What God Has Made Clean

While all that was going on, Peter was out on the road, going round from one gathering to another, and he came down to the town of Lydda. There was a man there named Aeneas who had been lying on a mat for eight years, because he could not move. “Aeneas, Jesus Christ makes you well,” Peter said. “Get up and roll up your own bed.” And he got up. Everybody who lived in Lydda and out on the plain of Sharon saw him, and they turned to the Lord.

Down the road at Joppa, by the sea, there was a follower named Tabitha — in Greek her name was Dorcas, which means gazelle. She spent her life doing kind things. She made clothes for people who had none, and she looked after the widows of that town, and everybody knew it. And she got sick, and she died. They washed her and laid her in the upstairs room. Lydda was near, and the followers had heard that Peter was there, so they sent two men to him in a hurry. “Please come to us. Do not wait.”

Peter went with them. When he came they took him straight up to the upstairs room, and all the widows were standing round the bed crying. And they had brought out the tunics and the coats that Dorcas had made while she was still with them, and they were holding them up for him to see — this one, and this one, and this one. Peter sent them all out of the room. Then he knelt down and prayed. Then he turned to her and said, “Tabitha, get up.” And she opened her eyes, and saw Peter, and sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her onto her feet, and then he called the holy ones and the widows back in and gave her to them alive. The whole of Joppa heard about it, and a great many people trusted the Lord. And Peter stayed on in Joppa a good while, in the house of a tanner named Simon, down by the sea.

Thirty miles up the coast, in Caesarea, there was a Roman officer named Cornelius, a commander of a hundred men in the company they called the Italian. He was not a Jew. He was a soldier of the army that was holding the country down. But he feared God, and so did everybody in his house; he gave a great deal away to poor people, and he prayed to God all the time.

One afternoon at three o’clock he saw, plainly, a messenger of God come into the room. “Cornelius.” He stared at him, frightened. “What is it, Lord?” “Your prayers and the kind things you have done have gone up in front of God, and he has remembered them. Now send men to Joppa and fetch a man called Simon, the one they call Peter. He is staying with Simon the tanner, in the house by the sea.” When the messenger had gone, Cornelius called two of his household servants and a soldier who prayed the way he did, told them the whole thing, and sent them off to Joppa.

The next day, while those three were still on the road and coming near the town, Peter went up onto the flat roof of the tanner’s house to pray. It was noon. He was hungry, and while they were getting food ready downstairs, something came over him. He saw heaven open, and something coming down out of it like a great sheet, let down by its four corners onto the ground. And it was full of animals — every four-footed animal there is, and the things that creep along the ground, and the birds of the sky. There were animals in it that no Jew had ever been allowed to eat, not once, in all the hundreds of years since Moses. And a voice said, “Get up, Peter. Kill, and eat.” “Not for anything, Lord,” said Peter. “I have never in my life eaten anything common or unclean.” “What God has made clean, you must not call common.” And it happened three times over, the same words each time. Then the whole sheet was taken back up into heaven.

Peter sat on the roof completely at a loss, turning it over and getting nowhere. And while he was sitting there, the three men from Caesarea came to the gate downstairs and called up to ask whether a Simon called Peter was staying in that house. The Spirit told him: three men are looking for you; go down and go with them, and do not hesitate about it at all, because I sent them. So Peter went down. “I am the man you are looking for. What have you come for?” “Cornelius sent us — a commander of a hundred, an upright man who fears God, and every Jew in the place speaks well of him. A holy messenger told him to send for you and to listen to what you say.” So Peter took them in and gave them beds for the night; and in the morning he went with them, and some of the brothers from Joppa went too.

Cornelius was waiting for them. He had called in his relatives and his closest friends, so the house was full of people, and not one of them was a Jew. When Peter came in, Cornelius went down at his feet. “Stand up,” said Peter, and pulled him up. “I am only a man myself.”

And then Peter walked in, talking with him, and stood in the middle of that crowded room — a room he had been brought up all his life never to walk into. “You know it is against our law for a Jewish man to keep company with a foreigner, or to go into his house,” he said. “And God has shown me that I must not call any person common or unclean. That is why I came without arguing when you sent for me. So tell me: why did you send?” “Four days ago, at this very hour, I was praying here in my house at three in the afternoon,” said Cornelius, “and a man stood in front of me in shining clothes and said, ‘Cornelius, your prayer has been heard, and the kind things you have done have been remembered in front of God. Send to Joppa for Simon who is called Peter.’ So I sent for you straight away, and it was good of you to come. And now here we all are, in front of God, to hear everything the Lord has told you to say.”

So Peter began. “Now I really do understand that God does not go by who a man is. In every nation, the one who fears him and does what is right is welcome to him. He sent his word to the children of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ — and that one is Lord of everybody. You know yourselves what happened all through Judea, starting up in Galilee after the immersing John preached: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he went about doing good and healing everybody who was held down by the Accuser, because God was with him. And we are witnesses of everything he did, in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a tree. God raised him up on the third day and let him be seen — not by everybody, but by the witnesses God had chosen beforehand, by us, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he told us to say it out to the people, and to say it plainly: this is the one God has marked out to be judge of the living and the dead. Every one of the prophets says the same about him — that everybody who trusts him has his sins forgiven through his name.”

