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

by Willie James Jennings

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.