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

by Willie James Jennings

goes, most modern commentaries are “no commentary

This irrevocability in Acts sometimes gets confused with immutability so that Acts gets interpreted as the historical foundation of the church’s life, as if Acts reveals the marble, stone, brick and mortar of ecclesial existence. Acts as architecture, in this sense, creates monument thinking about this narrative. Monument thinking turns the book of Acts into an ecclesial museum, the purpose of which is to show us the earlier forms of church life, religious ritual, or theology. That way of reading Acts has given into a colonialist procedure that places Acts inside the processes of knowledge acquisition and accumulation. The Book of Acts becomes an artifact. In this frame of reflection we turn to Acts in investigative analysis.

City life under Rome was city life permeated by the logic of slavery. In slaveholding society, one’s humanity was not a given. The body of a slave was a commodity and not a human being. Only by birth into the right family or by purchasing one’s freedom or by manumission could one claim a humanity, which was an elusive dream for many.

Diaspora means scattering and fragmentation, exile and loss. It means being displaced and in search of a place that could be made home. For Israel it means life among the Gentiles. Danger and threat surround diaspora life. Diaspora life is life crowded with self-questioning and questions for God concerning the anger, hatred, and violence visited upon a people. We must never confuse voluntary migration with diaspora, because diaspora is a geographic and social world not chosen and a psychic state inescapable. The peoples who inhabit diaspora live with animus and violence filling the air they breathe. They live always on the verge of being classified enemy, always in evaluation of their productivity to the empire, always having an acceptance on loan, ready to be taken away at the first sign of sedition. They live with fear as an ever present partner in their lives, the fear of being turned into a them, a dangerous other, those people among us. They also remember loss—of land and place, of life and hope, and even for some of faith. Yet diaspora is also power, the power of a conviction to survive and the power of a confession to never yield to the forces that would destroy them. Diaspora is life by any means necessary. The condition of diaspora is often bound up with life under empire.

The common is the condition of joined life where the haves and have-nots are bound together in clear sight of one another and in shared support. The common is the redistribution of life where the Spirit invites us to a sharing of space and place, resources and dreams. The common takes from empire its designs for building a world and from diaspora its plans for surviving in it. Instead the common joins, weaving together purpose and hope in the life of discipleship to Jesus.

Where the Spirit of God is, there is divine desire not simply for God but for one another and not simply for one another but for those to whom we are sent by the Spirit, to those already being drawn into communion with God and sensing the desire of God for the expansion of their lives into the lives of others. The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. Indeed the Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God.

The disciples ask the nationalist question: When will we rule our land, and become self-determining, and if need be impose our will on others?

Ray Anderson suggests, places on Judas the whole history of their betrayal.9 Peter and the other disciples are free, but Judas will carry the burden of collective guilt, the one and only betrayer of Jesus, the one and only failure in ministry.

The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays. Imagine peoples in many places, in many conquered sites, in many tongues all being told that their languages are secondary, tertiary, and inferior to the supreme languages of the enlightened peoples. Make way for Latin, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and English. These are the languages God speaks. These are the scholarly languages of the transcending intellect and the holy mind. Imagine centuries of submission and internalized hatred of mother tongues and in the quiet spaces of many villages, many homes, women, men, and children practicing these new enlightened languages not by choice but by force. Imagine peoples largely from this new Western world learning native languages not out of love, but as utility for domination. Imagine mastering native languages in order to master people, making oneself their master and making them slaves. Now imagine Christianity deeply implicated in all this, in many cases riding high on the winds of this linguistic imperialism, a different sounding wind. Christianity was ripe for this tragic collaboration with colonialism because it had learned before the colonial moment began to separate a language from a people. It had learned to value, cherish, and even love the language of Jewish people found in Scripture—but hate Jewish people.

The space of this common was where life stories, life projects, plans, and purposes were being intercepted by a new orientation. This common is created by the Spirit. How could the things they held dear not be drawn toward the common, this new gathering, this ekklēsia? Time, talent, and treasures, the trinity of possessions we know so well, would feel the pull of this holy vortex.

