Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible

By Willie James Jennings

In this new commentary for the Belief series, award-winning author and theologian Willie James Jennings explores the relevance of the book of Acts for the struggles of today. While some see Acts as the story of the founding of the Christian church, Jennings argues that it is so much more, depicting revolutionlife in the disrupting presence of the Spirit of God. According to Jennings, Acts is like Genesis, revealing a God who is moving over the land, "putting into place a holy repetition that speaks of the willingness of God to invade our every day and our every moment." He reminds us that Acts took place in a time of Empire, when the people were caught between diaspora Israel and the Empire of Rome. The spirit of God intervened, offering new life to both. Jennings shows that Acts teaches how people of faith can yield to the Spirit to overcome the divisions of our present world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: May 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781611648058

Willie James Jennings

Willie James Jennings (PhD, Duke University) is associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.

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1:1–4:37

The Revolution Is Here!

1:1–12

The Death of Nationalist Fantasy

The Book of Acts . . . [is] . . . a call to Christians to be open to the action of the Spirit, not only leading them to confront values and practices in society that may need to be subverted, but perhaps even leading them to subvert or question practices and values within the Church itself.¹

1:1–4

The revolution has begun. The disciples of Jesus have seen its beginning. It is a beginning without an end in sight. Part two of Luke’s Gospel, known to us as the Acts of the Apostles, narrates stunning newness. The newness begins with Jesus. Not an idea, not a principle, not even a memory, but an impossible reality, flesh and blood on the other side of death standing in front of the disciples, alive and well. No one survives death. Their words spoken in life, eloquent or clumsy, powerful or weak, meet their end in death, silenced by its power and remembered only by fragile memory and tentative technologies, ancient or modern. Flesh and word are separated by death, until now, until Jesus. His word spoken before his suffering, spoken during his suffering and betrayal, is now the same word he speaks. He watches over his word to perform it. This performance is of the Holy Spirit. Divine instruction comes only by the Holy Spirit, and Jesus will continue his lessons for life for his disciples through the Spirit.

This is a different reality of instruction, one born of the Spirit and the resurrected Word. This form of instruction flows over and through the disciples flooding their senses with the divine urging. This new reality of instruction intensifies God’s guidance of Israel, pressing them to follow where the Son of God leads. God speaks, and Israel must follow; this has been the order from the beginning. Luke gestures in the old order but clearly intends the new. As of old, the prophetic word is being spoken, but this is a new reality of the prophetic. Luke invokes the very reality that he renders historiographically. He writes history, but he is inside the history he writes, and he offers us a picture of Jesus who is alive, reading what Luke wrote, watching over its reading, and ready to speak through its words, his words. There is always danger in reading Luke’s narrative. It sounds like the old way, history done correctly. But his is history that threatens history: that is, it threatens a vision of the past that is reachable only through the imaginations of the storytellers. Luke gives us history that stands in what Michel de Certeau calls history’s rupture between a past that is its object, and a present that is the place of its practice.² This is not history writing trapped in that rupture and caught in what the philosopher Gotthold Lessing called history’s ugly ditch. This is history writing that will not be drawn into the illusion that it is speaking for the dead and in so doing bringing someone back to life. This is history that shatters both hagiography and historiography and then lays their shards across the bodies of witnesses and the body of a living witness.³

Luke cannot do otherwise, because he is witness to the One who rose from the dead, Jesus, Mary’s Son. Jesus speaks of the reign of God, a reign that has begun in his body. The faith that is being born at this moment is a faith of the body, of this life, of this time and this place. Jesus is present, here, now. Jesus inaugurates a new way of speaking about God and about life. This is truly the God of the living, the God who overcomes death. Theological speech that does not carry this tenor, this rich flavor, is not theological speech birthed in newness but is religious discourse yet bound to death. God, who overcomes suffering and death, presents Godself. Jesus gives himself (paristemi) to be viewed, touched, and even handled over many days. This giving of himself continues what began with the Mary’s touch of her child; through the crowds that pressed in to grasp hold of his healing body; to the brutal hands of a Roman military committed to practices of torture; to this moment when disciples, confused, fearful, unclear of the future, needed to hear the words of Jesus: here and now touch me (Luke 24:38–40). Jesus always presents himself to be touched.

