21st Day of Easter, Saturday May 2: Acts 12:1-19

As if famine weren’t enough, persecution is renewed in Jerusalem. Herod the local Roman subordinate governor has James, brother of John, executed, and seeing it’s popular with the Judeans, he locks up Peter. Acts is starting to style ‘Jews’ as separate from ‘Christians’, with the former being the dominant religious group bullying or at least not sharing protection with the latter. However, reading in our context, the same words come out anti-Semitic. Look out lest you misread.

Jailbreak for Peter is another good one. An angel comes, the fetters fall, and Peter is led past the guards. Even Peter thinks it’s a dream or vision, until he finds himself actually outside. Like the resurrection appearances, there’s a studied ambiguity about the physical or spiritual, miraculous or supernatural, character of God’s intervention in this and other jailbreaks, like healings and raisings. Have you ever been in prison, or visited in one? Why not? Class, race, and gender change your odds. Your perspective may be distorted by lack of experience. How about coercion that kept you in school or in hospital? What’s it like to get out?

There’s a great cameo for Rhoda here. Peter, on the lam, heads for the home of Mary, mother of John Mark. Rhoda the maid hears him at the door, and is so flustered she doesn’t let him in, but reports his arrival. Continuing the luminal ambiguity between angels, visions, dreams, miracles, or real physical experience, the account asserts that he really was out – and that in fact Herod executed the guards for letting him go, and left Jerusalem for his regional command Caesarea.