The
Gospel According to Acts
NT
Wright
The Acts of the
Apostles is one of the longest books in the New Testament, but it's also
something of a page turner! Luke was a skilled narrator; if you sit down and
read the book straight through, you'll find there really isn't a dull page in
the whole thing.
It covers quite a long
time, telling the story from Jesus's resurrection right through to when Paul
arrives in Rome, which is probably A.D. 60: a 30-year span compressed into one
book.
I suspect that the
reason for the book’s length is that in the first century that's more or less
what you can get on a scroll.
What
Luke Doesn’t Tell Us
There are many things,
of course, that Luke doesn't tell us because this isn't actually ‘Early Church
History’. There are lots of other things we'd love to know. For instance:
Where did Peter go
after he disappeared in Chapter 12? What was James doing all that time when he
was the ‘big man’ in Jerusalem? What about all the expansion of the church to
the south and to the east?
Instead, Luke
concentrates on Paul, and as we go along, we will see there is good reason for
that.
A
Sequel for Theophilus
Luke begins Acts just
as he began his Gospel because this book is the sequel. Both are addressed to
someone called ‘Theophilus’.
‘Dear Theophilus’, he
says. ‘The previous book I wrote had to do with everything Jesus began to do
and teach’.
We don't actually know
who Theophilus was. It may be that, actually, it is a made up name meaning one
who is a ‘lover of God’. That would mean Luke is writing for anyone who loves
God and wants to know what God has done in Jesus and what God is continuing to
do in Jesus—and that's what the next line says.
‘I wrote’, he says ‘in
the Gospel about everything Jesus began to do and teach’. The implication
being: Jesus hasn't stopped doing and teaching. Rather through his Holy Spirit,
Jesus is still active and going on doing what he came to do.
The
Kingdom of God
It's pretty clear that
what Luke is talking about throughout this book, and what he was talking about
for much of the Gospel of Luke, is the kingdom of God. What does the kingdom of
God look like? What does it mean for God to become king? What does it mean for
God to take charge?
Today people often say
'Well, if God really was in charge, if God really did do something dramatic in
and through Jesus, then surely God wouldn't have just allowed the world to go
to rack and ruin the way it seems to still be doing all the time!’.
But Jesus said again
and again, in the Sermon on the Mount and in his parables, ‘This is what the
kingdom of God is like. It's quite different from what you've imagined'.
Likewise, Luke intends
to say, ‘Actually, this is what it looks like when God takes charge. Jesus
gives instructions to his chosen apostles. He equips them by his Spirit. This
is what it looks like when Jesus himself is now the Lord of the world’.
It's very surprising.
Sometimes it's actually shocking. Because things don't work out as they want it
to. Things don't work out the way that we might want them to. But, by the end
of the book, the full sweep from Acts Chapter 1 to Acts Chapter 28, we find
that Paul is in Rome announcing the kingdom of God and the lordship of Jesus.
A
Strange New Phenomenon
Everybody in Luke's day
knew Rome was the center of the great imperial power. Paul was announcing that
God is God, God is King, Jesus is Lord, right under the very nose of Caesar
himself.
Something has happened
in A.D. 30 or 33 when Paul is converted. Nobody outside of a small geographical
area had heard of Jesus of Nazareth. By the time Paul is in Rome people across
the then-known world know who Jesus is. At least they've heard what people are
saying about him. Within another couple of generations or so the Roman
emperors had to do business with the leaders of this movement of people called
‘Christians’.
What is this strange
new phenomenon that has been unleashed upon our unsuspecting world? Our
unsuspecting empire?
Luke begins by
introducing us once more to the risen Jesus. The beginning of The Acts of the
Apostles hooks onto the end of Luke's gospel. ‘Jesus’, he says, ‘showed himself
to the disciples alive, after suffering, by many proofs. He was seen by them
for 40 days during which he spoke about God's kingdom’.
It's pretty clear that what Luke is
talking about throughout this book, and what he was talking about for much of
the Gospel of Luke, is the kingdom of God. What does the kingdom of God look
like? What does it mean for God to become king? What does it mean for God to
take charge?
