Barring the Doors of Our Hearts
“Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”
- Acts 5:4
Sometimes the real story is in the silence, in what we don’t read in scripture. In my Bible there’s about a 10 millimeter gap of white space between the end of Acts 4 and the start of Acts 5, a chasm wide enough to imagine some serious intrigue.
At the end of Acts 4 we get another flavorful description of authentic Christian community. It’s a picture of sacrifice and generosity and unity, the chapter closing with Barnabas’ entrance onto the scene, his introduction being an act of ultimate personal surrender for the good of the team. His donation of proceeds from a first-century land sale must have drawn the roar of the crowd and the collective esteem of his brothers and sisters in Christ.
And it surely piqued the interest of Ananias and Sapphira.
When they closed the flap of their tent, imagine Ananias and Sapphira’s hushed tones and private conversation, coyly assessing the copious head nods and deeply-moved, tear-producing “Thank you, Barnabas” comments floating around the campfire. We don’t know whether it was Ananias or Sapphira who first voiced it, but likely it could have been as simple a line as “Wow, that was quite a gift Barnabas made,” and rather than prompting deepest gratitude, such a volley got returned with attention zeroed in on the accumulated praise rather than the enormity of the gift. “Lotta people shaking hands with Barnabas, that’s for sure.” We can imagine Ananias stroking his goatee as he considered, and perhaps coveted, Barnabas’ esteem.
We don’t know their motivation for sure, but speculation sure leads us to three likely suspects, each with fiendish tentacles quick to wrap themselves around un-centered souls: Jealousy, Pride, and Selfishness. In the very next chapter, Ananias and Sapphira make like Barnabas 2.0, except their external actions don’t pair nicely with the internal motivations. They’re met with Peter’s question that echoes every parent ever: “What made you think of doing such a thing?”
The question that shouts at the reader, some 2000 year later, is one of severity. Surely Jealousy and Pride and Selfishness still sidle up to VCRC members in 2021 and lurk in the church’s shadows, yet we never witness post-offering drama like the scenes described in Acts. Why do Ananias and Sapphira both pay the ultimate penalty for doing what we seemingly do all the time: fall prey to sin’s lure? The answer comes in looking at the unfolding story of Acts. We have a picture of true biblical community. The apostles knew they captured lightning in a bottle with the type of pure selfless caring bubble the followers knew. And similarly they knew that Jealousy and Pride and Self-Interest have no place at the table of togetherness. Such acts take a savage and cruel dagger to the heart of true Christian community.
Maybe the lesson to glean from this episode is the indispensable, life-giving nature of such community. When enough collective trust, transparency and selflessness converge in our midst to give us a foretaste of heaven, we need to ruthlessly root out forces that threaten to unravel such a tight bond. Maybe we can’t nor shouldn’t wield such weighty consequences as Peter doled out, but maybe to love the church is to bar the door of our hearts from those forces that seek our undoing. The fate of our fellowship depends on it.
~ Blake Hiemstra