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    Acts for Everyone Part 2
    Acts for Everyone Part 2
    Acts for Everyone Part 2
    Ebook360 pages6 hours

    Acts for Everyone Part 2

    By Tom Wright

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    • Christianity

    • Roman Empire

    • Resurrection

    • Kingdom of God

    • Repentance

    • Chosen One

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Quest

    • Culture Clash

    • Mentor

    • Redemption

    • Political Intrigue

    • Journey

    • Divine Intervention

    • Sacrifice

    • Jewish Customs

    • Forgiveness of Sins

    • New World

    • Missionary Work

    • Religion

    About this ebook

    Writing in an accessible and anecdotal style, Tom Wright helps us to approach the rich and many-sided story of the book of Acts.

    Wright shows how the book builds on Luke's gospel, laying out the continuing work and teaching of the now risen and ascended Jesus in the power of the Spirit. His writing captures the vivid way in which Luke's work draws us all into the story, while leaving the ending open and challenging, inviting Christians today to pick up and carry on the story as we in turn live our lives in the service of Jesus.

    Tom Wright has undertaken a tremendous task to provide guides to all the books of the New Testament, and to furnish them with his own fresh translation of the entire text. Each short passage is followed by a highly readable discussion, with background information, useful interpretation and explanation, and thoughts as to how it can be relevant to our lives today.

    No knowledge of technical jargon is required. A glossary is included at the back of the book. The series is suitable for personal or group use. The format makes it appropriate also for daily study.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSPCK
    Release dateJan 18, 2008
    ISBN9780281062638
    Acts for Everyone Part 2
    Author

    Tom Wright

    Daitsu Tom Wright, who was born and raised in Wisconsin, has lived in Japan for over thirty years. He practiced and studied under Uchiyama Roshi from 1968 until the latter's death and was ordained as a priest in 1974. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he is currently a professor in the English Language and Culture Program at Ryukoku University in Kyoto. He was a teacher for the Kyoto Soto Zen Center until 1995, and since then he was been co-leading Zen groups with Rev. Doyu Takamine in Kyoto and Tamba. Rev. Wright has worked on the translation and editing of several works on Zen, as well as writing on Zen, the aftereffects of the Holocaust, and Japanese gardens.

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      Acts for Everyone Part 2 - Tom Wright

      ACTS 13.1–12

      Mission and Magic

      ¹In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Symeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen from the court of Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul. ²As they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the holy spirit said, ‘Set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ ³So they fasted and prayed; and then they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

      ⁴So off they went, sent out by the holy spirit, and arrived at Seleucia. From there they set sail to Cyprus, ⁵and when they arrived in Salamis they announced God’s word in the Jewish synagogues. John was with them as their assistant. ⁶They went through the whole of the island, all the way to Paphos. There they found a magician, a Jewish false prophet named Bar-Jesus. ⁷He was with the governor, Sergius Paulus, who was an intelligent man. He called Barnabas and Saul and asked to hear the word of God. ⁸The magician Elymas (that is the translation of his name) was opposing them, and doing his best to turn the governor away from the faith. ⁹But Saul, also named Paul, looked intently at him, filled with the holy spirit.

      ¹⁰‘You’re full of trickery and every kind of villainy!’ he said. ‘You’re a son of the devil! You’re an enemy of everything that’s upright! When are you going to stop twisting the paths that God has made straight? ¹¹Now see here: the Lord’s hand will be upon you, and you will be blind for a while; you won’t even be able to see the sun!’

      At once mist and darkness fell on him, and he went about looking for someone to lead him by the hand. ¹²When the governor saw what had happened, he believed, since he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.

      Acts 13.1ff

      Jim was full of enthusiasm when he left college. From his earliest memories he had been passionate about justice, about fairness, about people respecting one another and being able to live together in harmony. He had always admired the police (in England, this used to be quite easy) and had seen himself as a pillar of the community, helping society to get along, warning those who were messing about, and himself gaining respect all round.

      On his first day in the police station, an older officer came up to him.