That sense of this
being all about a fresh understanding of the Kingdom is important throughout
the book.
As they were having a
meal together, he began telling them what the kingdom would look like. He said
'I want you to stay here in Jerusalem to wait for the Father's promise’. He
says they should remember how it was when John baptized with water. But in a
few days from now, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.
Just as at the end of
Luke, just as at the end of John, there's a sense that if the disciples are now
to be for the world what Jesus had been for Israel, they are going to need to
be equipped with his Holy Spirit.
It isn't the case that
Jesus is just going away and leaving them to figure it all out themselves.
They'll have a lot of figuring out to do. But they will have God's own Spirit.
This mysterious personal power. This new breath. This new energy which they
called the Spirit or the Holy Spirit is what will guide them and direct
them.
What
Do Jesus’s Resurrection and Ascension Mean?
What we see then in
this first paragraph or so of Acts is the whole question about Jesus being
risen and the risen Christ being ascended. What, then, does it mean that Jesus
is Israel's messiah?
If we go back to the
Old Testament we see in passages like Isaiah 9, Isaiah 11, Isaiah 42, that the
messiah, when he comes, will be the Lord of the whole world.
Luke will later draw
upon Psalm 2. In Psalm 72, when we see this picture of Israel's true king, the
ultimate seed of David, who is going to be the Lord of the whole world, such
that from sea to sea, from north to south, all over, people are going to pay
him homage.
Throughout the Old
Testament period, though, that remained a grandiose and seemingly impossible
dream.
It happened briefly
under Solomon, David's heir and successor. It was Solomon who built the temple
which is significant for the story we are going to be telling. But it's never
subsequently been realized. The Davidic kings had died out at the time of the
exile and different people in Jesus's day and centuries before had wondered if
and when God would ever fulfill these promises to send a king, to send a
messiah, to send somebody who would actually be the Lord of the world in the
way that He'd always promised.
There must have been
many times where that promise seemed to be in the balance, when they must have
said maybe there's not ever going to be a king. Maybe it's just a nice idea. A
general metaphorical way of talking about how God is going to put the whole
world right. But, nevertheless, there were many who clung onto their original
hope.
Jesus says, ‘How
foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all of the prophets had said. Was
it not necessary that the messiah would suffer these things and enter his
glory?’. What we see in Acts is Jesus entering into his glory. Because his
glory, as in Psalm 8, is his rule as the messiah, as the truly human one, as
God incarnate over the whole world.
Again, it doesn't look
like what we or they might have suspected but this is the story that Luke is
telling. So, Jesus goes on and responds to the disciples question. They think,
‘Well, Jesus has been crucified; that was not our game plan. He's now been
raised from the dead’. That was a complete surprise as well.
They are still trying
to get their heads around what it all means. In verse 6 they say 'Master, is
this the time you are going to restore the kingdom to Israel?' You see what
they're thinking. They are imagining on the basis of the Psalms and the
prophets.
'Okay. We're tracking
with what the scriptures had said: that if a messiah comes and does the
extraordinary things Jesus did, it seems he should have had to do this also’.
Presumably that means
that Israel is going to be, as Deuteronomy had said, the top nation is the head
and not the tail. The world leader. The one through whom now God is going to
bring his New World to birth. To bring justice and peace to bear on the rest of
creation. That's their dream and they will be part of it. They are the 12
representing Israel.
But Jesus doesn't just
come out and answer their questions. There's a question about when these things
will happen, he says. There's a question about what exactly will happen.
People debate and argue
as to whether in verses 7 and 8 Jesus is saying ‘no’ or ‘yes’. I have a good
friend who would say that Jesus’ answer is actually, ‘No this is not the time;
God is not restoring the kingdom. You have a job in the meantime. Then God will
restore the kingdom’. That is an option that some people take.
The
Agenda
But I think it's quite
clear that actually in Verses 7 and 8, Jesus is saying ‘We're not talking about
times; we haven't got a chronology mapped out. That's something that God the
Father has got all on His own authority. But what will happen is that you will
receive power when the Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in
Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria and to the ends of the earth’.
