A Trip to the Library
AM Psalm 87, 90 • PM Psalm 136
1 Samuel 4:1b-11 • Acts 4:32-5:11 • Luke 21:20-28
Today’s reading from Acts recounts how early Christians held things in common. To express love, and perhaps to survive as a community, they were willing to share.
Except when they were not.
Thus we have the story of a member of the Christian community, Ananias, who sells some land, then gives some of the proceeds to the group, but holds some back. And gets caught at it. And dies for his trouble. When Peter (who himself sometimes has been a little sketchy in matters of faith) asks Ananias’s wife Sapphira about it, she dies, too.
I did an internet search using as a search term, “Why did Ananias hold back part of the money from sale of property?” The first item that turned up was a piece entitled “Why did God kill Ananias and Sapphira for lying?”
This raises two questions, neither of which I am ready to definitively answer here: First, why did Ananias and Sapphira have to die? Second, was it actually God who killed them?
A few weeks back, I wrote about Psalm 87, also part of today’s readings, about how God loves no place better than Zion. He records the names of people born there. There are celebrations of singing and dancing. God’s presence could easily be one of the things gushing forth from the “springs.” These are the kinds of scriptures I like to read.
I am less enthusiastic about reading scripture about killing, whether “justified” or not. It seems part of the human condition—after all, Cain killed Abel. In today’s reading from Samuel, thousands of Israelites die at the hands of the Philistines. Then thousands more. Of course, we know that eventually Israelites will have their turn at killing Philistines. This is seen as “justified.”
But is it justified when Elijah slaughters the prophets of Baal?
And when our elders first taught us about Joshua bringing down the walls of Jericho (maybe through singing and dancing!), they left out the part about his slaughtering women and children.
Marcus Borg argues “the Bible contains different voices (and thus different visions) of what life is about. And for each of the speakers, ‘what life is about’ meant ‘what life with God’ is about” (297). To this point, others have suggested that the Bible be considered a library. When we read about all this killing and dying, from Cain and Abel in Genesis, to the tens of thousands in Samuel, to Ananias and Sapphira in Acts, and further on, we have the opportunity to wrestle with different accounts of how different peoples have struggled with “life with God” throughout the ages.
Did God kill Ananias and Sapphira? For lying? It seems unlikely. But as my teacher, the late James Whitehead, used to say, I am going to pray on the matter. A lot.
And I am going to keep reading the Bible.
Work Cited
Borg, Marcus. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally. New York: Harper Collins (1989).
Written by James Gamble
James wrote his doctoral dissertation on Canadian writers Margaret Laurence and Anne Hébert.