      ‘Now then, young man,’ he said. ‘Let’s not have any of that grand ideal stuff round here. We don’t want anyone making a fuss where there’s no need. We’ll tell you who to go after and who to turn a blind eye to. If we all just blundered ahead with this crazy notion of justice, we’d never get anywhere! People are watching, you know. Think of your family, think of your pension. You’ll learn.’

      And Jim realized he had a choice. Compromise or confrontation. A safe passage to mediocrity, or a dangerous route to getting the job done.

      Many Christians in the Western world today simply can’t bear to think of confrontation (except, of course, with ‘those wicked fundamentalists’!). There really isn’t such a thing as serious wickedness, so they think, or if there is it’s confined to a small number of truly evil people, while everyone else just gets on and should be accepted and affirmed as they stand. Christian mission then consists of helping people to do a little bit better where they already are, rather than the radical transformation of life that, as we have seen, was happening all around the place in the early chapters of Acts. And so, when we come to this great turning-point in Luke’s story, the start of the extraordinary triple journey that would take Paul right across Turkey and Greece and back again, and then again once more, and finally off to Rome itself, we would much prefer the story to be one of gentle persuasion rather than confrontation. We would have liked it better if Paul had gone about telling people the simple message of Jesus and finding that many people were happy to accept it and live by it.

      But life is seldom that straightforward, and people who try to pretend it is often end up simply pulling the wool over their own eyes. It’s a murky world out there, and though the choice of compromise is always available in every profession (not least in the church), there is in fact no real choice. What’s the point in trying to swim with one foot on the bottom of the pool? You’re either up for the real thing or you might as well pack it all in. And Saul and Barnabas were up for the real thing.

      They had to be, after that send-off. Luke introduces ‘the church in Antioch’ with something of a flourish of trumpets; Antioch was on the way to becoming a second major centre of Christian faith after Jerusalem itself, and its leadership team was well known, with Barnabas and Saul among them. We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction. Whether they had been expecting something like this, we don’t know. But to be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow. (At the time of writing, I have just lost a close colleague who has been called to new ministry, and I am feeling the loss quite keenly.) But there are times, when you have been praying and waiting on God, when a new and unexpected word comes in such a way that you have no choice but to obey. And it’s just as well that this is how things happen, because when you then run into problems, and especially confrontation, it would be all too easy to think, ‘Oh no, we shouldn’t have come.’ But the answer, again and again, is, Yes, you should have come; and it is precisely because the gospel needs to make inroads into enemy territory that you need that constant support of fasting and prayer. (One might speculate and suggest that, since the holy spirit hadn’t mentioned John Mark, whom Barnabas and Saul took with them [as in verse 5], we shouldn’t be surprised that he got cold feet early on in the trip and went back home; but this may be stretching the point.)

      We are not told that the spirit specified Cyprus as their initial destination, though Luke omits many details and it’s quite possible that the direction was clear. In any case, Barnabas came from that island himself and it was a natural first port of call. There seem to have been Christian missionaries at work there already (see 11.19), but we should never imagine that a few quick visits and a few early converts meant that a whole town, still less an entire island, had been ‘evangelized’. There was still plenty to do, and Barnabas and Saul were not simply going to try to persuade one or two people. They were going to take the message to the heart of the Jewish community on the island, and then to the heart of its Gentile community. They sailed from Seleucia, the port of Antioch (Antioch, like Rome, sat a few miles up river from the sea), took the short crossing to Salamis, at the east end of Cyprus, and travelled along the main road round the south of the island until they came to the capital, Paphos, at the western end.

      Straight away they established a pattern which would be repeated in place after place. People have sometimes imagined that, because Paul styled himself ‘apostle to the Gentiles’, that meant he didn’t bother any more with his fellow Jews, but nothing could be further from the truth. In Romans 1.16 he describes the gospel as being ‘to the Jew first, and also, equally, for the Greek’ (‘Greek’ here means, basically, ‘non-Jewish’); and that describes, to a T, his practice as set out in Acts. Luke doesn’t tell us what they said in the synagogues in Salamis and elsewhere, because he is saving that for when they get to the Turkish mainland, and because he has something sharp and important to report. When Barnabas and Saul arrived in Paphos, they met two people in particular: the Roman governor, and a local magician.

