Peter and Jesus and Elijah/Elisha - Reflctions on Acts 9:36-43, Easter 4, Year C

by John C. Holbert on Friday, March 21, 2025

          Acts 9 provides the reader a rich panoply of tales about the two leading spokespeople for the emerging gospel, Peter and Paul. Paul, as the first part of the chapter narrates, has been changed from a destroyer of the new faith to its principal messenger, when he was felled to the ground—literally—by a visitation from Jesus himself. Now Luke returns us to tales of Peter, that great preacher from Acts 2; with two spectacular healing stories, we are told that the same spirit that motivated the ministry of Jesus now resides in his follower, Peter. In addition, these healings are fully reminiscent of similar healings in the Hebrew Bible stories of Elijah and Elisha. In that way, Luke establishes a direct line for the spirit’s work from the Hebrew Bible to the story of Jesus to the work of the first messengers of Jesus’ life and ministry.

         Peter is said to be a kind of itinerant minister in Judea and Samaria, going through “every place,” visiting first the “holy ones in Lydda” (Acts 9:32). Peter is presented as one anxious, or on call, to come when asked to play the ministerial role as needed. All of this activity appears to prepare us for Peter’s crucial work to and for the Gentiles, inaugurated with the Roman Cornelius in the next chapter. It is interesting and telling to note that that Gentile work, so inimical to Jews, and so controversial for the early Christians, was begun not by the persecutor of Christians, Saul/Paul, but by Peter, the original denier of Jesus, but now the veritable lion for him. Luke spends fully six chapters struggling with the beginning of the Gentile mission, obviously due to its sharply controversial nature.

         After healing the paralyzed Aeneas (Acts 9:34), a clear echo of Jesus’s healing of a paralytic in Luke 5:17-26, Peter is then called to Joppa, near the coast. While he was working in Lydda, a well-known and deeply saintly woman named Tabitha, an Aramaic name related to the Hebrew for “gazelle” dies. Luke helpfully translates the word into Greek, Dorcas, also meaning gazelle. Perhaps more importantly, Luke uses a term for a woman used nowhere else in the New Testament. He calls her a “woman disciple” (mathetria), suggesting that she was seen precisely as a female disciple of Jesus, fully equal in status to any other male disciple. Of course, it is Luke’s pattern to follow a story about a man (Aeneas) with one about a woman (Tabitha), but it is surely noteworthy that his designation for her is unique and should not be overlooked.

         Dorcas, one of the important widows in Joppa, has died and been placed in an upper room (hyperoon); that is reminiscent of the tale from 1 Kings 17:19 where the widow healed by Elijah is first placed in an “upper room,” the Septuagint using the same word. Upon Peter’s arrival, “all the weeping widows” came to him, but instead of asking for him to raise their dead friend to life, bring to him “the tunics and cloaks she had made while she was with them” (Acts 9:39). Peter sent all of them outside, then prayed, and commanded “Tabitha, arise!” (Acts 9:40). The verb “arise” is obviously that same verb used to describe the resurrection of Jesus in numerous places in both the Gospel and the Acts. And there is an equally obvious relationship between the raising of the little girl by Jesus in Luke 8:49-56: messengers are used; bystanders weep; all are asked to leave the healing room; the call to rise; the taking of the hand. Also, when Tabitha has been raised, she was “presented to them as alive,” employing the same phrase that was used for the resurrection appearances of Jesus in Acts 1:3.

         Furthermore, the paralytic and deceased healings are echoed not only in Luke’s Gospel, but also in tales from the prophets Elijah and Elisha at 1 Kings 17:17-24 and 2 Kings 4:32-37. There can be little doubt that Peter is an authentic representative of that long line of prophets that “work signs and wonders among the people.” Once again, Peter is emphasized as ready and able to begin the crucial Gentile ministry, thus fulfilling what God has had in mind from the world’s foundation, namely the gift of salvation and forgiveness to the entire world, not only for the chosen people, the Jews. The resurrection of Jesus Messiah, mirrored by the resurrection of Tabitha, indicates the resurrection power that will move the early church to spread its work through the known Roman world, just as Luke promised in Acts 1:8: “You will receive a power from the Holy Spirit coming upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all of Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” That same call, centered in resurrection faith, still motivates us as we seek to follow the resurrected one, fulfilling that call for us.