That's the agenda. That
is the agenda that we see then lived out through Acts. In Judea, because in the
early chapters of Acts are all focused on Jerusalem itself and little province
of Judea. But then in Acts 8, Philip goes off to Samaria and the Samaritans who
were so distrusted and sometimes actually hated by the Jewish people, they hear
the word of God and respond to it!
Another
King
Then, of course,
through the mission of Paul particularly, but actually starting with Peter, in
Acts 10 and 11, the gospel goes out to the gentile world as well.
So by the end it has,
in principle, reached to the ends of the earth. Because, just as all roads led
to Rome in the ancient world, so all roads led from Rome. Once you had planted
the gospel in one of those great cities, and ultimately in Rome itself, the
word was going to get out into the rest of the world.
So I think what Luke is
saying is that Jesus is saying, ‘Yes but maybe not in the way you’d expect’. It
doesn't look like a naturalist or military takeover. Rather it looks like the
church bearing witness like ambassadors going out to foreign countries to say,
‘Not only do we have a new king, but actually he's your king as well’. That's
how it works, again and again, in Acts, announcing Jesus as the world's true
lord.
This is why, for
instance, in Acts 17, when Paul and Silas are in Thessalonica, the crowds hear
what they're saying: there's another king, namely, Jesus. That is the message
of Acts. That there is another king and that it is Jesus. And this opening
chapter of Acts is all about how his rule is being launched on earth as in
heaven. That's what it's all about.
When we look at the
Book of Acts, it comes basically in two halves. It divides at the end of
Chapter 12. Up to the end of Chapter 12, we are basically still in the Middle
East in the world of the Jews and their immediate neighbors, including the
Samaritans, including some of the other territories that bump up against them.
Yes, there is a hint, when Peter goes to Cornelius in Acts 10 and 11, that this
is a sign that the gospel is going out to the Gentiles. And at the end of
Chapter 11 there's a sign that now in Syria, in the great city of Antioch, that
there's now a community that goes by the name Christianoi, ‘Christians’ for the
first time.
Basically, Acts 1-12 is
the proclamation of Jesus as the king of the Jews under the nose of the present
Jewish authorities, particularly of the Herods, just as in the gospels. There
always seems to be a Herod in the background looking over the shoulder and
saying ‘What's going on here? I'm the king of the Jews thank you very much’.
But at the end of Acts 12, the Herod at the time, Herod Antipas I, comes to a
bad end.
So then we move to the
second half of the book in Chapters 13-28, it is all about the gospel going out
to the gentile world, into Caesar's world, into the world with a very different
lord. Lord is kyrios in Greek, so this is the land of Kyrios Kyser, Lord
Caesar. The gospel goes out there, though it has a hard time getting
to Rome. Paul finally gets there because he is imprisoned, and
appeals to Caesar to hear his case.
When he gets there,
Luke says he is able then, even though he is under house arrest, to announce
God as king and Jesus as Lord openly and without interference, with nobody
stopping him and telling him, ‘No you can't say that here’. That, for Luke, is
the climax of the book. That he is announcing these things with all boldness.
That's one of thekey terms in Acts. The boldness which enables people to talk
about Jesus in the face (sometimes literally) of rulers and authorities
or whoever they may be. They're not shy; they're not afraid, because they
believe that Jesus is the world's true Lord. So Luke says they do this and Paul
does it with all boldness and with no one stopping him.
You might have thought
well there would be plenty of people in Rome who want to say, ‘For goodness
sake, shut up that person because he is a nuisance’, but they don't. As far as
Luke is concerned, it's been a huge journey to get there but the gospel has
gotten to the end of the earth. So we see then in this first short section of
Acts 1:1-8, that this is how the kingdom is launched. Not just in Jesus himself
but, granted his death on the cross, his resurrection. This is now the
commissioning of the disciples to take the news of this kingdom to the ends of
the earth.
Spaceman
Jesus?
We now come to verses
9-11 of Acts Chapter 1, one of the most difficult passages for the average
modern reader, which is the ascension of Jesus.
So often we have looked
at that biblical text and have been puzzled. Just what are we supposed to
think? Did Jesus really do a vertical take-off like a spaceman? I know churches
where there is a great east window with a picture of the ascension of Jesus
going up and all you can see is a cloud with two feet sticking down and the
disciples staring up as though to say, ‘What on earth is going on’ (of course,
it isn't on earth by then, but still)?