Peter did not get to finish. While he was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell on all of them — everybody in the room who was listening to him. And the Jewish believers who had come up with Peter stood there with their mouths open, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on people who were not Jews at all. They could hear them speaking in other languages and praising God. “Can anybody keep the water back from these people?” said Peter. “They have received the Holy Spirit just as we did.” And he gave orders for them to be immersed in the name of Jesus Christ. And they asked him to stay on with them a few days, and he did.

The news got to Jerusalem before Peter did, and it did not go down well. “You went into the houses of men who are not circumcised, and you ate with them,” they said. So Peter started at the beginning and told them the whole thing in order: the roof at noon, the sheet coming down, the voice saying it three times over, the three men standing at the gate at that very moment, the Spirit telling him to go with them and make no difference between one man and another, the six brothers who went with him, and what Cornelius had seen standing in his house. “And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them just as he fell on us at the beginning. And I remembered what the Lord used to say — ‘John immersed with water, but you will be immersed in the Holy Spirit.’ So if God gave them the same gift he gave us when we trusted the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in God’s way?”

That stopped the argument. They went quiet, all of them, and then they praised God. “So God has given a change of mind that leads to life to the nations too.”

Meanwhile the ones who had been scattered when Stephen was killed had gone a long way — up into Phoenicia, over to Cyprus, and as far as Antioch, which was one of the great cities of the world. And they had told the good news to Jews only, because that is what they knew. But some of them, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went into Antioch and told the Greeks as well. And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great many turned to the Lord. When Jerusalem heard about it they sent Barnabas up to Antioch. He came, and he saw what God had done there, and he was glad, and he told them all to hold on to the Lord with all their heart — because he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and full of trust. And a big crowd was added to the Lord.

Then Barnabas went off to Tarsus to look for Saul. He found him, and brought him back to Antioch, and the two of them stayed there a whole year, meeting with the church and teaching a great many people. And it was in Antioch, in that mixed-up city full of every sort of person, that the followers were first called Christians.

In those days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch, and one of them named Agabus stood up and said, through the Spirit, that a great famine was coming over the whole world. It came, in the days of Claudius the emperor. So the followers at Antioch each decided what he could afford, and sent help to the brothers living in Judea, by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.

And about that time King Herod laid hands on some of the church to do them harm. He killed James with the sword — James the brother of John, one of the fishermen Jesus had called up out of the boats by the lake. He was the first of the twelve to die. And when Herod saw how much that pleased people, he arrested Peter too. It was the days of Bread Without Yeast. He put him in prison and set four squads of four soldiers each to guard him, meaning to bring him out in front of the people once the Passover was over. So Peter was kept in prison. And the church prayed to God for him, hard, and did not stop.

The night before Herod meant to bring him out, Peter was asleep between two soldiers, chained by the wrists to both of them, with guards on the door. And a messenger of the Lord was standing there, and the cell was full of light. He hit Peter on the side to wake him up. “Get up. Quickly.” And the chains fell off Peter’s hands. “Put your belt on and tie your sandals.” Peter did it. “Put your coat round you and follow me.”

So he followed him out, and all the way he thought he was seeing a vision. He did not believe any of it was really happening. They went past the first guard post. They went past the second. And they came to the great iron gate that leads into the city, and it opened for them by itself, and they walked out through it and on down one street — and then Peter was standing there on his own. And he came to himself in the dark, in an empty street, with his coat round him and no chains on. “Now I know it is true,” he said. “The Lord sent his messenger and got me out of Herod’s hand, and out of everything the people were expecting to see.”

He knew where everybody would be. He went to the house of Mary, the mother of John who is called Mark, where a good many of them were gathered together praying — praying, at that very hour, for him. He knocked at the door of the gateway, and a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer it. And when she heard Peter’s voice through the door she was so glad that she never opened it at all. She left him standing out in the street and ran back inside shouting that Peter was at the gate. “You are out of your mind,” they said. She kept saying it was true. “It is his messenger, then,” they said. And all this time Peter was still outside, knocking. When they finally went and opened the door and saw him standing there, they could hardly stand up themselves.

He waved at them with his hand to be quiet, and told them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. “Tell James and the brothers,” he said. And then he went out, and away to another place. In the morning there was a great deal of trouble among the soldiers about what could possibly have become of Peter. Herod hunted for him and could not find him, and questioned the guards and had them led away. Then he went down from Judea to Caesarea and stayed there.

On a set day Herod put on his royal clothes and sat down on the judgment seat and made a speech to the people, and the people called out to him: “That is the voice of a god, and not of a man!” He took the glory that belonged to God and kept it for himself. And a messenger of the Lord struck him, and he was eaten by worms, and he died. But the word of God went on growing, and there was more of it every year. And Barnabas and Saul finished what they had come to Jerusalem to do, and went back to Antioch, and took with them John, the one called Mark.