Those obstreperous idiots - Living by the Word - Acts 4:5-12 - Column

THERE IS a downside to all the talk in Psalm 23 and John 10 about being God's sheep. Perhaps my attitude is jaundiced by my reading of the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt, 25:31-46). I have always sympathized with the goats in that parable, I can see good sheep being separated from bad sheep, and good goats from bad, but to be blasted simply for being what you are--a goat--seems unjust. Besides, goats are more interesting. They have minds of their own, they don't follow blindly, they are rambunctious, and they eat anything. Surely God prefers goats to sheep.

The lectionary readings, however, stress the Good Shepherd and Christ's willingness to lay down his life for the sheep (see also 1 John 3:16). But I am still wary of these texts. Christians have been instilled with a sheepish docility that has played into the hands of the Powers for centuries. Obedience has been made the highest Christian virtue, obedience that was to be paid to Christ's representatives on earth, the rulers and the clergy. As a result, Christians have colluded in their own injury. They have accepted without resistance totalitarian rulers. They have been submissive in the face of tyrannous hierarchies in church and state, corporations and schools. Women have submitted to battering, economic exploitation and wage inequality. Men have been led off to war like sheep, flocking to their doom without resistance, as if to do so were the height of glory.

Sheep. Bah!

There is nothing sheepish, however, in the reading from Acts. Peter and John have been arrested by the authorities (identified here as "archons," the biblical word for the principalities and powers) for healing a man and preaching the resurrection of the Jesus these authorities had killed. A night in the pokey does nothing to dampen their spirits. Normally, "idiots" (idiotai, common) are cowed by the panoply of power and the bearing of the powerful. But not these goats. They use the occasion of their arraignment as a platform for preaching. "When they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and idiotai, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus." They had, in fact, observed that this was trademark behavior for those who had been with Jesus. Jesus takes sheep and makes them goats. He takes those who have internalized the system of ranking and stratification as divinely ordained and frees them from these delusions. He awakens common, ordinary people who have never before sensed their power and sends them into the very maw of the System to denounce it.

The Powers are not stupid. They sense the genuine threat this empowerment poses for their hegemony. This danger must be met head on. The entire priestly oligarchy turns out: "Their rulers, elders and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family." These Powers ask right away, "By what power or by what name did you do this?" Obviously they couldn't have done it on their own; someone had to put them up to it. And indeed he did. But the frightening thing is that although the authorities had killed the instigator, his comrades were stronger than ever.

The effrontery of these idiotai! They make no effort to plea bargain, or to reassure their captors of their harmlessness. Instead, they revel in their newfound power. They stick it to the authorities: You murdered the man who has empowered us. It is by his power that this formerly crippled man now stands before you whole. Worse for you, this "criminal" you had the Romans execute is destined to become the cornerstone, for "there is salvation in no one else...no other name under heaven by which we must be saved."

That concluding triumphal statement has caused havoc in human history. Christians armed with the certainty that they alone possessed God's truth tore about the globe destroying religions and spiritualities superior to their own. Let us apologize to the countless victims slaughtered by Christian conquistadors for refusing to convert; let us beg for mercy from God and humanity for the arrogance of Christianity in its spiritual scorched-earth-and-take-no-captives missionary juggernaut.

But if we attend to what Peter and John are up to, we hear the truth in what they say. Jesus was, if fact, the first person to propound a consistent critique of the domination system. Building on the prophets, he stripped away the facade of goodness constructed by the Powers and exposed their violence and greed. In the same way that we might say that Adam Smith was the revealer of capitalism and Karl Marx the revealer of the class system, Jesus revealed the domination system. Docile, sheeplike human beings don't even realize the depth of their oppression, but accept their inferior status as a God-given fate to be endured. The poor have no idea that their liberation is the special concern of God.

If "saved" means being united and reconciled with God, then Acts 4:12 is palpably false. There are many authentic roads to God, and no religion holds the franchise for illumination. But if "saved" here means being delivered from the bondage and delusions of the domination system, and being empowered to set others free--if it means ultimately transforming the system itself and renouncing domination in all its forms--then Jesus is indeed the one who can yet save the world from the domination system. And that, it seems to me, is a factual statement with which persons of all religions might agree.