      Both of these are important, as well as in themselves, for what they signify, for Luke and for us. We have already seen that Luke is very much aware of the larger Roman world for which he is writing, and though Roman officials in his book sometimes do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons he wants everyone to be aware that he will give credit where credit is due, and is not prejudiced, or eager to regard all officials, and especially all Romans, as automatically a danger to God’s world and God’s people. This is not unimportant for us to remember in our own world, where political polarization easily leads people into simplistic analyses and diagnoses of complex social problems, and to a readiness to dismiss out of hand all authorities and anyone in power, whether locally or globally. In this case, the fact that Sergius Paulus had heard about Barnabas and Saul indicates well enough the kind of impact they had been making in his territory. The fact that he wanted to give them a fair hearing – and ended up apparently believing their message – is a wonderful start for their work.

      But there is no advance for the gospel without opposition. Indeed, so clear is this truth that sometimes, paradoxically, it’s only when an apparent disaster threatens, or when the church is suddenly up against confrontation and has to pray its way through, that you can be quite sure you’re on the right track. On this occasion the gospel was invading territory which was under enemy occupation, and the enemy was determined to fight back. The enemy in question was the power of magic, which has already come up in Acts 8 and will recur in chapter 19. We who live in the curious split-level world, between modern scepticism on the one hand and the rampant culture of horoscopes and many other kinds of attempted raids on the supernatural on the other, would do well not to give a superior smile at this point. There are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in modern Western philosophies, and some of those things are very dangerous.

      The confrontation comes to a head as the Jewish false prophet Bar-Jesus, also known as Elymas (Luke says this is a ‘translation’, but it’s clear he really means ‘alternative name’), tries to persuade the governor not to listen to what the apostles are saying. But now it is the turn of Paul to do what Peter had done in chapter 8. Notice the ‘looking intently’ in verse 9, a feature we’ve observed before. Sometimes, in a context of prayer, it is possible to see right into someone’s heart, even if we would rather not. When that happens, the only thing to do is to take the risk and say what you see. And what Paul saw was ugly indeed, though not (alas) uncommon: a deep-rooted opposition to truth and goodness, a heart-level commitment to deceit and villainy and, as a result, an implacable opposition to the good news about Jesus. Paul reacts sharply, declaring God’s judgment on him in the form of temporary blindness (which he himself had suffered, of course, in chapter 9; did Paul hope that in Elymas’s case, as in his own, this would lead to repentance and to embracing the gospel?). The result is that the governor believed the gospel. Luke says that he was astonished at the ‘teaching of the Lord’; this clearly doesn’t just mean the theological content of what was being said, but the power which it conveyed.

      One obvious lesson from all this is that when a new work of God is going ahead, you can expect opposition, difficulty, problems and confrontation. That is normal. How God will help you through (and how long he will take about it!) is another matter. That he will, if we continue in prayer, faith and trust, is a given.

      One final note. Luke switches in this passage from the name ‘Saul’ to the name ‘Paul’, which he will now continue to use. ‘Saul’ was a Hebrew name, most famously used for the first Israelite king, whose noble and tragic story is told in 1 Samuel. Paul seems to be aware of this; he, like that king a thousand years earlier, was from the tribe of Benjamin, and on one occasion he quotes, in reference to himself, a passage about the choice of Saul as king (Romans 11.2, quoting 1 Samuel 12.22). Paul also mentions the king in Acts 13.21, in the speech we are about to hear. But the name ‘Saul’ didn’t play well in the wider non-Jewish world. Its Greek form, ‘Saulos’, was an adjective that described someone walking or behaving in an effeminate way: ‘mincing’ might be our closest equivalent. It was, to put it delicately, not a word that would help people to forget the messenger and concentrate on the message. So, like many Jews going out into the Greek world, Paul used a regular Greek name, whether because it was another name he had had all along, which is quite possible, or because it was close to his own real name, just as some immigrants change their names into something more recognizable in the new country. One thing was certain. Paul was serious about getting the message out to the wider world. When you even change your own name, you show that you really mean business, even if it will lead you into confrontation.