People have really
gotten hung up on that. They thought, are we supposed to believe that heaven,
from their point of view, is a place within our solar system a few miles up
above our present earth and what would that say about, for instance, people in
other parts of the world?
Naiveté?
Or Something Else?
But actually, first
century Jews weren't nearly as naive as we've often imagined. They didn't think
of heaven as a location within our space, time, matter, or universe. They
thought of it as a different dimension (to use a more modern metaphor), or like
a different mode of being, which intersects with our mode of being. Again, this
is another way of putting a label on something that we don't have good language
for.
But they were quite
happy talking about up and down without meaning that God lived a long way
upstairs and that we lived downstairs and maybe there would be other creatures
down below as well. They used that language just like they use the language the
prophets do of the sun and the moon being darkened and the stars falling from
heaven when what they are talking about is a major socio-political catastrophe
like the fall of Babylon in Isaiah 13.
Several other biblical
passages work in that way. So, we have to be careful in imagining that oh, they
seemed to think that this was a vertical takeoff, but of course, we can't
really believe that. I think the answer to that supposition is ‘no’. This is
standard first century language for heaven and earth, that Jesus goes from them
into the heavenly dimension.
Behind
the Curtain
It's very interesting
that throughout the New Testament, when the different writers talk about Jesus
coming back again, sometimes they talk about His return but sometimes they talk
about His appearing. First in Colossians 3 and then in 1 John 3 we are told
that when He appears, it's not then that He's gone a long way away—it's that
He's in a different dimension. It's as though He's behind an invisible curtain
and one day the curtain will be removed and we will discover that He'd been
there all along.
This language of heaven
and earth, though it's confusing, is very important for us to get our heads
around. Particularly because what's going on in the story of the Ascension is,
of course, that the human Jesus with His risen physical body, physical and,
perhaps, even more than physical because it now can't be hurt, it can't get
sick, it can't die again; it's a more robust thing, not less. This body is now
in God's space, God's dimension, God's heavenly presence. But for us, with
centuries of philosophical wandering all over the map, this is very difficult
to get our heads around.
Blame
Platonism
I was once debating
with my old friend, the late Marcus Borg, who said the whole point of the
letter to the Hebrews and the Book of Acts is that Jesus, who is crucified and
raised from the dead, is now in heaven. Marcus would say to me 'Tom, I just
can't imagine that.' I used to say, ‘Marc, you need to work on your
imagination, because the problem is that our imagination has been infected by
Platonism particularly’.
Around Paul's day and a
little bit later, there were one or two philosophers in the world that we
loosely call Middle Platonism, to distinguish from Plato himself, a few hundred
years earlier and the Neoplatonists from a few hundred years later. It's a loose
label but it means great philosophers like Philo and Plutarch, one a Jew
then and the other a Gentile, in the first century.
For them, the worlds
that we have and all that there is, was at least two-fold. There was a heavenly
world and there was an earthly world. But for them, heaven and earth were not
compatible. The problem was that we were marooned on earth like voyagers stuck
on a desert island and we longed to get back to our real home, which was in
heaven. Of course, that's what a lot of Christians think the New Testament is
about. But it isn't. That's the view of Plutarch, one of those Middle
Platonists. That we are on earth at the moment but we want to leave earth and
go to heaven instead and instead of having a body we just want to have a soul because
that's what heaven needs.
We are on earth at the moment but
we want to leave earth and go to heaven instead and instead of having a body we
just want to have a soul because that's what heaven needs.
One
Single Creation
As far as the Jewish
world is concerned, God made one single creation: Heaven and Earth. A single,
bifurcated reality with heaven and earth as the twin halves of God's good
creation. It isn't that earth is the shabby bit and heaven is the nice bit.
Heaven and earth are both good. God saw all that he had made and it was very
good. We can get rid of the idea that Jesus wouldn't have wanted his body in
that heavenly dimension because now heaven and earth are joined together in a
new way in and through Jesus himself.