There will be no stoning in the community of Christ. Only the Holy Spirit may draw back the breath of life. A line has been drawn that the followers of Jesus may not cross over. We are the people of resurrection, not death.

For Saul, this is a righteous act. Killing in the name of God can be approved. But this approval is of the old order, not the new. Now its absurdity can be exposed. There were no doubt evil people in Israel worthy of death, but there was no one, without doubt, who was innocent enough to kill them. It is in this tension between the new order and the old that the old will assert its power in and among the faithful. Stephen has been seen as the first Christian martyr, but we must see more than a faithful witness unto death. We must also see the way faithful people can yield to the old order and kill if they believe they or God are threatened by a different witness. Stephen was executed, and his execution was approved. How often have Christians given their approval of executions, religious and political, but how often have we seen this as giving into the old order and resisting the Holy Spirit?

we must never resolve this tension with euphemistic slogans that summarize the suffering of disciples to varied and diverse burdens.

the text does not show us fully Saul’s logic of who is targeted and who is spared, only his single-minded focus.

The Spirit promises to guide the going if we but yield to divine desire. If God can sustain us against Saul, God will also do so against all enemies of body, soul, and mind.

Simon, there with Philip, is one who longs for power. The gospel draws such people who have not yet entered fully the space of redemption. They live in the space just outside redeemed space where their energy and time are caught up in chasing the crowd’s attention and seeking power. Simon mistakes God for power, and many who will come after him will make this same mistake. But this is an easy one to make because having some measure of control over people and being able to draw a crowd is the closest thing to being with God without God’s help.

Even if such a person stands with disciples, and even if such a person is in fact a believer and ready to be a disciple, they have not yet entered in, and the question they raise for us is whether they ever will? This is our history, one where people who lust for power and attention circle around the work of discipleship, of preaching and teaching and healing. Their longings for recognition and power interlace the miracles of divine showing.

Disciples of Jesus must be convinced not only of God’s love for the world but also God’s desire for people, especially peoples we have been taught not to desire. John Chrysostom says of this moment that it was meant as a twofold sign signifying the giving of the Spirit to these longed-for Samaritans and the not giving of the gift to give to Simon.9 Chrysostom is on to something crucial here because this giving requires not only bodies touching but bodies yielded, bodies given to God. In this moment of waiting, like the other (Acts 1), God will draw near and give lavishly in an intimate space created by bodies and created for bodies. God’s drawing and claiming of the beloved creation continues, reaching through the apostles and through Diaspora prophets, from Peter and John through Philip and now to the Samaritans. The Holy Spirit has come. Simon could have no part in this because he does not understand what he sees. All he saw was power, raw power in the hands of the apostles, which for Simon circulates like all currency. The exchange of money for this power makes sense in the space just outside of redeemed space where the intimacy of faith remains hidden by its obvious utility. There are people the world over who live and breathe and envision Christian faith only in its utility and only through exchange. Though they stand near its intimate space they are not in it. “Give me this power” (dote kamoi tēn exousian tautēn, v. 19). This is Simon’s specific request for this spec...

The rebuke is redemptive because through it Peter exposes to Simon his distance from God even while he stands in the divine presence, even as the Holy Spirit is being poured out again on all flesh. Simon is yet to be touched. So Simon is invited to enter the intimate space of waiting through repentance and prayer. It could be that only such rebukes can help those believers still captured in the optics of exchange and the currency of the crowd where money and recognition is just as valuable as the Holy Spirit. It was no small step for Simon to agree with the assessment of the apostles and ask them to pray for him. His response should give us hope that the new order can indeed break open the old order and cause those addicted to power to ask for help.

It was no small step for Simon to agree with the assessment of the apostles and ask them to pray for him. His response should give us hope that the new order can indeed break open the old orde...

Luke is laying out the cartographic vision of Jesus where witness will spread from Jerusalem, through all Judea, into Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (1:8). But he is also slowly exposing what that spreading will mean. There is an intensity building in this drama. God is overwhelming, and Philip will now experience what it means to fall into the hands of a desiring God.

