IT IS in Acts 3 and 4, where Peter and John invoke the powerful name of Jesus to heal a man who had been crippled from birth. This precipitates the first of many confrontations with the authorities. It frames a further explanation from Peter about the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection (4.5-22), and then a dramatic prayer (4.23-30) which results (4.31) in a fresh shaking of the house and the disciples being freshly filled with the spirit. This last passage then completes a circle from the start of chapter 2.
The house and its inhabitants are the focus of the divine drama — again, in implicit tension with the Temple itself. This theme holds these introductory scenes together. As regularly in the Gospels, here in chapter 3 we have a dramatic action, a challenge, an explanation, and a resulting controversy. In the Gospels, Jesus himself would explain, perhaps with a parable, what God was doing.
Here, in Acts, it’s the disciples who explain what Jesus was now doing, through the power of his name and his spirit. The Gospel story, remember, was about what Jesus had begun to do and to teach. Now we see what Jesus is continuing to do and to teach. That’s the explanation for what’s going on. So, at the start of chapter 3, verses 1-11, Peter and John perform a dramatic healing of the man who’d been lame from birth. He was well known, and now everybody heard what had happened. For Luke, the healing is important, but so, of course, is the explanation.
Once again, they tell the story. In Acts 3.12-16, we have a dense statement that draws together three things. First (verse 13), Jesus has been glorified by Israel’s God. This echoes Isaiah 52 and 53, where the Servant is “handed over”, but also “exalted”. Second, Jesus died in place of a murderer (verse 14). Third, of course, God raised him to life. And fourth (verse 16), what has made the crippled man whole again is faith in Jesus’s name.
Luke doesn’t here spell out the implicit Christology, nor does he spell out the implicit atonement theology, but it’s all there in the scriptural echoes, especially those from Isaiah, issuing once more in the summons to repent. Jesus is the “Prince of Life” (verse 15); that remarkable title sounds almost Johannine, suggesting that Jesus has life in himself, not just coming to life after his own death but being in charge, on God’s behalf, of all life in creation.
These tight-packed verses look like a condensation of a much fuller account of Jesus and his death. As in the Gospel story, the combination of Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and the historical account of Jesus dying in the place of the guilty, says it all. This, however, is not the main point that Luke wants to emphasise. He more or less assumes it, takes it for granted, and moves on.
PETER now sketches more fully where they are in God’s timetable (verses 20-1). He makes explicit, as the angel had done in Acts 1, the link between the ascension and Jesus’s return. He has been taken into heaven until it’s time for him to come back, at which point God will restore all things. But this means that the time has already arrived for the worldwide Abrahamic promises to become a reality, as Moses and the prophets had foretold (verse 25). The promises to Abraham were made in the immediate aftermath of the disaster of Babel. Now, with Babel apparently reversed in Pentecost, those promises are at last to be fulfilled.
In other words, the remarkable healing which has just happened points to Jesus as the personal fulfilment of scripture. Now, says Peter, you in turn must become scripture-fulfilling people, the true Israel that turns from sin and claims the covenant promise (25-6). These massive claims constituted a direct affront to the Temple and its hierarchy, the official guardians of the national life. The chief priests are horrified that the disciples are proclaiming that “the resurrection of the dead” has begun to happen in Jesus (4.2). Resurrection was already a revolutionary doctrine, which was why the aristocratic Sadducees opposed it: people who believed that kind of thing — well, there’s no knowing what they might do in pursuit of their cause. (The Sadducees were well used to thinking this about the Pharisees; now, they are faced with a whole new group talking about “resurrection”, and doing so in a whole new way.)
The idea, as in verse 2, that the general resurrection had begun with one person, in advance of all the rest, was an unprecedented modification in the doctrine. Orthodox Pharisaic belief was that all God’s people would be raised from the dead in the end. (This may be one reason why Jesus’s own unexpected resurrection caused Paul at least to conclude that Jesus was representing God’s people in person; that he really was God’s Messiah.)
In any case, the claim made by Peter and the others, that the person who had been raised from the dead was the Jesus who had been crucified as a messianic pretender — this was a total shock. And, out beyond the specifics, as far as the chief priests were concerned the Temple was the place where God had promised to dwell, and to act to rescue his people. Who were these people claiming that the promises had been fulfilled in such a different way?
So, they interrogate the disciples (Acts 4.5 onwards). “What power did you use? What name did you invoke?” This might have been, perhaps, the prelude to a potential charge, that the disciples were using some kind of dangerous magic. Peter replies (in 4.8-12), as by now we expect, that Jesus’s resurrection was God’s vindication of him as Messiah, and — a poke in the eye for the present Temple hierarchy — that he, Jesus, is the stone the builders rejected who is now the chief cornerstone. In other words, the disciples hadn’t just been using some random magic name. This was the fulfilment of the very traditions the chief priests were claiming to represent!
