This comes from N.T. Wright’s Acts for Everyone Part One, but it reads like a paragraph out of a novel. A historically-true, gospel-centered, heart-thumping novel that reflects the kind of “education” a seminary grad can only pray for and aspire to.
Peter and John had a secret–a secret that enabled them to run rings round the book-learning of the authorities. They had been with Jesus. They had been with him night and day. They had seen and heard him pray. They knew how he read the scriptures, in his fresh, creative way, drawing out their inner message and finding his own vocation in the middle of it.
Now that he had died and had then been astonishingly raised, and had then been exalted into the heavenly realm, all Peter and John had to do to explain what they were about was to develop the lines of thought they had heard him use over and over again.
This didn’t just give them “boldness” in the sense of courage to stand up and say what they thought. Sometimes people can be bold even when they’re muddled. It gave them something more: a clarity, a sharp edge, a definite point at which to stand. And the authorities knew it.
I like the way N.T. Wright describes the new landscape defined by Pentecost and the explosive growth of the early church, as related in Acts 2. Jesus wants the same thing to happen in cities today:
Imagine a world without this astonishing teaching! Imagine a society where there was no ‘common life’ built around a shared belief in Jesus! Imagine a world without ‘the bread-breaking,’ or a world without prayer! Life would be bleak indeed — as it often is for many people, not least those who embrace a relentlessly secularist lifestyle, shutting the door on any of these possibilities. And if you lived in such a world, and then suddenly found yourself swept up in this pattern of teaching, fellowship, bread-breaking and prayer, you would know that new dimensions had opened up before you, and new vistas of how the world might be had suddenly become visible. - Acts for Everyone Part One, page 45
My newest scheme is to read through Acts, which aside from being one of my favorite books of the Bible, is a great “church planting” book. I’m going to attempt to follow along in a couple commentaries as well: Ajith Fernando’s Acts and N.T. Wright’s Acts for Everyone (Parts 1 and 2). Here’s a great bit by N.T. Wright on the resurrection:
‘Heaven’ may well be our temporary home, after this present life; but the whole new world, united and transformed, is our eventual destination. Part of the point about Jesus’ resurrection is that it was the beginning of precisely that astonishing and world-shattering renewal. It wasn’t just that he happened to be alive again, as though by some quirk of previously unsuspected ‘nature,’ or by some extraordinary ‘miracle‘ in which God did the impossible just to show how powerful he was, death suddenly worked backwards in his particular case.
It was, rather, that because on the cross he had indeed dealt with the main force of evil, decay and death itself, the creative power of God, no longer thwarted as it had been by human rebellion, could at last burst forth and produce the beginning, the pilot project, of that joined-up heaven-and-earth reality which is God’s plan for the whole world.
Great point that the resurrection wasn’t merely a signature miracle. No, it’s our first and foremost example of what God does when “given” a free hand, unchecked by sin. The resurrection is what redemption looks like when the defenders have been left in the dust and there’s an open court in front of it (bear with me, it’s March). Eventually we’ll all experience this.
