Outside of a courtroom, the word “witness” does not enjoy a stellar reputation in these times. Nearly a century of the word being co-opted by the sect known as “Jehovah’s Witnesses” has, in the popular mind, firmly associated a religious “witness” with knocking on doors and aggressive evangelism, often accompanied by various heavy-handed tracts threatening doom for the unrepentant.
In one of my favorite books, The River Why by David James Duncan, the protagonist’s crude, home-spun mother refers to all visitors who come to the door with some religious purpose as “witlesses.” To her they are all ignorant, Bible-toting fools who very likely have not read very well the book they carry around.
It seems unlikely to me that any wholesale change in the cultural understanding of what a religious witness is will occur any time soon. Nonetheless, Christians can move beyond that cultural bottleneck to appreciate what a “witness” was in the early days of the church and how that word came to identify some of the most committed believers in our history.
In the last verse of our text for this Sunday, Acts 5:27-32 (readings from Acts take the place of readings from the Old Testament in the Easter season), Peter says “we are witnesses of these things,” “these things” being the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
In a time when Christians bearing witness can suggest testimony to many different aspects of faith, including Christian morality, end times warnings, and even simply, “what Jesus means to me,” it is good to recall that the first Christian witnesses were much like courtroom witnesses, those who beheld and recall a specific event and can testify to its occurrence. A step on the way to redeeming the act of witnessing today might be to freshly embrace our responsibility for just that one testimony, Christ has died and Christ is risen.
In addition, we will want to note that the Greek word for the witnesses which Peter claims he and the other apostles to be is martures, “martyrs.” The word which simply denoted testimony came to be associated with those Christians who testified to their own peril, in the face of opposition like is described in our text. Those who gave their lives for the faith were called “martyrs” because they were first and foremost what that word literally means, “witnesses.”
There is more to say about how Christian witness might look today, whether Peter’s brave insistence that “We ought to obey God rather than humans” implies a certain quality to true witness which will always make it abrasive or at least annoying. In that regard, let me offer just a thought from Chrysostom that what appears to be arrogant defiance of authority in Peter’s words is actually compassion for those who need to hear a message of good news, that Christ is risen and there is in Him, as verse 31 concludes, forgiveness of sins. That’s a message of love, not defiance.