Jonah and St. Simon Tanner

Acts 10:44-48 Gentiles Receive the Holy Spirit

While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days. (NRSV)

Through the Easter season, instead of a lesson from the Hebrew bible we are reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, tomorrow Acts 10:44-48. An interesting little snippet, it’s actually part of Luke’s (the anonymous author of the Gospel according to Luke apparently also wrote Acts) story of Simon Peter traveling around the Judean countryside proclaiming Christ crucified and raised. At the moment, The Adventures of Peter the Apostle had him staying at a house by the sea in Joppa. 

A seaport on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, we remember Joppa from another story. When λογος κυριου as the Septuagint has it, the Word of the Lord — oh my is this the same λογος κυριου that Gospel John proclaims in his prologue? — comes to Jonah and orders him to go preach in Nineveh. Escared essless to use the vulgate, Jonah shows the white feather, turns tail and lights out in the opposite direction, to run as far away from λογος κυριου as he can get. Jonah flees to Joppa to take a berth in a ship bound for Tarshish, all the way over on the western side of the Mediterranean Sea, and we know the rest of that spell. 

So anyway, here we are back in Joppa eight centuries later, this time with Simon Peter, staying in a seaside cottage on the outskirts of town. Peter is in Joppa (also Jaffa and Yafa), a seaport in use 4,000 years, back in the bronze age, where now is Tel Aviv. Peter’s host is a tanner, also named Simon, and it strikes me that Simon Tanner lives outside the city limits because he stinks. As happens, his skin has absorbed the stench of long years in the tanning trade and he lives at the shore where the sea breeze whisks away the smell of him. Simon Peter probably has a bad cold is my thought. 

Peter is famously in Joppa where he raises the kind and gentle Tabitha, called Dorcas, from the dead. Word about what Peter has done gets around, including as far as Caesarea a few miles up the coast. The name “Caesarea” tells me the town is an imperial city for housing retired Roman soldiers, and sure enough a resident there, an Italian centurion named Cornelius, a gentile, is visited by λογος κυριου who tells Cornelius about Simon Peter and tells the centurion to summon Peter. To set him up for this call, Peter, a Jew though not a Judean, has had a vision

 in which he is visited by λογος κυριου and told that nothing God has made is to be considered unclean, clearing the way for Peter to visit the gentile and stay in his home. Summoned then, Peter goes up the beach to Caesarea, where he meets a gathering of Cornelius and his relatives and close friends. There, Peter tells them about Christ crucified and raised. The little assembly of Gentiles is so filled with τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον that Peter has them baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. 

That’s not the end of Peter’s adventure, but it may be the first report of the baptism of gentiles into the death and resurrection of Christ, which is relevant to Easter, our season of baptism; and that’s why we will hear it in church tomorrow morning, the Sixth Sunday of Easter.

TW+ enjoying the old stories