The disciples are being introduced to the revolutionary way. Faith will not be rooted in a phantasm. Whether they believe or not, Jesus is alive. Present to be touched, in league with all the senses. Surely the resurrection of Jesus is closer to the erotic than the evidentiary. He is not a slab of living meat stretched out across a medical examiners table or a judge’s bench, waiting eagerly to be held up as proof in front of a skeptical world. Luke does speak of convincing proof (tekmēriois), but this moment of summation should not be used to turn us away from the sheer thankfulness of the surprise. The friends who held him before his anguish and their anguish, before his abandonment and their guilt, who wished to see him one more time, hold him once more, maybe even now to say I am sorry, maybe now to hold him again, see him again, hear him again. This moment is more than proof; it is forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace. The body of Jesus is not simply evidence, it is much more. Love bound in bodies can now continue through death: touch can be eternal. Jesus presents to his disciples a way through the fear of death by simply touching him. It will be the way of his disciples. Disciples must touch and be touched. Could it be that the church weakens its grasp of the resurrection precisely in its timidity to present itself to be touched by the world? Even at this moment, the church is yet plagued by a fear of touch, shaped in worship services where people sit or stand side by side, hermetically sealed in their private piety. Some ecclesial quarters harbor a profound disdain for touching as nothing more than modern sentimentality and a sign of weakness of mind and will.

Touch, of course, is clothed in discourse and performed through the logics of cultures, adding complication to its execution. Touch means different things to different people. And touch for many has been the occasion of violence and suffering, exploitation and pain. For others touch has been lost to a distorted sexual imagination and made only a precursor to intercourse. But now God invites touch, announcing a new order of things, a new possibility of knowledge and even truth discovered through hands touching a sanctified body. Handling Jesus, as the disciples will soon come to understand, will happen as they put their hands on those whom he chooses to embrace. Jesus took bread and wine into his hands just as he took the disciples into his life. Now both will re-present his life and invite grasping. These are not replacements for Jesus. He yet gives himself to be held, and he asks of his disciples to do the same.

1:5–12

He will seal this new order, this revolution over death and the power of violence through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the promise of the Father to the Son and those joined to him. Indeed Acts narrates the journey of the Spirit even more deeply into the way of Jesus and the journey of Jesus more deeply into the way of the Spirit. The Spirit, companion with Jesus and his disciples, will soon spread the body of Jesus over space and time opening his life as a new home for the faith of Israel. So this new Israel, an Israel staring at Jesus, staring at life after death, is commanded by Jesus to wait in Jerusalem.

Geography matters. Place matters to God. From a specific place the disciples will move forward into the world. To go from place to place is to go from people to people and to go from an old identity to a new one. Jesus prepares them for the journey of their lives by holding them in a place where the Spirit will be given to them in that place, and from that place they will be changed. But first Luke shows us signs of the old, the old identity of the disciples: After the command of Jesus, the disciples ask the crucial question: Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel? (1:6a). This is an understandable question, yet it is still an astonishing and tragic question. It is understandable because Jesus is now, without doubt, the One with power over death; the One who has overcome violence; and the One with all power in his hands. The greatest weapon that any people might use is violence. No people have ever resisted the tempter’s snare to make use of violence in order to have their way in the world and to secure their future.

