Canter Bridge

Our skeptical Zeitgeist makes it easy for us to recoil from awkward metaphysical talk.

We prefer to live our lives, without comment upon the Greater Wars that may surround us, within narrow and convenient parameters.

‘Live and let live’, we say.

‘This shop serves everybody.’

Don’t make us think about the reasons we travel with the herd, don’t make us reason, don’t make us decide hard things. The weather outside is frightening.

In a context where we allow ourselves to think only about safe things, overly dramatic billboards, bumper stickers, neighbors make us nervous. We sneer a little, we look away. We turn up the music.

We return to the herd, with its antiseptic, conventional, we-all-think-the-same-about-this-don’t-we? predictability. It almost feels enlightened. We feel enlightened.

How different the biblical witness, with its awkward angularities and its casual approach to potential embarrassment.

While the early Jesus movement was still figuring things out, their early communal commitments met a singular challenge.

But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles’ feet. But Peter said, ‘Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? (Acts 5:1–3 ESV)

Peter seems to exceed the speed limit on this one, to lurch into melodrama. Surely, poor Ananias had simply made some back-of-the-envelope calculations and concluded that a little white lie that advances the community while allowing a nest egg for Sapphira and the kids was not the worst thing doing down in Jerusalem this week.

Peter takes a different view, one that without embarrassment takes cosmic warfare into account.

Satan, per this audacious leader of the early Jesus movement, had invaded Ananias’ heart and planted his flag on that pulsing turf. Calculations that seem morally neutral represent, for the apostle, one of the earliest battlegrounds of the Christian era.

‘While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.’ When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it. (Acts 5:4–5 ESV)

We shiver, and we should, if our most basic deliberations have become a battleground.

If Peter is right—Ananias’ sudden death seems to increase the odds—then perhaps our most mundane management of life has become the area of larger battles. Of life, of death, of final loyalties.

It is not a bad thing to tremble before such matters.