The Weird Passages

At this point in the year, if you're following along with the Sunday scriptures, we should be looking at Acts 5 this week. We are not because it's Mother's Day, and Acts 5 is absolutely not a passage for Mother's Day. Not even close.

Acts 5 contains the notoriously chilling tale of Ananias and Sapphira. They are a husband and wife. One day the sell some land and donate the proceeds to the church. Selling land and donating the proceeds was common in the early church; the practice is already mentioned twice in the four preceding chapters.

But the couple do not donate all the proceeds, only some. And it seems they lied about it. Peter says this was no lie to human beings, but to the Holy Spirit. And they both die.

I want to mention a few things briefly about this difficult passage because 1) someone asked me about it and I'm a sucker for the weirdest, more difficult passages in the Bible, and 2) I'd like to offer some general guidance on some the Bible's many, many difficult passages -- or, "texts of terror," as biblical scholar Phyllis Trible famously referred to them.1

Read closely
The first thing to say is that we need to read these scriptures closely. The grotesqueness can throw us off, and we miss important details. For example, in this one, Peter doesn't kill them. He holds them accountable but doesn't kill them. Does that mean God does? Maybe? Probably? We don't know. Luke simply tells us they fell down and died.

This doesn't make the passage any easier to swallow, but it does at least cut off any interpretation that Church leadership has the power to end life--a real issue for a good chunk of church history.

It's not by itself
We have a bad habit of thinking that every scripture--every verse (!)--is supposed to mean something special to me, personally. This is not how the Bible was written. And so this scripture needs to be read in context.

For my money, the most relevant context for Acts 5 is Leviticus. In Old Testament times, holiness was no joke. Temple activity was dangerous business, and most of Leviticus revolves around healthy respect for the holiness of God. If priests weren't careful they would drop dead. Think of the way you hike a mountain, or drive on a dangerous highway: a lot of preparation, care, and attention, or else.

God's holiness didn't get dialed down in Jesus. These are all Jews. They have one Bible, the Old Testament, and they are still studying it, abiding by the Torah. And so the natural conclusion would be that the holiness of God has been breached.

This might not resolve everything about Acts 5, but it at least helps us see why people don't seem to be caught off guard in the story.

Application is tricky
Obviously, this kind of event hardly ever happens, if at all. I have seen someone literally drop dead in church, but it was pretty clear why: he was very, very old.

Like I said, not every scripture needs to be directly, personally applicable. But it is also hard not to see some message here. Are we even remotely conscious of God's holiness? At Peak we say we take the work seriously, but not ourselves. How seriously do we take God?

Here, I always think of Annie Dillard's description of what participation in a church service would be like if we were more fully aware of God's holiness:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. 2

Even if we don't understand everything about Acts 5, it does at least provoke a question: what is our relationship to God and worship? What do we think we're doing on Sundays, or really in any of our dealings with the Almighty? Maybe the weirdest thing of all is that we don't all fall down and die. And then we need to ask ourselves why that is.

Deeper wrestling
The Bible is full of difficult texts, and they almost always have to do with sin. We don't know why Cain's offering is not accepted. We don't know what Ham's sin is. Aaron's sons bringing strange fire, and for some reason it's a very bad thing. We don't know exactly what Moses did that disqualified him from entering the Promised Land. Saul's sin is fuzzy. David isn't supposed to take a census, but does. What's wrong with a census?

The Bible isn't trying to prove itself to us. And so its ambiguity, its strangeness, is probably intentional. I think we're meant to ask all these questions, to wonder and wrestle with the strange scriptures. 3 That is how we learn. That is how Jacob ended up with a blessing--an all night wrestling match with God.

But it's also how he ended up with a limp.

Sooooo, there's that ...

Pastor Eddy

1 I'm mainly focusing on important but oddly ambiguous texts. Trible focuses on texts that are literally terrifying--that seem to have no place in the Bible. There is a lot of overlap between these two, but for more on the really heinous passages, you'll have to wait for another article from me, or better, check out Trible's book -- Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives; Fortress Press: 1984
2 Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters; New York: Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 40-41
3 I'm not the only one who thinks this. See Gary Schnittjer, Torah Story: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch; Zondervan Academic, 2006