• Acts of the Apostles 2: 42-47

Luke’s Acts of the Apostles paints a vivid portrait of the communities of first believers.  We see those who had seen and heard the Risen Christ as well as those who heard their testimony and believed.  Both groups, eye-witnesses and those who accepted their testimony,  are busily engaged in a routine that had already become established: daily prayer in the Temple, “breaking bread” together regularly  in a shared meal, pouring over the Hebrew scriptures and interpreting them in ways to understand the life and fate of Jesus, and establishing a network of caring for their members.

• Psalm 23

Although the metaphor of a god as a shepherd of a particular people was not unique to the Hebrew people, it becomes a dominant meme in the Hebrew scriptures for a people who were homeless so much of their history–  Abraham and Sarah had been called to leave their homeland and go to a new place, then God’s people spent many years in slavery in Egypt, they wandered in the wilderness for forty years, lived under recurring threat by nearby superpowers, were led to captivity again this time in Babylon, endured dominance by the Greeks and then the Romans and subsequent diaspora.  The idee fixe of God as Shepherd to Israel, on whose care their very existence depends, permeates their entire history and is poignantly captured in this most prized psalm.

• I Peter 2: 19-25

In this letter attributed to Peter, there is a reminder that, as with any new religious group in the Roman Empire, the first followers of Jesus were under scrutiny for loyalty to the Emperor.  The content of this excerpt admonishes Christians: “Honor everyone.  Love the family of believers.  Fear God. Honor the Emperor.”  Addressed specifically to believers who were slaves in the homes of wealthy families, the writer urges them to endure punishment when it is fair and even when it is unfair.  The example is Christ.

• John 10: 1-10

John’s narrative develops a venerable metaphor in the Hebrew scriptures– God and God’s anointed servant-leaders as shepherds– into a description of the role, purpose and legitimacy of Jesus.  John wants to establish that Jesus does not “climb” in [to the sheep fold] by another way, “but the gate-keeper opens the gate for him….”  The followers of Jesus “hear his voice” and follow him, “because they know his voice.”  The followers will run after Jesus and shun the “stranger” because “they do not know the voice of strangers.”  (Three times John emphasizes that it is the distinctive “voice” of Jesus that inspires and enables his followers to distinguish between him and pretenders.)  John writes that when Jesus saw that those whom he was addressing “did not understand what  he was saying to them” he spoke more prosaically:  “I am the gate of the sheep.”  He then proffers the distinguishing trait that separates him from pretenders, whom he calls “thieves and bandits.”   “The thief only comes to steal and kill and destroy.  I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.”  This is the singular criterion by which the followers of Jesus should judge anything or anyone said in the name of Jesus!

The texts of the Second Testament describe the early community of post-resurrection  believers who quickly developed specific routines that did not go unnoticed by their neighbors and community authorities.  It was not just what they said that raised curiosity, but what they did.  Their words and their actions were of equal importance.  

It is notable that so many writers regarded as post-Modern latch onto the emphasis in  biblical texts on actions, deeds, and results.  Consider, for one example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote:  “Christianity is not a doctrine, not I mean, a theory about what has happened and what will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.”  (Culture and Value, p. 28)  Liberated from Western Medieval and Modern speculative and conceptual priorities, Christianity can return to its original balance of proclamation and action.  One feeds the other, both witness to the real, actual needs of people here and now.  Wittgenstein gets more specific:

“A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer.  [Here he inserts the name of Karl Barth.]  It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to express it.   Practice [in the original German text Wittgenstein uses the Greek word “praxis”] gives the words their sense.  (p. 85)

All the work of the church is closer to the originating experience of the post-resurrection church and has much more authentic impact when such words as “love” and “justice” describe and cause a result that “actually takes place in human life”  and “truly brings life… more abundant.”   The distinctive “voice” of Jesus that always rings true and exposes frauds has one and only one result–  Life-enhancing, Life-giving, a notable expansion of the conventional meaning of “life.”

In his passionate testimony in The Weakness of God: A Theology of Event, John Caputo writes of  the always Life-affirming results of God’s word:

“The power of the event that unfolds in the name of God is the unconditional, inextinguishable power of God’s Yes.  No matter what.”  “His (sic) absolute loyalty to life, his absolutely unconditional judgment– and promise.  Good, good… very good.”  (p. 90)  

The first community of believers were noticed for what they said and what they did.  It was the norm for the nascent community.  It was what set them apart.  The proclamation that love supersedes every form of degradation and death was made potent by the deeds the words produced.  This was the one reliable criterion that distinguished the authentic “voice” of Jesus from all other competing claims.  The result is always the same: life and life more abundantly.