Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible)

by Willie James Jennings

These travelers returned home to Antioch after a journey filled with pain and joy and most importantly filled with the presence of a God of indefatigable love. There in Antioch they tell their story with its new chapters, and it is a story that confirms the truth of Antioch: We are church together, Jew and Gentile.

The goal must be communion and joining. The church in many instances and in many places is yet caught in the moment of objectification of others—the other-in-theory. We have normalized this privileged position and failed to see it for what it is—a step in the right direction that yet lacks the full humanity that must be realized in Christ.

We are the inheritors of the legacy of segregation that has powerfully and successfully reduced the way we imagine church life. We have settled for what was gestured at in Acts 15, a form of segregation that allowed Gentile believers to go their own way and for Jewish believers to leave them alone (Acts 15:29).

Segregation, then, is not simply a political or ethical problem. It undermines our doctrine of creation, and it

constantly robs us of sensing together the full reality of our creatureliness and the embrace of God our creator.

Life in cultural, economic, and social silos, performed in multiple parallel lines, is the inner logic of too many communities, and such configurations accepted by Christians confront the church with its deepest sin: it denies the power of the living Spirit.

There is an inescapable vulnerability that shapes the lives of disciples, and it cannot be borne alone. Companions are needed and friendship is required, the kind that carries the same realities of covenantal loyalty to the God of Israel and faithfulness to the gospel. This is companionship and friendship in a different key, a different, more intense register. It carries the emotional density of life in the Spirit.

If the apostles had named him the “son of encouragement,” then Luke’s narrative names him risk-taker, because Barnabas seemed to always make heavy wager on people.

The mission, however, should in truth be read through the prism of Timothy’s body. The mulatto body is always the individual body and the social body at the same time. It is simultaneously the body of hope and the body of fear, the body of revulsion and the body of desire.

What every people find most unsettling is a body formed between two peoples, their people and that of another people, especially an enemy. That body already suggests betrayal and undisciplined desire and maybe even loss, the death of identity and story. Who are you? What a strange question. Yet this is the thorn-infested question that many interracial children have pressed back on them as though they can answer a question that only a people can answer. Such a question is and will always be an unfair burden for any one person whose mother and

father flow from different and sometimes antagonistic streams of culture, la...

Disciples can ever turn the ministry of the gospel into the feverish activity of an addict. There

Ministry in the name of Jesus Christ releases people to speak, especially poor women, by challenging the voices of their own oppression that constantly wish to speak through them.

“These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews” (v. 20). One sentence, this sentence, captures history. Contained in it we find Gentile hatred and Jewish diaspora fear.

We must never glorify argument as the engine that moves the thinking of a community forward. Such a way of thinking reflects a profoundly chivalric and masculine vision of progress where truth wins out through combat and violence, and in the end power begets more power.

All religious speech, no matter how carefully stated, no matter how ecumenical and affirming, no matter how polite, shatters at the resurrected body of Jesus. Because to speak of the resurrection of Jesus is no longer religious speech, but speech that challenges reality, reorients how we see earth and sky, water and dirt, land and animals, and even our own bodies.

Yet the questions are crucial. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” (v. 2) “Into what then were you baptized?” (v. 3)

These questions expose not simply gaps in their discipleship but lack of clarity of its telos, its end, goal, and fulfillment.

The danger is to press into technique imagining its tight execution as the key to loosening death’s agents’ stranglehold on life.

Confronting those powers that oppose God often means confronting those seeking to protect their wealth. Paul had been in this kind of situation before, where his actions directly challenge the cultural economy and financial arrangements of a city.

If you want people to hate deeply, hate down to the bone, then suggest that someone or something threatens their financial stability and their theological beliefs.

Paul is showing us that God has drawn that risk into the divine life so that the risk and dangers that may confront

us in life will not define our life.

Indeed Paul here articulates his life redefined by the pain...

True stability is being grounded in the grace of God. That grace is the compass we need for living where past, present, and future

revolve around the divine life and those who have come away with God.

Churches continue to struggle with seeing the crucial difference between a stability rooted in the old ways (of family, nation, o...

We often long for homogeneity, which is the desire for a sameness that helps us cope with a diversity that we cannot anticipate or control. That longing leads to the futile performance of authenticity masquerading as commitment to God but in actuality only plays to a watching crowd.

Our weakness and vulnerability is on full display once we enter our mode of crowd. This is chaos, and the empire knows how to handle chaos: with the chaos of military force. The

Jesus encourages Paul. This is what Jesus does. He encourages us in the midst of struggle and especially at what seems like the beginning of an intensification of suffering.

At this moment, the state will do for Paul what it would not do for Jesus, deliver him from the hand of death. The irony does not escape Luke as he narrates an impossible situation for Paul.

What would it mean to educate people inside this hope? What would it mean to immerse, that is, to baptize intellectual ability, verbal dexterity, and eloquence inside the body of Jesus, inside his death and resurrection and his sending of the Spirit, so that our words, no matter of what we speak, arch toward hope and give witness to resurrection?

Luke is showing us the formation of an opinion about the gospel that always flows through empire: it is foolishness.

This is the way assimilation works. It fits us to survive and thrive in a world not of our own choosing or making. And in return it would conceal and if possible destroy our people’s histories by drowning them in a wider narrative of national or cultural existence.

If the gospel is rightly proclaimed, then it will always challenge assimilation by reminding us that we live inside a Jewish story that cannot be assimilated but burns away all that would cover its truth: Christ Jesus is the giver of life, and your life is now inside his story.

Faith can go bad, as the history of Christianity has shown us when God’s people enter into a shared blindness that turns love of God and zeal for the divine into intense hatred and a willingness to kill.

Paul has not now nor has he ever trusted the judicial process. His trust is in God.

How do you think, sleep, dream, eat, and live when your life hangs suspended in a legal process that moves painfully slowly and is governed by a judicial system not concerned with the truth?

the church has too often chosen Roman-like assimilation instead of Pentecost-formed joining.

So while some work for the welfare of the empire, we work in empires for the welfare of God’s creation.

We should never pit experience against revelation, the soul against the Spirit.

Paul is a bridge to scandalous hope.

He proposes to transition the hope of Israel from its unseen God and messianic expectation to its God found in the resurrected Messiah Jesus.

The purpose of God is what calls us out of violence and into its opposite—the offering of life and that eternal. Only a purpose bound to the giving of life is strong enough to weaken the temptation to take life.

As we noted earlier with Felix and Drusilla (25:13–27), assimilation turns the familiar into the strange and renders the story of a people null and void under the pressure of imperial domination.

The journey of faith, if it is one that follows the Spirit, will be one that draws us toward people who out of economic necessity live close to danger and on the edge of physical harm.

isolation and solitary confinement have never been about danger. They are about control and punishment woven in vengeance. We must resist the structures of vengeance that lay at the heart of our prisons that already enact the death penalty by starving women and men of human contact and slowly strangle their life force.

the question for the church is not whether we will eat but when and where we will offer food and under what conditions will we invite those fear laden and troubled to eat.

This part of Luke’s narrative echoes hauntingly through history to the tragic case of the slave ship Zong. At the close of the year 1781, a slave ship traveling from Africa to Black River in Jamaica was lost at sea and running low on water. The crew of that ship, hoping to survive by cutting their losses, threw overboard 132 Africans, who were soon to be slaves.

Even at its close, with Paul on center stage, this is not first his story, but the story of another. It is the story of an urgently longing God who has bound the divine life to the frailty of flesh.