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? All this would, of course, be for the good of the world, they suppose. A resurrected Jesus cannot stop such a request from being made, nor could he thwart nationalist desire. Nationalist desire has tempted Israel from the beginning and in fact tempts all peoples. The nationalism suggested here is not a historical nationalism bound to the anatomy of Israel, but the deeply human desire of every people to control their destiny and shape the world into their hoped-for eternal image. Nationalist desire easily creates a fantasy of resurrection and the fantasy of resurrection appeals to peoples, calling forth a triumphal vision of a nation that rises from death and is filled with conquerors and the powerful. Jesus, however, is not a sign of resurrection. He is its Lord. Resurrection will not define him. He will define resurrection’s meaning and resurrection’s purpose. It will not be used by these disciples as an ideological tool for statecraft. Nor will it constitute them the winner’s circle. Such ways of thinking resurrection turn Jesus into the greatest victor in an eternal competition and produces disciples who follow Jesus only because they worship power.

Nationalist fantasy has seeped into faith both Jewish and Christian and finds its ways into other faiths as well. Such fantasy dreams are completely understandable and quite compelling because they help us cope with the vulnerability that is creaturely life, and they reflect the power of accumulated wounds. The greater the number of wounds inflicted on a people, the greater the fantasy dreams of being self-determined and wielding power over others, and power to control our own destiny. It drives the creation of walled communities, border patrols, and checkpoints and turns violence and segregation into the proper exercise of the state’s right to life.

Jesus does have power and the reign of Israel will be restored, but not as the disciples anticipated it. The power of God will be released on them through the Holy Spirit, and the life of Jesus will be inseparably bound to their lives. They will become, in ways more complex than they could ever have imagined, his witnesses. Witness here carries two fundamental connotations for these disciples. They carry the real history of life with Jesus. They are now in the position of the master storytellers. Like elders of the village who remember well the old ones and the old ways, so too the disciples will soon speak of when they walked with Jesus, drawing from fragile memories the fragments of sights, sounds, and the words of the man from Galilee. They will be an irrefutable presence. They will also be witnesses of divine presence. They will give room to the witness, making their lives a stage on which the resurrected Jesus will appear and claim each creature as his own, as a site of love and desire. This second sense of witness reaches into the first sense. Although there will only be a few who knew him according to the flesh (kata sarka, 2 Cor. 5:16), countless more will follow these disciples in rightly claiming to be an irrefutable presence of an experience with Jesus even as they give space through their lives for Jesus himself to speak to others.

Witness in this twofold sense is already in conflict with nationalist desire, and against the fantasy of any people for global influence or world domination. The disciples will be formed by the Spirit as witnesses. They will be turned out to the world not as representatives of empires but those who will announce a revolution, the revolution of the intimate, God calling to the world. They will enter new places to become new people by joining themselves to those in Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. As Jesus announces this divine desire, he ascends. The ascension of Jesus continues to play so small a role in ecclesial imagination precisely because we struggle to think spatially. As Vine Deloria Jr. suggested, one of Christianity’s historical weaknesses is that it knows how to read the world temporally but not spatially.⁴

We more easily imagine the time of Jesus Christ, the time in which he wishes to announce his reign, and the time between his ascension and his return, than we do the space of Jesus Christ, the spaces he wishes to inhabit and to enter in. If the ascended Lord embraces our time as his time to be made known, then he also seeks to walk in the places of this world to announce his life as the life given for the world. It is true that the ascension of Jesus certainly marks the new time of his reign and the time of the Spirit. In this time what will be constituted is the moment of gathering that will become the church. Yet as Jan Milič Lochman noted, Jesus’ journey to heaven becomes the disciples’ journey to the ends of the earth.⁵ Jesus ascends not only to establish presence through absence, but he also draws his body into the real journeys of his disciples into the world. He goes to heaven for us, ahead of us. He goes with and ahead of his disciples into the real places of this world. He is Lord of time (past, present, and future) yet walking in our time, and he is Lord of space (here and there) yet taking our spaces and places with utmost seriousness.

