Tales of the Unexpected: Acts 5

More mature readers (OK… ‘older folks’) may recall a TV series called Tales of the Unexpected that ran from 1979–1988. Apart from a dazzling array of guest stars, it’s probably best remembered for the involvement of Roald Dahl, who wrote most of the stories and narrated the introductions. Dahl was a resident of the Buckinghamshire village where we lived for some years, Great Missenden; the Dahl Museum is there.    

Anyway . . . in Acts 5:1–11, we have what I would call a tale of the unexpected: unexpected to me, at least. It’s one of those stories that you really rather wish wasn’t there. I would prefer to write about other biblical stories. I find this particular one strange and anomalous—but should I? In any event, I ought not to shy away from it. If I’m thinking these things, others probably will be as well, so hence this blog.

The passage is quite long, but requires reading in full for you to see what I mean:

1 Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

3 Then Peter said, ‘Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? 4 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.’

5 When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. 6 Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

7 About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. 8 Peter asked her, ‘Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that is the price.’

9 Peter said to her, ‘How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.’

10 At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. 11 Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

How, then, to read this event? In the hands of a preacher accustomed to assuming a ‘face value’ or ‘plain sense’ reading of texts, it would be easy to conclude this is a straightforward morality tale: “This couple lied, God was angry, so God killed them; Christians had better behave, or else.” Particularly useful, perhaps when the sermon topic is financial giving!

While this may be overly simplistic, we should beware domesticating the story too much—sanitising it of its shock features. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

As always, we should first ask ourselves what the immediate context might tell us. Remember that the three most important things about biblical interpretation are “Context, Context, Context.” Luke, the writer, has just painted a utopian picture of the early church at the time of its birth: Acts 2:42–47 and 4:31–37. There seems little doubt that Luke presents those passages as an idealised picture of what this new community of God's people looked like—and, by implication, as timelessly exemplary for the church. In fact, significantly perhaps, our passage contains the very first appearance in Acts of the Greek word for ‘church’: ekklesia.

In the final verses in the preceding chapter (remember there were no chapter breaks or verse numbers in the original), Luke reports that a man named Barnabas sold a field and gave all of the money to the church. Our passage then begins, as if in deliberate contrast to that, “Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property.” So far, so similar; but as we know, that’s when the stories diverge.    

Let’s deal with a couple of easy things that the story is not teaching. It’s clear that it’s not about compulsory giving; the property and the sale proceeds were always theirs (v.4). They are not put to death for failing to give enough. Whether they gave—and how much they gave—was always voluntary.   

But let’s stay with this context of the forming of the church as a newly constituted community of God’s people in Christ. The Swiss biblical scholar Daniel Marguerat sees a clear parallel between the entry of ‘original sin’ at the birth of the new human community in Genesis and the entry of ‘original sin’ at the birth of the new church community in Acts. If we think of Sin personified—as Paul speaks of it in Romans 5–7—we might even see both as something like Pearl Harbor-style pre-emptive attacks.

There is a clear ‘spiritual conflict’ God-versus-Satan backdrop. The fledgling church has repeatedly been described as “filled with the Holy Spirit” (e.g., Acts 4:31), and here in contrast we see Peter identifying that “Satan has filled” Ananias’ heart and that he has “lied to the Holy Spirit.” Here, too, we can see a parallel with the Genesis account, where the serpent's deception enters and corrupts the fledgling human community.    

Thus the offence—the deceit—is not simply against the church but, more profoundly, against the Holy Spirit: ‘You have not lied just to human beings but to God’ (v.4; see also v.9). And it’s not about money as such, it’s about attempting to deceive the Holy Spirit and the potentially malignant effect of such deceit on the church in which his presence dwells, if allowed to take root. What’s at stake is the integrity of the community in its future moral trajectory.

So far, so interesting, perhaps. But we haven’t yet tackled the big questions. Why were Ananias and Sapphira not offered the opportunity to repent and be forgiven? Did the Holy Spirit really summarily execute them? Was Peter complicit (at least in relation to Sapphira’s death)? Do modern-day prophets deliver those kinds of messages and outcomes? Did the Holy Spirit intend “great fear” to “seize the whole church and all who heard about these events,” to deliver a message? Does he continue to work that way today—are we all in danger? Should we all be fearful?

Taken at face value, perhaps most of those questions could be answered affirmatively. But I think that’s too shallow a reading. Firstly, this is something of a one-off story. It’s not something we see happening regularly; it’s an extraordinary story at an extraordinary moment in salvation history. Whenever we encounter a verse or passage that seems to go against the grain, we should beware reading paradigmatic or ‘normative’ status into it.

I don’t often quote the Westminster Confession, but there’s a principle there called ‘Scripture interprets Scripture.’ In its own words, “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture . . . it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.”

In other words, we should not allow the apparent (or uncertain) meaning of a particular text to go against the whole tenor of what Scripture broadly teaches. It’s a warning against inappropriate proof-texting: individual texts are to be interpreted against the backdrop of the larger theological witness of Scripture.

It gives us a grid of reference that prioritises what Scripture “mainly says”—and says often and clearly—over against what it occasionally says, or says unclearly. I think the Ananias and Sapphira story is in that latter category.

What about that “great fear” that “seized the whole church”?That doesn’t sound good, does it? The Greek word for ‘fear’ here is phobos. (Although our word ‘phobia’ ultimately derives from the same root,  they are not synonymous.) The semantic range of phobos does embrace sheer terror in some instances, but its biblical usage also means reverent awe. For example, Luke (who wrote both the Gospel and Acts) uses phobos in that way in Luke 7:16, where the NIV renders it, “They were all filled with awe and praised God.” The context? Jesus raising the only son of a widow in a town called Nain. So, no judgement, punishment, or terrorising going on in that story.

It would therefore be wrong to derive from this one story, against the tenor of Scripture as a whole, that God was deliberately terrorising the early church into obedience, and still less, that it is paradigmatic for our experience of him. Scripture stresses the love of God as fundamental to his character—1 John 4 says, ‘God is love’. He is never described as ‘God is fear’ or ‘God is wrath’.     

Yet, when all is said and done, we can’t escape the fact that two people dropped dead, and the whole church witnessed what must surely have been a terrifying event. Moreover, the punishment does seem disproportionate to the crime. And there is an uncomfortable irony in Peter's role. Luke has already told us that Peter himself denied Jesus three times (Luke 22:31–34, 54–62)—surely no trivial offence—yet Peter lived to experience forgiveness and restoration. Ananias and Sapphira are afforded no such opportunity.

We are not the first to grapple with the apparent moral injustice in the story, and various theories have been advanced, including those I’ve suggested here.       

I said earlier that we shouldn't domesticate the story. That means in either direction: neither “God kills dishonest Christians, so watch out” nor “The word phobos meant awe and respect, so nothing to see here.”

Reading the Bible well sometimes means letting difficult stories remain difficult. I think we can make good sense of why Luke tells this extraordinary story at this extraordinary point in the birth of the church, not least because there’s a timeless truth here that integrity in the church really, really matters.

What we shouldn’t do is either turn this story into a paradigmatic formula for how God responds to people’s sin or pretend that any of this makes the Ananias and Sapphira story any less a tale of the unexpected.