Daily Retreat 04/26/06

2006 Apr 26 Wed: Easter Weekday

Acts 5: 17-26/ Ps 33(34): 2-3. 4-5. 6-7. 8-9/ Jn 3: 16-21

From today’s readings: "Go and take your place in the temple area, and tell the people everything about this life.... The Lord hears the cry of the poor.... God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life."

WARNING - You can’t lie to God!

The Sunday lectionary readings are on a three year cycle, and the daily readings are on a two year cycle, and together, that makes for a pretty good tour of scripture over the course of those years, but even so, not every verse of the Bible is included in the lectionary. While almost the entire Acts of the Apostles is covered in the daily readings after Easter, if you’ve been following the daily readings in your Bible, you probably noted that the first verses of chapter 5 of the Acts have been skipped over, including vv. 1-12 (which I invite you to read now!), the unsettling incident with Ananias and Sapphira. This husband and wife sold a piece of property, but unlike Barnabas (cf. Acts 4:32-37), the deceptive couple only contributed a part of the proceeds, even though they feigned that they had given all. Because they lied to the Holy Spirit, they were struck dead on the spot!

If one focuses on the harshness and immediacy of their punishment, the point can easily be missed, which is probably why these verses are omitted from the lectionary. But the central message here certainly IS NOT that God instantly strikes dead anyone who steps out of line (in which case, none of us would be around to read this!), nor was the issue about Ananias’ and Sapphira’s limited generosity (cf. v. 4). Rather, their sin was in their lie to the Holy Spirit (v. 3). God, of course, cannot be deceived, so anyone who deliberately attempts to do so (as Ananias and Sapphira tried) is revealing a fundamental lack of faith in God as God! After all, if a person thinks he can ever fool God, that’s the same as saying the person thinks he’s smarter than God, and if that could be the case, the person wouldn’t need God at all!

Mark Twain reflected on this same insight in Huckleberry Finn, although from a different angle. The lead character, the unsophisticated boy Huck Finn, finds himself helping Jim, a runaway slave, to make good his escape. Haunted by the social mores of the ante-bellum south, which maintained that turning in the runaway was the right thing to do, Huck thinks it’s his duty to ask God for strength to betray his friend Jim, but he ultimately shies away from petitioning God’s help to do something that his conscience forbids, concluding in chapter 31, "You can’t pray a lie!"

Let the example of Ananias and Sapphira serve as an urgent warning to every one of us: You can’t fool God, and you can’t pray a lie - those who try to do so are seeking death by dismantling the very basis of their own faith!