His ascension marks less his power and more his scope. He will reign over the whole cosmos and yet he rises to raise us into heaven, as John Calvin said, and to overcome the distances between us and God and between one another.⁶ Jesus’ ascension is in fact God claiming our space as the sites for visitation, announcing God’s desire to come to us. God’s desire will be seen in the pouring out of the Spirit in a specific place in order to enter specific places and specific lives. He ascends for our sake, not to turn away from us but to more intensely focus in on us.

As he ascends, the disciples watch, and here the danger of watching becomes clear. Jesus is no action figure, no superhero to be consumed in spectacle. Watching Jesus and watching for Jesus was and is a significant temptation for his disciples. Such watching can easily undermine movement and easily undermine the priority of the journey. Luke presents to us two men in white robes standing by the disciples, just as they did at the tomb of Jesus (Luke 24:4–5). These men echo a similar question to the one asked in the Luke passage, a question that basically means, Why are you performing actions that contradict the actions of Jesus? The women (in Luke) sought the living among the dead; these other disciples at this moment look into the heavens concerned by absence rather than looking forward to see presence. These disciples consumed in spectacle may easily turn toward monument thinking and building. They could easily have begun to consider how they might mark the spot of his departure and forget his instruction given through the Spirit. This is a moment of loss, even as they know that they must go forward in faith. We must never discount the next step that must be taken at the sight of Jesus’ leaving. Such a step is understandably a labored step, unsure and unclear. Nevertheless it must be taken because faith always leans forward to Jerusalem, toward the place where God waits to meet us. We are always drawn on by God to our future. For some of us that drawing will not take us away from what we have lost or what we feel or what we see. But for others that drawing will mean leaving behind such loss, if it would be an obstacle to our moving toward what God wants to do in and through us. The Holy Spirit always waits for us to enter the journey of newness.

The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are the result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.⁷

FURTHER REFLECTIONS

Christians, Jews, and Nationalism

Nationalism is a seductive way of understanding collective existence. It has become almost impossible to not see the world as a collection of nations, nation-states, and peoples who are not nations but are on their way to becoming nations. Nationalist vision even infects the way we read the Bible and understand biblical Israel’s existence, gauging their actions according to the protocols of nation-states. However, it would be better to read Scripture against nationalist vision and nationalist form that interprets peoples on a plain of group sameness, each seeking self-determination, control of their land and resources, and desiring full membership and participation in the global economy. Such a way of understanding peoples necessitates borders, cultural and racial segregation, and military forces to maintain independence. Nationalism always engenders zero-sum calculations, where we win by controlling our borders and/or controlling our identities, or we lose by being overrun with aliens who confuse our identities and resist assimilation. Nationalist vision is weakness and fear masquerading as strength and courage, because it beckons the world’s peoples to postures of protectionism and leans toward xenophobia. In our global contexts, nationalism always sets the stage for commerce and capitalism. Only money and those with money may flow freely between nations. This however is a false freedom that depends on a history of conquest, uneven exchange, debt deployment and manipulation, violence, and war. To think toward national existence is already to be thinking toward captivity and death.

We struggle to imagine collective life beyond nationalist form. The pre-Pentecost events of chapter 1 remind us of the dynamic of collective life that the triune God is drawing Israel toward—a people who receives peoples, welcoming the stranger, and thereby expanding their identity without loss or violent assimilation. The multiple stories of Israel in Scripture show us a people pressed by God not to be like other peoples who desired a king and a world inscribed by the visible trappings of power and influence and forms of interaction controlled by such realities (1 Sam. 8). Israel got precisely what they longed for: a king and a royal lineage. God, however, overturns what we might anachronistically call Israel’s nationalist desire through nationalist form—the son of King David, King Jesus, will not form nationalists even as he forms a new people, but disciples. Should disciples of Jesus love their nation, the one they claim and are claimed by? This is the wrong question. The question we are compelled to ask and answer by our lives is, How might we show the love of God for all peoples, a love that cannot be contained by any nation, a love that slices through borders and boundaries and reaches into every people group, every clan, every tribe, and every