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

by Willie James Jennings

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).