1/7/2024 0 Comments Peter heals lame man acts 3![]() ![]() And as he did, the man’s feet and ankles were instantly healed and strengthened. In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk!”ħ Then Peter took the lame man by the right hand and helped him up. 6 But Peter said, “I don’t have any silver or gold for you. 3 When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for some money.Ĥ Peter and John looked at him intently, and Peter said, “Look at us!” 5 The lame man looked at them eagerly, expecting some money. Each day he was put beside the Temple gate, the one called the Beautiful Gate, so he could beg from the people going into the Temple. 2 As they approached the Temple, a man lame from birth was being carried in. They looked, they saw what they needed to do and they did it.3 Peter and John went to the Temple one afternoon to take part in the three o’clock prayer service. In the end, this turned out to be pretty spectacular, but they started with something simple – their interest, their attention, their compassion. They didn’t have any money, but they gave what they could. Peter and John had the right idea, because, after all, they’d been hanging out with Jesus for years. Because I’m aware of how often I look in anger and judgement I know how often I refuse to look at all. How we look at people can be a mark of how deep our faith has got into our bones, and frankly this terrifies me. Imagine, say, the looks given by passers-by when your autistic kid has a meltdown in the supermarket, or when your granddad does something inappropriate because his mind is slowly being clouded by Alzheimer’s, or when the friend who comes to church with you at Christmas has one too many tattoos and a flexible attitude to swearing, or when you read the latest tabloid campaign to characterise the disabled as ‘lazy’. Because the alternative to not looking is sometimes to stare in horror and disgust, and in some ways that’s worse. Let’s not kid ourselves though, it’s about how these guys looked at each other. There’s something going on here, something about compassion and interest and acknowledging the beggar’s humanity. Scores of people must have walked past him every day, some of them throwing him a few coins here and there, and yet how many people actually looked at him? After all, it’s scary how easy it is not to make eye contact when you’re dropping a quid at someone’s feet. I mean, the guy’s begging at the Temple gates, presumably because this was a high traffic area that gave him enough to live on. It’s taken years for me to twig that this seems to be about eye contact. “Peter looked straight at him, as did John. But here’s the line that I always saw as a strange detail to mention: They don’t have any, but instead heal his lameness so far, so typical for the New Testament. So Peter and John are going into the Temple in Jerusalem when a beggar asks them for money. There’s a part of me that still hates myself for that, but if I’m being honest, it’s not a very big part, and I can still studiously avoid making eye contact with people begging in places like Derby or Dudley or Birmingham, places I live and work. These skills also served me well in San Francisco, when I found myself stepping over someone sleeping on the pavement. I’ve convinced myself it’s a survival skill for the rare times I visit major cities when I was in Toronto back in 1999, I couldn’t handle seeing the homelessness problem, so within a couple of days I’d trained myself to walk faster, to look straight ahead, to not try and give pathetic scraps of change to the homeless woman standing outside a shopping centre, to the man lying on a sidewalk air vent. Over the years I’ve somehow made myself good at not looking. ![]()
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