      ACTS 13.13–25

      Address in Antioch

      ¹³Paul and his companions set off from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia. John, however, left them and went back to Jerusalem. ¹⁴But they came through from Perga and arrived in Antioch of Pisidia, where they went into the synagogue on the sabbath day and sat down. ¹⁵After the reading of the law and the prophets, the ruler of the synagogue sent word to them.

      ‘My brothers,’ he said, ‘if you have any word of exhortation for the people, let us hear it.’

      ¹⁶So Paul stood up and motioned with his hand for attention.

      ‘Fellow Israelites,’ he said, ‘and the god-fearers among you: listen. ¹⁷The God of this people Israel chose our ancestors, and he raised the people up to greatness during their stay in the land of Egypt. Then he led them out from there with his hand lifted high, ¹⁸and for about forty years he put up with them in the desert. ¹⁹He drove out seven nations from the land of Canaan, and gave them the land as their inheritance ²⁰for about four hundred and fifty years. After that, he gave them judges, up until Samuel the prophet. ²¹After that, they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man from the tribe of Benjamin. He ruled for forty years, ²²and after God had removed him he raised up for them David as king. He is the one to whom God bore witness when he said, I have found David, son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will accomplish all my purpose.

      ²³‘From this man’s offspring, in accordance with his promise, God has produced a saviour for Israel: Jesus! ²⁴Before he appeared, John had announced a baptism of repentance for the whole people of Israel. ²⁵As John was finishing his course, he said, What do you suppose I am? I am not the one. But look: someone is coming after me, and I am not worthy to untie the sandals on his feet.’

      Acts 13.13–25

      I sat in the small meeting room, intrigued at what I was hearing. I had been invited to a presentation organized by local councillors and businessmen in a particular area. They had a project, and they wanted support for it. There was an old factory, covering several acres, which the owners had abandoned. Now the council, together with local interest groups, wanted to develop the site in quite a new way, to make it a tourist attraction, to bring in visitors and, they hoped, new income for a deprived area.

      But they didn’t start with the project. They began somewhere very different. They talked about the town, and about its history. They showed slides of how things used to be at the height of prosperity. They talked about the people who had grown up in the area, about how they had given their lives to working in the old factory, about the community spirit and the sense of place and history. They did everything, in fact, to demonstrate what a splendid community this had been, and should be ... and could be. Only then, when they had done everything to demonstrate what a rich culture and heritage the area had, did they start, very carefully, to talk about the new plan. They stressed its continuity with what had happened in the past. They showed how the new innovations would fit in. They knew perfectly well that what they had come up with was quite different from anything that had happened before, but they wanted us on board and knew that simply to slap the proposal on the table would invite instant rejection. As I write, the proposal is still under discussion.

      It’s good sense; and of course it’s what Paul does again and again, as he effortlessly now takes the lead where before it was Barnabas leading and him following. Perhaps, now that they are in Turkey, which was Paul’s home territory (Pisidian Antioch is about 200 miles west of Tarsus, and further inland), Paul feels himself more at ease. This is a typical diaspora synagogue; he knows how these people tick, the stories and songs they are familiar with, how to get the point across. We will see a few chapters from now that when he is faced with different audiences – most noticeably in Athens in Acts 17– he takes a very different line in order to achieve the same effect. But here he launches in to the history his audience knew and the hopes they already cherished.

      Paul had an easy platform to do this, because it was customary in synagogues to allow visitors to give a fresh word of exhortation, following the reading from the law and the prophets. Indeed, some have suggested that Paul and Barnabas (John Mark has already left by this stage, as we see in verse 13) wore clothes which signified their status as qualified Jewish teachers, rather like someone showing up in an academic gown or a clerical collar; but this may be far-fetched. The important point is that the instant fellowship of Jewish people around the world, and the ready acceptance of previously unknown visitors to public worship, provided a natural context for Paul to announce the good news, as he was committed to doing, ‘to the Jew first’. (He also mentions ‘god-fearers’; these were Gentiles who attended the synagogue, and worshipped the God of Israel, but who had not yet become proselytes and hence full members of the community.)

