I find this week’s lesson from Acts 4:32 – 5:11 pretty scary. Like the story of Simon in a few weeks, it demonstrates the danger of approaching spiritual life from wrong motives and for duplicitous reasons. Almost as scary as the text itself is this YouTube video of “The Ballad of Ananias and Sapphira,” but it pretty much gets the lesson right.
As the end of that silly song suggests, the frightening thing is to examine one’s own life and heart to find those ways in which we may imagine we are fooling others spiritually, or worse, fooling God.
The text may seem like a total downer, but it’s good to remember that the episode begins with a beautiful description of sharing and common life among Christians. It’s a picture of kingdom life, of what happens when God truly reigns over us and we enter into the kind of living He created us for.
There is also a muted but distinct word of grace in Peter’s condemnation of the couples’ lie, verse 4, “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal?” In other words, Ananias and Sapphira were led into a totally unnecessary deception by the false perception that they had to attain some standard of giving set by others in the congregation. But the reality was their total freedom in Christ to give more or less according to their own desire. The only fault was the attempt to appear more generous than they actually were.
May we all learn the lesson of that blessed freedom which God gives to us through the grace of Jesus. We don’t have to leap some spiritual high bar to enjoy His love. It’s all a gift, given regardless of our personal merit or worthiness or accomplishment. Let’s not fail to receive that freeing grace and may we offer it to others in such a way so that no one is misled into thinking being a Christian means being a spiritual superstar.