Aeneas and Tabitha

 Last Saturday before Advent

I'm writing on Saturday, but for those of you who are reading this on Sunday, HAPPY ADVENT! For Episcopalians and especially for 1928 Prayer Book Anglicans, Advent is a penitential season, like Lent. They have the same color, Purple. While Methodists, or at least Methodist clergy, are sure that Advent is not Christmas (no Christmas carols please, until Christmas), we don't think of Advent as being penitential. Advent is expectation, waiting, patience, excitement

Back to today's Bible study. Please read Acts 9:32-43. 

Although the full title of our book is The Acts of the Apostles, it's really about two of the Apostles, Peter, in Acts 1-12 (excluding 8-9:31) and Paul, in Acts 9, 13-28. Our study today returns from Paul to Peter. The narrative over the next couple of chapters will move Peter from a ministry exclusively to Jews to into a ministry for all. It will also show Peter moving from the geographic Jewish world into gentile territory. It will also show Peter having to change dramatically his understanding God's mission through Christ. 

 

These last verses of chapter 9 show Peter continuing his ministry of healing, showing that the Apostles can do everything that Jesus did. Luke gives a very brief account of Peter healing a man named Aeneas in Lydda. Aeneas is a Greek name. We might even call it a pagan name. Our Aeneas is named after a hero in the Trojan War. In the Roman mind, he becomes first a Roman-like counterpart to Odysseus, the Trojan War hero who sailed the Mediterranean with many adventures in an effort to get back home to Ithaca in Greece in Homer's epic poem The Odyssey. The Roman poet Virgil wrote an epic poem in Latin, the Roman language, about Aeneas sailing the Mediterranean with many adventures to get to Italy and found the city of Rome. Homer wrote in the 8th century BC.; Virgil, in the 1st century BC, finishing the Aeneid in 19 BC. Christian read and translated it in fourth year Latin class in 1962-63. Whether our Aeneas in this Bible story knew the story of the Aeneid we don't know. 

 

Our Aeneas, bedridden for 8 years, was raised up by Peter in the same way Jesus raised up more than one handicapped person. 

Luke tells us that Lydda is near Joppa (modern day Jaffa), which is very near Caesarea Maritima, the Roman capital city of Judea. Peter is getting into the gentile world geographically. There he also finds Tabitha, a Jewish woman, who also goes by her Greek name Dorcas. Her name Tabitha is Aramaic. Both words mean "gazelle." Peter dramatically raises her from death. Many in the town come to faith in Christ. In our last verse Luke tells us that Peter stays in Joppa with Simon the tanner. Peter is getting dangerously close to gentiles. Simon, though a Jewish Christian, is in a profession that would have been considered unclean by Jewish priests and rabbis. In chapter 10 Peter will have to confront his anti-gentile bias head on. 

Stay tuned.

Faithfully,

Christian