      His approach was obvious. Like Stephen in chapter 7, he tells the story of Israel, bringing out particular points. But whereas Stephen had concentrated on Abraham, Joseph and Moses, Paul makes his way swiftly through the early years to arrive at the monarchy of Saul and David. What he says about the early period, though, is enough to establish the fact that God’s method of operation is to choose his people, to prepare them, to lead them through one stage after another, and then, finally, to give them ‘the man after my own heart’ as king. In other words, perhaps the main point of verses 17–20 is to stress that God’s purposes normally take a while to unfold, to get to the place where the ultimate purpose can be revealed. Unlike some in our own day who see the Israelite monarchy merely as a dangerously ambiguous flirtation with the wrong sort of power, Paul is quite clear: this was God’s will, and God was delighted to have arrived at the choice of King David after such a long time.

      Now of course Paul would have been the first to agree that David, though he may have been ‘the man after God’s own heart’ (verse 22, quoting a combination of Psalm 89.20 and 1 Samuel 13.14), was also himself a man with deep and tragic faults and failings. Paul, indeed, cites David as a classic penitent, dependent on God’s grace for forgiveness (Romans 4.6–8). But the point is not that the story stopped at David, but that in working with Israel for several hundred years to produce the king who would establish the pattern of someone ruling over God’s people with justice and truth (that seems to be what ‘after God’s own heart’ is getting at), God was establishing a further pattern as well: the notion of waiting for the true king, the ultimate king, ‘great David’s greater son’.

      And so, as soon as he gets to David in his story, Paul moves on. In the next section of the address he will explain, in line with Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, how it is that things which David himself said or sang must be taken as referring, not to David himself, but to the descendant in whom they would be fulfilled. Here he simply declares, slicing through a thousand years of further waiting, that now at last God has produced for Israel the one who will rescue them. Notice, he says for Israel. Paul believes, of course, that what God has done in Jesus he has done for the whole world, but he makes it very clear, throughout this address, that the first stage is always to see Jesus in relation to Israel itself. He speaks, as one might to a synagogue audience, of ‘this people Israel’ (verse 17), and the whole point of the address is not that this is a model for how one might speak to just any audience, but that this is what has to be said to God’s people themselves. What God promised to our ancestors he has now fulfilled. The good news which bursts out of this for the Gentiles is exactly that: the good news that the creator God has fulfilled his covenant promises with Israel, promises which always envisaged blessing for the world. It is fatally easy for the church to tell the story of Jesus while simply ignoring the entire story of Israel. That is the way to produce a shallow, sub-biblical and ultimately dangerous theology.

      Notice, too, that Paul refers to Jesus, right off the top, as ‘saviour’ or ‘rescuer’. He hasn’t said what Israel needed rescuing from. Later on he will talk about ‘forgiveness of sins’, but every Jew in the first century knew that all was not well on several levels; that Israel, though God’s people, were not living in freedom, were not being much of a light to the nations, and were often finding it difficult to keep their own law, whether because of pressure from pagan society or laziness within the Jewish community. All was not well: when would God’s purposes finally come true, when would Israel be rescued from her continuing plight? That is the implied question, a corporate as well as an individual problem, to which Paul offers the solution of Jesus the Saviour. It is vital, of course, that Jesus is a descendant of David; this was well known in the early church, and Paul refers to it at the foundation of his ‘gospel’ statement in his greatest letter (Romans 1.3). Hidden in the long years of gestation, the promise of a coming Messiah contained, not just a message for Israel, but good news for the whole world, as Psalms like 2, 72 and 89 had always insisted. But the message had to come to Israel first.

      It is interesting to find John the Baptist playing such a prominent role in verses 24 and 25, corresponding of course to the place he has in all four gospels. It is as though one could hardly expect the Messiah to come unannounced, without Israel being prepared. And John, according to Paul here, was doing two things in particular. He was getting people to repent, to turn back from everything which would hinder them from joining in the new work of God’s kingdom. And he was pointing ahead to the one who was coming. Paul is setting up a system of signposts, from David a thousand years before to John a mere 15 or so years earlier. And all the signposts point to one person: Jesus the Messiah, the Rescuer. Paul’s strategy is a challenge to us all, to understand our audience well enough to know how to tell them the story in a way they will find compelling, how to set up signposts in a language they can read.

