12 When Peter saw it, he addressed the people, "You Israelites, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety (εὐσεβείᾳ, godliness)[1] we had made him walk? Peter denies that his personal power or even his reverence for God is not the source of the healing of the man related in 3:1-10. Emphasizing what he shares with the audience, he says that 13 the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors, reminding us that the God of the Jewish people is the God of Jesus and those who follow him, is the one who healed the man in Acts 3:1-10. Indeed, the whole of the book of Acts concerns the actions of God in establishing the early church. While the apostles participate in the action of God and testify to it, God is responsible for the success of the early Christians. This God has glorified, focusing upon the action of God, the servant Jesus. Here is where the focus of our attention ought to be. This passage invites us to reflect upon the event nature of our relationship with God. God has acted in a specific, unique, and universal way in this suffering servant, Jesus of Nazareth. However, what Peter says next has tapped into the anti-Semitism of its readers. Thus, Peter will now emphasize the malicious work of the audience, distancing himself from them, even though he shares with them the Jewish heritage. It serves to highlight the contrast between divine and human action that we often find in Acts. Jesus is the one whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. 14 However, you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, 15 and you killed the Author (Ἀρχηγὸν)[2] of life, reminding us that Jewish eschatological hope involved resurrection to new and eternal life.[3] Further, while some titles of Jesus seem strange to our modern ears, the notion of Jesus as the prince of life is still intelligible today.[4] Yet, the one they killed is the one whom God raised from the dead. Peter offers an assessment of blame here in that his Jewish audience is to blame and he somewhat lets the Romans off the hook, even though crucifixion would not happen had the Romans not done it. Rather than drawing out an implication of the passage, however, the passage discloses the anti-Semitism of many readers of the passage. To use such a passage to make the Jewish people throughout history “Christ-killers” is not what the passage intends. I want to suggest that we, understood as Christian, other religion, or secular, do not like hearing the message that God chose the Jews. This passage, even if it lays blames on the Jews of the time Peter, shows why the Jewish people remain a chosen people. Jesus fulfills the Jewish scripture. Christians have searched for proof that they are no longer the chosen ones. Has the church replaced them? We do not like the news that God chose Jews, rather than Germans, French, Russian, Chinese, or American. Divine light shined upon the Jewish people. If we want to bask in the light, we need to be with the Jewish people, for God fulfilled their scripture in Jesus. In the continued existence of the Jewish people, we as non-Jews come against the rock of divine choice. Yes, salvation of the Jews, for Christians believe the Jew on the cross is the one through whom God brings salvation to all people.[5] To this, we are witnesses. The event nature of the action of God means that if others are to know of the event, someone needs to witness or testify to it. We call them apostles. Believers throughout history have relied upon that their testimony. The reliance upon such a subjective and common thing as testimony means following Jesus will always be a matter of faith. The certainty that math and science have is not something preaching or theology can have. 16 Further, by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you.[6] The event nature of the action of God has meant that even Peter needed to respond with faith. Even separated by millennia, we unite with Peter when we receive his testimony and place our faith in the same name, Jesus. Peter specifically identifies the source of the healing of the man they now see as the object of faith, Jesus Christ. Peter shifts his focus from the action of God to the implication of that action for his audience. If God acts in an event that impinges upon our time and space, and if we have witnesses to that event, then the event will have implications for how people are to live. 17 "And now, friends, highlighting the injustice of using this passage for anti-Jewish sentiments, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. Jesus prayed from the cross that God forgive them, for they did not know what they were doing (Luke 23:34). All of this heightens the point that this passage did not intend to feed anti-Jewish sentiments. 18 In this way, God fulfilled, emphasizing action from God, what God had foretold through all the prophets, that the Messiah of the Jewish people would suffer. The most surprising thing about Christian preaching and teaching is that we find the action of God located in the suffering Jewish Messiah. The suffering of Christ is in accord with Jewish scripture and especially the testimony of Jewish prophets. We now receive a hint of the earliest preaching of the church in Jerusalem in verses 19-21. 19 Repent therefore, and turn to God so that God may wipe out your sins. In Luke, the call to repentance always includes forgiveness of sin. The image of God wiping away sins is reminiscent of Psalm 51:1-2 where the psalmist prays that God would blot out his transgressions. Thus, despite the cruel actions of humans (vv. 14-15), their repentance has the potential to result in forgiveness from the one whose power made possible the miraculous healing of 3:1-10.
