“…People brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by.” – Acts 5:15 (NIV)
The image is almost overwhelming in its immediacy. The streets of Jerusalem lined with the sick and suffering, on beds, on mats, some of them perhaps carried considerable distances by desperate families who had heard what was happening and wanted even the edge of it. Not because Peter’s shadow had any inherent power, but because the Spirit of God was so visibly and undeniably operative in this community that people with no theological framework for what they were witnessing knew, instinctively, that proximity to these people was proximity to something they could not otherwise access.
Luke adds the detail that people from the towns surrounding Jerusalem brought their sick and those tormented by impure spirits, and all of them were healed. Not most of them. All of them. The miracle-working power of the Spirit operating through the early church was not occasional or selective in the way we might expect, producing results in some cases and leaving others disappointed. The Spirit was moving with such consistency and completeness that the community’s witness was becoming impossible to dismiss, even for those who were actively opposed to it.
This passage asks an uncomfortable question that I want to sit with honestly rather than move past quickly: what would have to change for this kind of expectation to characterise our own communities of faith? I am not suggesting that the specific form of these miracles, the shadow, the immediate completeness of the healing, must be reproduced exactly as though we are running a historical recreation. The Spirit works sovereignly and does not operate according to our formulaic expectations. But the underlying reality, that the Spirit’s presence in a community produces visible, unmistakable, supernatural fruit that draws the desperate toward it rather than repelling them, is presented in Acts not as a special dispensation for the first generation but as the ordinary consequence of genuine Spirit-habitation.
The crowds came to these streets not because the apostles had advertised their services or built an impressive infrastructure. They came because word spread that genuine healing was happening here, and genuine healing is the kind of report that travels faster than any organised publicity campaign. The early church did not chase its community. Its community came to it, drawn by the evidence of something real.
There is a version of Christian community that produces no such evidence, that is entirely explainable by natural means, that offers helpful social connection and ethical instruction and sincere good intentions without the supernatural dimension that Acts consistently presents as normal. And there is another version, the version Acts describes, where the Spirit’s presence is so genuine and so operative that the surrounding community cannot explain what it is seeing, and cannot stay away from it either.
Today, pray for your community of faith with specificity: Lord, let the evidence of your Spirit’s presence in our midst be so visible and so undeniable that the sick and desperate in our surrounding area are drawn to us, not by our marketing but by the unmistakable testimony of your power. And ask honestly: what in your own life needs to change for you to be part of that kind of community?
Prayer
Father, let the evidence of your Spirit’s presence in my community be impossible to explain by any natural means. I pray for signs and wonders, not for spectacle, but for the sake of the desperate and suffering people in my surrounding area who need what only you can give. Make us a community that draws the sick and broken by the sheer reality of your presence. In Jesus’ name, amen.
