Famous last words

Peter making his plea

“We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

   - Peter at the first ecumenical council of the Church as recorded in Acts 15:11

On my book shelf in my office I have a little treatise that was gifted to me several years ago. Famous Last Words: Fond Farewells, Deathbed Diatribes and Exclamations upon Expiration is just what it says it is: an assorted collection of quips and quotes of those on the brink of eternity. Included are everything from angst-ridden cries to odd and eye-brow raising comments. Here's a few:

“Well, folks, you'll soon see a baked Appel.” George Appel before being put to death by electric chair in

I bet he hears fine now

1928

…

“I shall hear in heaven!” Ludwig Van Beethoven, famous German composer who from the age of 31 on was afflicted by deafness

…

Or my favorite:

“They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-.” General John Sedgwick who during the Battle of the Wilderness, while everyone was diving for cover from Confederate sharpshooters, stood up and caught a bullet in the face.

Peter with a swashbuckling look

As “last words” go, Peter's impassioned speech before the Jerusalem council on the matter of Gentile admittance into the fellowship, is truly one for the ages. It could be argued that verse 11 of the fifteenth chapter is the pivot point of all that Luke has been trying to say in the Book of Acts: that the Church of Jesus is not specifically a Jewish one but a multinational family of believers bound together by common love and faith in the Lord Jesus. In one concise statement Peter captures the essence of what it means to be saved. He articulates the basic Christian belief that the Church has built all her teachings upon. Talk about “the rock” on which the Church is built (see Matthew 16:18)!

Peter's home in Capernaum?

Peter's journey to this moment was not a straight line, however. As Michael Card has pointed out in A Fragile Stone: The Emotional Life of Simon Peter recent archeological digs have uncovered the foundation of a large home attested to be Peter's eighty-four feet south of what was then the synagogue of Capernaum. “What kind of a person buys a house one door down from the synagogue?” asks Card. Indeed (assuming that it was his home.) He's an intimate inner-circle guy of the movement and pretty much is an eyewitness of almost every Jesus-story that is collected in the gospels.

After the Resurrection and before he returns to heaven, Jesus asks him to watch over the flock and take care of it. While there were no titles that distinguished him more superior than the remaining 10 apostles, you get the sense that they looked to him for leadership – and he gave it. It was his suggestion that they choose a replacement for Judas (Acts 1) and on the Day of Pentecost he is the one who articulates the message first that the Last Things have begun (Acts 2). For the first part of Acts, always his name is mentioned foremost – in the healing at the Gate Beautiful (Acts 3), in pronouncing judgment on Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5), and in the defense of their message before the Sanhedrin (Acts 4-5). For awhile he is larger than life – while Luke tells us the Lord was working wonders through the rest of the apostles (5:12), it's Peter's shadow that people want to fall on them (5:15). He is the paragon of all that a son of Abraham and a disciple of the Master Jesus should be.

Strong medicine

But in Acts 8, that image begins to be tarnished a bit. Through Philip, one of the original Seven Servers, God had opened up a door of ministry among the Samaritans of all people. Peter and John are delegated to go down and have a look-see to ascertain if this is on the level. They find that there are many Samaritans turning to Christ and in a strange irony it is his calloused hands that are laid upon them that they might receive the Holy Spirit as he once had (see One small touch) (Acts 8). But stranger than this are the events that play out and are recorded in Acts 10. While staying in the home of a tanner – an odd place to stay for a traveling holy man – he has a vision three times and while he's still wondering what it means there is a fateful knock at

Whaddya gonna do?

the door. By the next day he is preaching to a room full of Gentiles – and Roman ones at that. His message is one of the few sermons in Acts that are never finished. But unlike Stephen and Paul whose words are cut short due to the blood lust of a ravenous mob, the Holy Spirit preempts him as his hearers are caught up in the rapture of glossolalia. In response, good Law-abiding Jew he may be, he does what only seems logical according to the circumstances: he orders them to be baptized, Gentiles though they are. While he has some 'splaining to do before the Jerusalem council when they hear his story they accept the merits of it and make what sounds to my ears as a pretty “Duh”-statement: “So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life” (Acts 11:18). You think?

I know that's not fair to those first disciples. If all you've ever known is separation between those who are members of the Covenant and those who are not, it is not an easy thing to get that the rules were changing – and God was the One changing the rules! It makes me think that when Jesus spoke the words of the Great Commission the first time they heard that as Jewish men who were thinking only of the message being taken to the rest of their Jewish brethren throughout the world. The idea that God had a much bigger idea never even occurred to them.

After his miraculous prison break (Acts 12), he leaves Jerusalem to follow this strange path that the Lord had laid down for him. In his absence, the leadership of the Jerusalem church falls to James. As far as we know, he will return to the city only one more time to participate in the council where the matter concerning these new Gentile converts is determined. It is a gathering in which he will play a significant role. In the interim, he eventually ends up in Antioch a very cosmopolitan fellowship three hundred miles north of Jerusalem that has been integrating Gentile believers into their midst for quite some time and with relative ease. In fact, in time he will find himself enjoying table fellowship with quite of few of his Antiochian Gentile brethren – something that would be a scandal in Jerusalem.

St. Paul's Church in Antioch (today)

Getting dressed down in Antioch

But when certain “right-wingers” from the Jerusalem fellowship show up and begin to speak up about such liberal practices as actually sharing the Lord's Supper together with uncircumcised fellows, such is their persuasiveness that it causes him to waffle, to pull back from the otherwise collegial relations he was developing between him the Gentile believers in the Church. That's about the time when Paul and Barnabus get back from their year-long ministry trip in Galatia. When they had left the year before, they had left a harmonious fellowship that was much like the city they belonged to – ecumenical and diverse (see Acts 13:1-5). But they've come back to one that is now in disarray thanks to the folks from First Jerusalem. When Paul notices that even “the rock” is crumbling under the weight of such foolishness that those heavyweights from Jerusalem are throwing around, Peter earns a public dressing down (Galatians 2). Talk about awkward.

Which makes Peter's public defense of essentially Paul's “gospel” before the Jerusalem Council all the more amazing. I don't hear spite. I don't hear grudging acknowledgment of the truth of Paul's teaching. I hear a passionate plea to the very people he allowed to shame him into backpedaling in Antioch:

Getting it right this time

“God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.” (Acts 15:8-11)

This is his swan song, his famous last words. “With this speech Peter bows out of the book of Acts,” says Ajith Fernando. If you don't include the two letters he later pens, this the last time we hear from him in the narrative part of the New Testament. For the rest of his days he will be a man on the move, a missionary pastor going from place to place fulfilling what the Lord beside the Sea of Galilee had once asked him to do so many years before, feeding and caring for the flock of God.

Fernando makes this observation about Peter's actions that day:

“Conflicts in the church today are often marred by a partisanship that reduces debate to the level of politicking. People take sides depending on their experiences. A person who has humiliated someone else must be opposed and humiliated in return. Though the issues discussed seem to be principles, deep down a hurt self is causing havoc in the church. How different Peter was! He refused to let the past humiliation in Antioch color his actions at the council. Instead, he spoke up on behalf of the cause of Paul and Barnabus even before they themselves spoke.” (The NIV Application Commentary on the Book of Acts, p. 428)

I think that's what we call a big man today, a “rock” on which the Church of Jesus continues to be built.

Thanks, Peter, for being a big man