The Jews have various
ways of conceiving this, and indeed, in the centuries before the times of
Jesus, there was an entire literary genre which we may suppose goes with an
entire set of spiritual possibilities or practices which were to do with
finding a way of glimpsing or even having a revelation of things that were real
in heaven and that we wanted to become real on earth.
We loosely call this
literary genre apocalyptic because that word means revelation. An ‘Apocalyptic
event’ happens when something is a present secret in the heavenly dimension is
unveiled to the surprised and, perhaps, alarmed watchers still within the
earthly dimension. I think that was often a literary genre that was used
because people were aware in the long years of extended exile to the time in
Babylon, though they have rebuilt the temple, and the temple, as we'll see
later on, was the place where heaven and earth were supposed to come together.
Like
a Son of Man
Though they've rebuilt
the the temple, there was a sense that the job hadn't been finished. That the
living glorious divine presence hadn't actually come back in power and glory as
had been promised by Isaiah and Ezekiel in other places, which we'll look at
later. So various seers and prophets and devout persons in their praying and
their studying of scripture were hoping that maybe they would have some kind of
revelation of heaven and earth coming together at last.
One of the most famous
books in that genre is the book of Daniel in the Old Testament. We're not sure
when Daniel was finally edited, probably in the first half of the second
century B.C., though many of the stories undoubtedly go back a long way behind
that. But it was written at that time of great crisis and turmoil for the
people of God, with political disasters happening and then God doing surprising
rescue operations.
In Daniel Chapter 7
there is this extraordinary vision of one like a son of man, a human figure,
who seems to be oppressed and being attacked. But then, after the monsters have
come up out of the sea and done their worst, (that's a symbol for the Pagan
nations all around the people of God), after that, there's one like the son of
man coming on the clouds and is presented before the Ancient of Days, before
God the creator himself, and is actually seated on a throne right beside God
himself. This is a scary thought. Are there now two Gods? No, unfailingly not.
This is written by
Jewish monotheists who, within their monotheism, see that actually from the
beginning, from the heaven and earth chapter, the Genesis Chapter 1, there is a
role as humans, which as Psalm 8 puts it, is to be crowned with glory and honor
and to have all things put into subjection under their feet. Somehow that line
from Genesis 1 and the role of humans as being in God's image, God’s reflectors
if you like, that coming through Psalm 8 what is man that you're mindful of
him, the son of man that you take thought for him, you've made him a little
lower than the angels to crown him with glory and honor, putting all things
under his feet'.
This then comes through
Daniel 7 and now to our surprise, and perhaps alarm, it turns out to be real.
Jesus himself is the one like the son of a man who, having suffered at the
hands of the beast, and particularly the last great beast, Rome itself,
Jesus is now exalted. Jesus is now on the throne. This means of course that
this really is the coming of the kingdom of God. Jesus is going to be enthroned
and that from now on all the forces of darkness, all the monsters that have
come up out of the sea, are going to eventually be put in their place.
Within this whole
apocalyptic tradition, we look back and see that Luke is here tracking with
what he and others had said in the gospel narratives. Because when Jesus is on
trial before the high priest the day before he is finally crucified in Luke
22:66, the high priest asks him if he is indeed God's messiah. Jesus says,
‘Yes, and from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of
power’. Matthew 26:64 says the same thing. From now on this is how it's going
to be. Some people have misread that passage and you can misread Mark 14 in
that way as well. But I think the right way to read it is not ‘one day you'll
look out the window and see the Son of man coming down to earth’. Rather, ‘from
now on, you are going to see what it means’.
The son of man has come
on the clouds and has been seated at the right hand of God himself. Everything
is going to be different as a result of this. The beasts are going to be
overthrown and the kingdom of God is being launched.
You can tell that this
is what's in the author's mind because of the use of Psalm 110, as well
as those passages in the Gospels and, from time to time, throughout Acts
and elsewhere in the New Testament, notably in the Letter to the Hebrews, which
reference ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make
your enemies your footstool’.
This explanation of
this 'one like the son of man' is the fulfillment of that great Psalm
prophecy: one of the most quoted verses from the Old Testament in the whole of
the New Testament. It's a statement that now already something has happened, as
a result of which the world is a different place.