A disciple of Jesus is someone who not only enters the story of another people, Israel, but also someone ready to enter the stories of those to whom she is sent by God. Christians have often failed to see difference as an invitation to change, transform, and expand our identities into the ways of life of other peoples. So our embrace of other cultures and ways of life have most often in our long history not pressed toward the depth and intensity of the divine embrace of their lives. We have therefore undermined their freedom in Christ to be themselves and yet more. Too often Christianity has bequeathed to many peoples a derogatory gaze of their own cultural ways and their own peoples and turned the life of faith toward being little more than cultivation projects aimed at western civilization, western styled development, education, and so forth.

The history of modern colonialism is inside this history of modern Christianity, and we cannot escape its legacies; but we can end its trajectories by asking ourselves, Who are the people nearest me that the Spirit is pressing me to get to know, come to appreciate, and ultimately join? Such a question presses us beyond the still common way of embracing different people, either through assimilation or segregated toleration. These options make impossible an evangelism that follows the movement of the Spirit. The Spirit convinces through love, reveals God’s life through our lives joined to others, and exposes the divine touch by how we touch with joy and pleasure the ways of life of others.

The revealing God yet remains hidden in revelation. This hiddenness is not because God hides, but because, as Karl Barth says, God controls God’s own self-revealing, we do not.18

God comes to you and to me, as only God can come to you and me, as God, our God. The coming is a calling, a drawing, an awakening of our life to its giver and lover. The others with Saul were in the presence of the speaking God, but God was not speaking to them.

Cornelius is an aspiration, but he is also an anomaly.

tragically, the church has too often turned prayer against hunger, imagining prayer as the antidote to hunger, as medicine to a bad condition. This is not so. Hunger needs prayer, but prayer needs hunger. Hunger sets the stage for prayer, and prayer sets the table for hunger. God works through prayer, but God works on the site of hunger. God glories in our hungers and speaks to us in the precisely ordained reality of it. Indeed nothing that God will now say to Peter makes sense unless we remember that the divine word came to a hungry creature. Prayer and hunger are the inner realities of a disciple of Jesus.

This word from God, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat” (v. 13) must be read first communally before it may be read consumptively. For us this word of God is a dangerous word because we are conditioned to read it inside an unrelenting chauvinism and the victory of capitalism that constantly turns the world of animals and peoples and the very earth itself into nothing but natural resources. We are the inheritors of histories that have imagined the entire world through scenes that mock this moment in Acts, imagining God to be actually saying to a man, “Look here on the unknown world and take all you want.” These are the histories most immediately of whiteness and white male supremacy. But this is not at all the direction of this text. Peter is not being asked to possess as much as he is being asked to enter in, become through eating a part of something that he did not imagine himself a part of before the eating. This new eating grows out of another invitation to eat, one offered by his savior and friend: “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19).

This moment schools us in divine transgression. God brings Peter to one outside of the covenant, transgressing God’s own established boundary and border. We must not weaken the radical implications of this epic meeting. This meeting has yet to gain its proper place in the historical consciousness of the church because the actions of God here are taken for granted. God’s actions here have been imagined by so many Christians through a mangled vision of providence that conceals the real God behind a strange universal god. That universal god in this line of thinking has always been poised to render Israel inconsequential and now was moving on past covenant with Israel and finally overcoming their religious ethnocentrism. The universal god was fulfilling a hidden wish to make Israel a doorstop put in place to grant the world access to salvation. This line of thinking imagines God’s life with Israel as simply a dress rehearsal for the real play. The universal god of this distorted providence had all of us, the Gentiles, the rest of the world in mind all along, even as Israel was turned inward toward its own struggles with covenant faithfulness. This sick providence falsely reads Israel’s history as their many failures to get beyond themselves and their petty religious or nationalist interests. That false history interprets God’s actions toward Israel as so many attempts to break out beyond them. It therefore ultimately suggests a clear division of operations: Boundaries and bord...