      ACTS 13.26–43

      The Messianic Challenge

      ²⁶‘My brothers and sisters,’ Paul continued, ‘children of Abraham’s family, and those here who fear God: it is to us that the word of this salvation has been sent! ²⁷The people who live in Jerusalem, and their rulers, didn’t recognize him, and they fulfilled the words of the prophets which are read to them every sabbath by condemning him. ²⁸Even though they found no reason to condemn him to death, they asked Pilate to have him killed. ²⁹When they had completed everything that had been written about him in prophecy, they took him down from the cross and put him in a tomb. ³⁰But God raised him from the dead, ³¹and he was seen for several days by those who had come with him from Galilee to Jerusalem. They are now his witnesses to the people.

      ³²‘We are here now to bring you the good news which was promised to our ancestors, ³³that God has fulfilled this promise to us, their children, by raising Jesus. This corresponds, indeed, to what is written in the second Psalm:

      ‘You are my son; this day I have begotten you.

      ³⁴‘That he raised him from the dead, never more to return to corruption, conforms to what was written:

      ‘I will give you the holy and faithful mercies of David.

      ³⁵‘Because, as it says in another place,

      ‘You will not hand over your holy one to see corruption.

      ³⁶‘Now David served his own generation, and in the purposes of God he fell asleep and was gathered to his fathers. He did experience corruption. ³⁷But the one God raised up did not experience corruption. ³⁸So let it be known to you, my brothers and sisters, that forgiveness of sins is announced through him, and that everything which could not be set right under the law of Moses ³⁹can now be set right for all who believe.

      ⁴⁰‘Beware, then, lest what the prophets foretold comes true of you:

      ⁴¹‘Look out, you scoffers – be amazed, and disappear!

          I am doing something in your days, a work which you wouldn’t believe

          Even if someone were to explain it to you.’

      ⁴²As Paul and Barnabas were leaving, they begged them to come back the next sabbath and tell them more about these things. ⁴³Many of the Jews and devout proselytes followed them once the synagogue was dismissed. They spoke to them some more, and urged them to remain in God’s grace.

      At the time I am writing this there is a massive global debate taking place. Led by senior figures in science and government, people everywhere are asking whether the world and its atmosphere are really warming up at the alarming rate that they seem to be doing, whether this is in fact caused by human agency as many people think and, if so – since the dangers from this warming are massive – what can be done about it.

      This is a hugely important debate, and it carries a note of urgency. If it is indeed true that global warming and its attendant dangers are being caused by things we are doing, particularly by how we run our industries, then we must act swiftly. If we do nothing, the moment will pass, and the dramatic changes to our world will happen, with loss of life and livelihood and huge risks for social and cultural stability, leading potentially to massive displacement of people, to food and water shortages, and to the violence and war that desperate people resort to when everything is at stake. Fortunately (in my view) the churches around the world seem now to be in the forefront of this movement, as is only right.

      There are no doubt many turns and twists, and not all the arguments advanced for the emerging consensus are as good as they should be. But few doubt that the situation is urgent and must be addressed at once. This is something strange and new in the Western world, where the prevailing philosophy most of us have imbibed is that we’ve more or less got everything right with our modern democracy, our business, commerce and industry, and that, if we just have more of the same and remain calm and sensible, a bright future is assured for us, our children and our world. The message is, This May Not Be the Case, and we need to do something about it urgently.

      That is the kind of urgency which Paul now injects into his address. This isn’t simply a history lesson with a new ending. It is a history lesson which is rapidly turning into a warning: something new is happening under your very noses, and unless you join in you will miss out! God is doing a new thing, the new thing which he had long planned and promised. When that happens, it isn’t just something you might think about in long winter evenings and discuss over a drink with your friends, like the question of which is the best rock group in the last 30 years, or what to do about crime, or why the price of beetroot has dropped. This is more like someone rushing into a hotel bar and shouting that the river is rising, there are just a few boats left, and if you don’t want to swim for it you’d better get on board right now.

      Because the resurrection of Jesus, which is the main subject of this second half of Paul’s address, has introduced a new note of urgency into everything. Jesus is risen, so new creation has begun. Jesus is risen, so God has at last fulfilled his promises to

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