Their repentance will mean that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. The Lord may then send the Messiah appointed for them, namely, Jesus, who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through the prophets. Here is an example of early Christian proclamation, that the risen Lord is to be the end-time messianic King whom Jewish future expectation hoped for and whom God will send. It merged the expectation of the return of Jesus with the Jewish expectation of the Son of Man who will come on the clouds of heaven.[7] This notion is quite consistent with the theology of Luke. What is unique to this passage is that it makes the return of Christ dependent on the conversion of Israel. The conversion of Israel becomes the prerequisite of the arrival of eschatological salvation. Furthermore, the parallelizing of the coming of times of refreshment with the coming of Jesus is striking. The whole passage is a primitive Christian conversion tradition that had its context in a Jewish-Christian community the faith of which was strongly orientated on the future. Historically, one can best connect verses 19-21 with the earliest Christianity in Jerusalem in terms of the significance of the idea of the Parousia and the role of the Jewish people. He refers to Moses, who said the Lord would raise up for them from among their people a prophet like him. They must listen to what Moses says. Everyone who does not listen to that prophet God will cast out of the people. We should note that in 2:21, God has already promised grace to all who call upon the name of the Lord. In Acts, repentance is the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 3, repentance finds fulfillment in the return of the Lord Jesus. Both speeches find fulfilment of scripture in the present through the ministry of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Peter then points out that beginning with Samuel and the prophets after him predicted these days. He reminds them that they are descendants of the prophets and of the covenant that God gave to their ancestors. God told Abraham that in his descendants all the families of the earth shall receive divine blessing. When God raised up the servant, Jesus, God sent him first to them, to bless them by turning them from their wicked ways. Barth, in a discussion of Jesus as the Lord of time, considers Jesus as the one who was, is, and about this passage, the one to come. In this case, the basis for repentance is that seasons of refreshing are coming. The prophets foretold the first advent of Christ, but also implicitly the second as well, to which the church looks and the entire world actually moves.[8]
[1] A relatively rare word in the NT (appearing elsewhere only in the Pastoral Epistles and 2 Peter), but it is far more common in other ancient Greek literature where it refers to one's upstanding character or reverence for Greco-Roman gods.
[2] It may alternatively be translated "leader" (as in Acts 5:31) or "pioneer" (as in Hebrews 2:10 and 12:2). Regardless of translation, however, it is clear that Peter is establishing Jesus as the pinnacle of life.
[3] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 347.
[4] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 421.
[5] Why do we so dislike to be told that the Jews are the chosen people? Why does Christendom continually search for fresh proof that this is no longer true? In a word, because we do not enjoy being told that the sun of free grace, by which alone we can live, shines not upon us, but upon the Jews, that it is the Jews who are elect and not the Germans, the French or the Swiss, and that in order to be chosen we must, for good or ill, either be Jews or else be heart and soul on the side of the Jews. "Salvation is of the Jews." It is in their existence that we non-Jews come up against the rock of divine choice, which first passing over us is primarily made by Another, a choice which can concern us only in that it first concerns him and cannot affect us except in him and through him. In the "lost-ness" and in the persistence of the Jews that Other One looks down on us; the Jew on the Cross, in whom is salvation for every man. --Karl Barth, "The Jewish problem and the Christian answer" (1949) in Against the Stream: Shorter Postwar Writing (SCM, 1954), 200.
[6] The Greek syntax of verse 16 is rather muddled, and even the NRSV struggles to produce a coherent sentence. Despite the tangled grammar, however, the point of the verse is relatively clear: The man's healing has been brought about by the power of faith in Jesus' name. It is less clear, though, precisely whose faith Peter has in mind here: his own and John's, the healed man's or the faith of all three figures. The healed man never expresses any evidence of faith; indeed, he believes that he will merely be receiving alms (v. 5). However, the man does respond when Peter and John catch his attention, and it may be that even this small gesture indicates a modicum of faith. Nonetheless, it is not so much the subject of the faith that matters as it is the object of that faith. As in the speech up to this point, Peter points to a power greater than himself: the power of Jesus' name.
[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 3, 608.
[8] Church Dogmatics III.2 [47.1] 495.
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