Before Peter will offer his truth he must listen. This is the key currency of the new order. This is the engine that will operationalize holy joining. Listening for the word of God in others who are not imagined with God, not imagined as involved with God, but whom God has sought out and is bringing near to the divine life and to our lives. Peter speaks, and now his earlier conclusion—that he should no longer call anyone unholy or unclean—joins an additional insight: God shows no partiality (prosōpolēmptēs, v. 34). God’s tastes are much wider than Peter had imagined until this moment. Peter is at the threshold of revelation. That revelation is not of God’s wider palette for people, but that Peter’s range of whom to love and desire must expand until it stretches beyond his own limits into God’s life. God is pressing Peter’s aesthetic toward death and resurrection—the dying and rising to new desires is now the call emerging for him.

Yet the greatest event of this story comes after the miracle of baptism. It is the beginning of life together, “Then they invited him to stay on for several days” (v. 49). The reading habits of the church tend to run past these slender words, but they capture divine design. This is what God wants, Jews with Gentiles, Gentiles wanting to be with Jews, and together they eat and live in peace. This is surely not the eschaton, not heaven on earth. It is simply a brief time before the chaos and questioning descend on Peter and the other disciples who will follow the Spirit, before the returning to the old regime, and before the lust for the normal returns. But in a quiet corner of the Roman Empire, in the home of a centurion, a rip in the fabric of space and time has occurred. All those who would worship Jesus may enter a new vision of intimate space and a new time that will open up endless new possibilities of life with others. Peter, however, must soon do a strange thing—he must give witness to the witnesses of Jesus and try to convince them that God transgresses.

Peter stands before his redeemed kin in utter vulnerability. He has no textual witness to fall back on, no prophetic utterances to conjure from the collective memory of his people.

The restoration of Israel will involve divine love for the Gentiles. After the silence God’s love has modulated into a new key, but the rhythm and song of Israel continues. The beat goes on.

The past, though important, is never the point for the life of faith. The point is the present moment with the living God who is with us, beckoning us to communion. The God who speaks to us now calls us into the risk of hearing a new word, a word that orients us toward the unanticipated and the unprecedented where the reconciling God is active. Peter found himself in the midst of such a word in Acts 11, where what God was doing in and through him among the Gentiles pressed him body and soul up against the word God had spoken to his own people, Israel. The key for us, seen in this moment for Peter, is to refuse the binary of naming the past word false and the present word true or the present word false and the past word true, and to discern through the Spirit the line of continuity between past and present. We may do this because such discernment is not a burden but is the joy we have in participation with the ongoing life of Jesus, who has claimed this space between past and present word as his own and invites us to join him in it. “You have heard that it was said, . . . but I say to you”—Jesus’ words—point to the present and intimate speaking of the living God made flesh and one with us in the challenging task of hearing God’s new words pressed against the old ones.

A church that knows not the particular needs of its time and place is a church that has not heard the Spirit speaking. The church is marked by the Spirit with an inescapable action and an irrefutable demand—we must do what we can to address the particular needs the Holy One confronts us with. So the Antioch church sends relief to the Judean church by the two most appropriate to speak for them, the two that spoke their difference into existence: Saul and Barnabas.

Here is a sign of human sinfulness—pleasure at the death of one’s enemies and satisfaction at the silencing of opposition.

Christians, like no one else, should understand how easy it is to return to prison, not because of human failing but because of failed systems that are calibrated against the powerless, the weak, and the poor and work best against insurgent voices pressing for systemic change.

Peter leaves for unknown reasons, but we often know the reasons that former inmates leave churches: they waited too long at the door hoping to come in.

This is always the first work of clarification, the separating of the messengers of God from the presence of God. The church born of Gentiles always needs this clarification. We too often confuse our presence with the presence of God. We have indeed been joined but from God’s side and not our own.

As Luke Timothy Johnson suggests, “the text of Scripture does not dictate how God should act. Rather, God’s actions dictate how we should understand the text of Scripture.”