THERE follows in verses 13-18 the slightly comic scene in which the Temple-hierarchy try to insist that the disciples should not talk about Jesus any more. As if! Back comes the reply, opening a major theme in Acts: we must listen to God rather than to you (verses 19-20). The leaders go back to join the others and tell them what’s happened. This precipitates, in verses 23-31, one of the classic early Christian prayers. Solemnly invoking God the creator of all (verse 24), it moves into Psalm 2, a central source for early Christology. Psalm 2 begins, as they quote, with the nations raging and plotting.
Yes, say the disciples, Herod plus Pilate plus the Judaean leaders together represent the world’s rulers. It was the greatest empire, and the finest religion, the world had ever known, that together put Jesus on the cross. That is where they start.
But they’re not just using the first two verses of the psalm as a peg on which to hang their prayer. As often in the New Testament, when you have one line or verse of scripture being quoted, you should look at the larger context, which the writer or speaker may well be assuming.
In this case it seems that Psalm 2 is, as it were, continuing to be “heard” or imagined, just behind the spoken text. In the psalm, God laughs at the foolish world rulers, declaring that he has established his king on Zion — as we said before, rather like God laughing at the builders of Babel and then calling Abraham to begin the long journey of salvation. The prayer assumes that Jesus himself is the one now enthroned on Zion, named as God’s son, receiving from his father the nations as his inheritance.
The psalm then concludes (Psalm 2.10) by addressing the world’s rulers: “Now therefore, O kings, be wise” (my emphasis). The prayer in Acts 4 picks up that phrase “Now therefore” and turns it into a new prayer in verse 29: “So now, Master, look on their threats; and grant that we, your servants, may speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand for healing, so that signs and wonders may come about through the name of your holy child Jesus.”
That is the point at which, as at the start of chapter 2, the house is shaken, and the disciples are once again filled with the Spirit. Once more they become a small working model of what God will do with the whole creation. The narrative of chapters 2, 3, and 4 has come full circle. The Pentecost people are launched into a dangerous but exhilarating new world.
IF YOU don’t already know this prayer, get to know it. If you’re engaged in any work for God’s Kingdom, any ministry of evangelism, teaching, or pastoral wisdom, you’re going to need it. Get to know Psalm 2, standing behind this prayer as it stands behind a good deal of scripture, and learn how to enter into its spirit and apply it to new situations.
Many times in ministry you will be preparing a sermon or talk, or engaging in one of a thousand important tasks, and something gets in the way — sometimes simply distractions, innocuous in themselves but gently pulling you away from your focus; sometimes more sinister, perhaps a sudden dark temptation; or perhaps an intervention from outside, a phone call from a senior parishioner warning you not to preach about a particular topic.
Many times the Church is called to take a stand, and the local authorities — from a city councillor all the way up to the national political hierarchy — may send a clear warning that this is not wanted. This will happen more and more, especially in polarised political situations, or places where the Church is under threat from the authorities.
Sometimes, the warning may be wise and you may actually need it. The fact of somebody opposing you doesn’t automatically mean you’re in the right! But in all genuine Kingdom-work there will be moments when you find yourself confronted with one kind of challenge or another. At that point, I strongly recommend that you go back to Psalm 2 and Acts 4, and cling on for dear life to the great conclusion: “So now, Master, look on their threats; and grant that we, your servants, may speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand for healing, so that signs and wonders may come about through the name of your holy child Jesus.”
The end of Acts 4 echoes both the gathering of the Church to pray in Acts 1.13-14, and the short summary of the church’s life in 2.42-7. The witness to the risen life of Jesus (verse 33) was embodied in the radically new lifestyle of the disciples, living as family and sharing all they had.
As a result (verse 34), “there was no needy person among them” — which is a quotation from Deuteronomy 15.4, where Moses is predicting the blessing that will come upon the covenant people. That’s part of the point: what they were doing was not simply random acts of kindness, but the new lifestyle which constituted a fulfilment of torah itself.
All this is part of the build-up, with the opposition of the Temple-hierarchy going on at the same time, to the implicit conclusion that it is in Jesus’s followers that the traditions and hopes and life of ancient Israel, and the intertestamental Judaeans, were now being brought to fulfilment. They were themselves, of course, all Judaeans; there is no sense of replacing Israel with someone quite different. Luke is presenting the followers of Jesus as the people of the fulfilled covenant.
So where does this leave us, as followers of Jesus today? In the first four chapters of Acts, we have seen the establishment of the new Temple, the place where heaven and earth come together. The one God has come to his people in the person of the Son, in whose very body heaven and earth are joined.
This same one God has now come in the person of the Spirit (or, to put it another way, Jesus has now poured out his spirit, as in Acts 2.33), to dwell with and even in his people, renewing them as covenant members and enabling them to bear powerful witness. God’s filling of them with the Spirit points ahead to his final filling and renewal of all things. And all this happens because Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, is exalted to reign beside the father on the throne of the universe.
This is an edited extract from The Challenge of Acts by Tom Wright, published by SPCK at £13.99 (Church Times Bookshop £12.59); 978-0-281-09058-7.