IN THE NAME OF JESUSReading: Acts 3: 1-16
We are in the season of Pentecost. In the immediate days following the coming of the Spirit, life for the believers was full of joy and wonder. In the midst of all that was happening, they recognised that, until more was revealed, they needed to be faithful to what they knew and part of that was to continue in the observance of their faith. (The difference was that they had now this open secret of Jesus crucified and risen and the empowering presence and gift of the Holy Spirit.) So on this particular afternoon Peter and John were going to the regular three o’clock prayer service in the Temple. It was a custom in those days for beggars to sit near the entrance to a temple, a synagogue or a shrine because it was assumed that people on their way to pray would be more inclined to notice them and be generous! The man in this story was no different. He had been lame from birth and from the time he was old enough, the same thing happened every day. He was now over forty years’ old and he had been carried daily to this particular gate of the Temple in Jerusalem so that he could beg from the people going in. He probably didn’t even look at their faces much any more but simply repeated by rote his plea for alms for a poor beggar. He would have been one among many. He was almost like an institution, he had been there for so long. It would never have entered his head that life could be any different from the begging he had always known. So there he sat waiting for the devout who never missed a prayer meeting. Peter and John would not have stood out for him in a crowd. It was just that they were passing very close to him and, as usual, he asked for money. But then something very strange happened. No money clinked into his alms dish, but these two men did not move away. They stopped in front of him and looked at him very intently. Somehow he had been singled out for God’s particular attention on that day. I like to think that the Spirit whispered to them, “I want this man healed. He’s been here long enough. And, besides, I’ve got something much better for him to do than begging!”
Then Peter addressed him directly, something that never usually happened. “Look at us!” he said. After overcoming the momentary shock at being spoken to as a human being, the man did look up, eagerly. He thought he was going to get something. Well, he did get something, but it wasn’t what he was expecting. Peter continued, “I don’t have any money. But I’ll give you what I have. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk!” Peter didn’t only speak the words. He recognised the power that Jesus had promised, the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit to heal, challenge, comfort and bless. He reached out to the man and took him by the hand. He helped the man up. It was as he was cooperating with Peter that the man’s feet and anklebones were strengthened. He jumped up, stood on his feet and began to walk and leap and praise God. This was a very public healing. Crowds of people witnessed it. Nobody could deny it. He went into the Temple with his new friends, and those who were already inside heard the commotion, saw the man, recognised him as the one they had seen so often at the Beautiful Gate. They heard him praising God. They saw him walking, out now on Solomon’s Colonnade, and they were dumbfounded, in total awe at what had happened. Another moment of recognition and a God-given opportunity for Peter! He saw it and grasped it and preached a very powerful sermon or homily to a captive, but willing audience, beginning by disclaiming that it was anything to do with them that the man was now healed. He was very bold. What a different Peter from a few weeks before. Listen again to part of what he said. “It is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of all our ancestors who has brought glory to his servant Jesus by doing this. This is the same Jesus whom you handed over and rejected before Pilate, despite Pilate’s decision to release him. You rejected this holy, righteous one and instead demanded the release of a murderer. You killed the author of life, but God raised him to life and we are witnesses of this fact! The name of Jesus has healed this man – and you know how lame he was before. Faith in Jesus’ name has caused this healing before your very eyes.”
Sometimes I think that we, in then Christian Church in all its branches, are a bit like the lame man. We’ve lost our expectancy, if we ever had any, that things are actually going to be any different, either in our own personal situations or in the life of the church. We allow ourselves to be carried to the same place of begging and compete with one another for a few ‘pence,’ a few blessings that just might come our way, when all the time God is wanting to open the windows of heaven and pour out all the riches, the treasures of his blessings upon us. But we never ‘look up.’ It has never entered our consciousness that whatever our particular ‘disability’, be that a physical condition, an emotional crippling, a mental distress, a spiritual deadness, a relationship problem, a worry about family or job, it could be transformed. The lame man, under the compelling gaze of Peter and John, at least had the faith to reach out his hand. He took a tiny movement of faith. And maybe that’s all that’s required, namely that we cooperate ever so slightly, that we show Jesus that we’re willing, and then he does the rest. It is faith in Jesus’ name that will ring the changes in our lives as we stretch out to receive from him. Whatever our condition, God has far more in store for us than a life of begging or a few pence of blessings. As he touches your life and mine then we, too, can be witnesses to his healing, forgiving, reconciling love in the world as Peter was. Jesus never ever touches us, heals us, or restores us for ourselves alone, although that is very important, but always so that we can then be a blessing to someone else. We, too, could yet become people of the way who live their lives with such conviction that we can say to all those who have been wounded and crippled by life, “We don’t have any money for you. But we’ll give you what we have. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk, get up from where you’ve been trapped for so many years and walk out to embrace the future that he has prepared for you.” It starts with us.