The dominant way of imaging people together has been forms of cultural and social parallelism (peoples living parallel lives) that underwrite segregationist mentalities. Segregation is an ancient strategy for constructing a world, and we could categorize it in three forms that often enfold and inform each other. There is spatial segregation that creates distinct geographic spheres of life and activity that maintain and control populations and guide the flows of commerce. Spatial segregation easily works itself down into our collective subconscious and teaches us to see peoples as naturally and normally separated for their own good and according to their own desire for separation. Spatial segregation gets woven into the material reality of habitation in the design of buildings, streets, neighborhoods, and cities, and can help perpetuate inequalities, xenophobia, racism, and violence simply by how it has arranged our daily movements and activities. There is cultural segregation whereby people maintain subtle or obvious boundaries to their language, stories, practices, indigenous knowledge, or even history. They may live and interact with other peoples but they maintain a psychic distance and a clear and palpable sense of the other as outsider. Then there is desperate segregation characterized by its fragmentary and episodic character. Here people seek to separate for the sake of survival. They are inundated with the forces of assimilation that constantly seek to render their...

too many pastors and church leaders have made themselves the high priest of segregationist practices. They have settled for the love of their own people instead of a love that creates a people.

This woman seems to see herself in the disciples. They are slaves as she is a slave, her religious proclamation somehow matching their word. This, however, is a sick optic. The slaveries are not the same, yet they exist in the same world and can be and have been historically easily confused. One great danger for the disciples here is precisely such confusion. Repeatedly the church has confused its obedience with the obedience of those enslaved, imagining the ordered and organized life of a Christian or a community to be a similitude to a slave body or a slave plantation. There is great pleasure in imagining someone or some people doing exactly what we want, especially if we fantasize that what we want of them is also what God wants of them.

Disciples can become addicted to such praise and affirmation and indeed can reinforce the exploitation of the enslaved by keeping them close only for their use-value. The slave girl performs her captivity precisely in her religious speech, and disciples can get high on and become addicted to such talk. Disciples can ever turn the ministry of the gospel into the feverish activity of an addict. There is a deep connection between her god-talk and her fortune telling: both are inside the logic of exchange of spiritual power and material wealth. However, her agency in all this is quite complex, as agency is always complex. A demonic spirit is making use of her body just as her owners are making use of her. Indeed the demonic and economic are bound together here, and Paul touches their connection.

The point was not to silence her voice but to release it from its networked captivity.

Ownership and discipleship are never easily aligned. Luke has made this clear from early in the Acts narrative. Ownership aligned with discipleship is possible, but only under the conditions witnessed by Lydia and not the owners of this slave girl. It is possible only under the conditions of a life being drawn irrevocably by the Spirit into the new reality of intimacy and community. Only those willing to open their lives, their homes, and their possessions to use for the sake of the gospel can escape the seduction of ownership. Only those whose ownership tips the economic balance away from enslavement might inhabit a form of ownership that follows Jesus. The church has always struggled against the identity-constituting powers of ownership and has often been overcome by its seductions. We are yet to grasp fully the struggle of discipleship precisely at the site of ownership where the voice of the Spirit must be heard over against those voices that wish to weave together in us possession with social control, the concern for maintaining our things with the willingness to kill others to do it. These owners enact the same logic of violence that was pressed on the body of Jesus. They have the disciples stripped and beaten. Again disciples will wear their familiar clothing—humiliation and torture and chains—and in this way perform the body of the slave that is also the body of the prisoner and that is ultimately the body of Jesus.

The christological center of prayer is revealed at the site of suffering and rejection. There is an organic connection between Jesus praying in the garden before his torture and Paul and Silas praying in the prison after their torture. This is for the sake of Jesus and the humanity he saves. Worship in churches can be obfuscating and unintentionally quite misleading if we fail to remember this original format. Praying and singing join us to tortured and chained bodies, both past and present, and to the real pressure placed on disciples’ bodies as they look toward God. Praying and singing are acts of joining that weave our voices and words with the desperate of this world who cry out to God day and night. Each time we gather in the name of Jesus and lift our voices, this point of reference should shape our reverence and drive us to see and learn and know and change the situations of those who suffer especially in that holy name. Each time we pray and sing we are also joined to the shouts of joy and praise to a God who saves and delivers and invites us to take hold of divine power by faith.