The
Throne and the Cross
Jesus is now enthroned.
How has that happened? Something to do with what he did on the cross. In the
early chapters of Acts we'll see the little hints on how they're trying to
navigate what it meant that Jesus died on the cross.
How does that mean that
the kingdom of God can now be launched in a new way?
It seems to have
something to do regarding Daniel 7, to do with the fact that through his death
the powers have been put in their place. They have been held to account. They
have been, in principle, condemned, even though they will still rage and make a
lot of noise and actually make life, as we'll see, very difficult for Jesus's
followers. There's another strand as well, which I think any first century
reader of Acts would actually pick up reading Acts 1:9-11. Because many, many
people, right across the Roman Empire, knew what happened when a Roman Emperor
died. Actually, when Julius Caesar died, he wasn't even emperor at that stage,
but he was trying to become some kind of supreme leader.
In 44 B.C. when he was
assassinated, at his funeral, some clever person released an eagle so that as
when Caesar was being burned on his funeral pyre, an eagle flew up into the sky
and people said, ‘There it is; there's his soul being taken up to heaven’. So,
who knows who organized and orchestrated that. But from then on, the senate
voted that Julius Caesar was now divine. He had gone up to heaven. He was now a
god and therefore conveniently his adopted son Augustus as he later became
known, Octavian as he then was, could be styled 'Son of God' or 'Son of the
deified one’. It's a very convenient thing if you're an emperor ruling a mighty
empire. Actions become divine ones. Have your name on the coins and inscribe
‘Son of God’. Because that means everyone is going to want to obey you.
Otherwise bad things may happen to them right there.
Acts happens under the
shadow of imperial ideology which was actually the fastest growing religion in
Paul's world. An ideology which said Caesar is Lord. He is the son of the
deified one. So the Roman Empire now has the status of divinity to back
it.
Acts is saying, ‘No,
Jesus is Lord’. Here's the difference: With Caesar, supposedly his soul has
gone to heaven, so he's now joined the pantheon; he's joined Jupiter and all
the rest, whatever that meant to people on the street, it certainly meant you
better do what you're told and pay your taxes or it will be worse for you,
etc., but Caesar was not coming back. Oh, I know that later there was a rumor
of Nero coming back again, but that was just something that was rumbling along
in the 70’s after Nero's death as a way of saying maybe the old emperor will
come back one day. But nobody actually thought that somebody like Augustus or
any emperor was going to come back in the same way that they had seen him
go.
Citizens of Heaven
But what we have here
is, as Jesus is lifted out of sight, two men appear dressed in white. ‘Why are
you standing here staring into heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken from you
into heaven, will come back in the same way that you saw him go’. So, whatever
it was that they saw, there will be a fresh appearing. Here again people make a
classic mistake. They think well, Jesus will come back and snatch us away so
that we can go back to heaven with him. That's not what it means at all.
At the end of
Philippians Chapter 3, Paul says very clearly, ‘We are citizens of heaven’.
Yes, but from there we are waiting for the King, the Lord Jesus, the messiah,
who will change our mortal bodies to be like his glorious body by the power
which enables him to subject all things to himself. In other words, he is going
to come back in order to sort out this world once and for all. We are not, in
other words, looking to escape this world and go to heaven; we are part of the
new project in which heaven and earth have been brought together in and through
the person of Jesus himself, looking for the time when Jesus will return to
make heaven and earth one at last. That has been the purpose, it seems, from
the beginning. It is for that purpose that Jesus then commissions his disciples
to go out as heralds of the king, to be witnesses to this new heaven and earth
reality which has come to birth as we'll see in the second chapter.
This is going to happen
in quite almost literally a breathtaking way when the spirit comes upon them.
But already what we see in Acts Chapter 1 is heaven and earth joined together
in Jesus. If we know our business, we should be saying this is because, in this
human being who is somehow the living embodiment of Israel's God, the promise
of Genesis 1 has already been fulfilled. There is New Creation. He is the
beginning of it and we are invited to join in.
From/: Prof. N.T.
Wright, Lectures presented 22 May 2017, St. Andrews, Scotland
