a kind of immunity against being stared down by eyes accustomed to feigning ultimacy:

Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, ‘Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.’

After further threats they let them go. They could not decide how to punish them, because all the people were praising God for what had happened. For the man who was miraculously healed was over forty years old.

It is possible to conjecture as an explanation for such self-prejudicial audacity a kind of group hysteria. They really believed that the God of Israel had raised their Galilean prophet to life and begun to infuse the potency of that same resurrection into smaller but quite present broken vessels. So they went and lost their lives on the confused thrill of it all.

For this reader, the text has too strong a ring of truth to resort to such conjecture.

YHWH was afoot. So, quite literally, was a man whose feet had dangled uselessly for as long as he could remember.

So were conspiracies simply to shut the whole thing down.

So were growing groups of people who on other grounds were undisposed to get caught up in such a new thing.

So was Peter, the unlettered, who now found himself capable of standing and delivering with uncommon courage.

Peter has an explanation for it all and says so. There aren’t many others.