5th Day of Easter, Thursday April 16, Acts 3:1-26

So what do you make of Peter healing ‘in the name of Jesus’? Luke/Acts gives us a sort of franchise version – just as Jesus sent the 72 in Luke, now the apostles carry on the healing work. Is this Jesus’ successor, or franchisee? Is the healing a loss leader, to gather a crowd for the preaching that follows?

Worse, what do you make of Peter’s sermon? We ducked the issue yesterday, but who is Peter accusing of having killed Jesus, and with what consequences? Will we just let it lie that ‘the Jews killed Jesus’ – and read the rest of the book as ‘since they rejected, they were replaced by Gentile successors’? God forbid, coming up on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Ha’Shoah!

I prefer to read Peter as a good religious calling other religious to confess and repent their complicity in a community of faith. Peter’s talking to ‘us’ as one of us here – in coming days we’ll start dealing with the ‘them’ messages – but not yet. We are not listening in on Peter condemning a ‘them’ group, but challenging us, then and now, to consider how we have misread and misused what God gave us. This is a call to confess, not to blame.