WTF Bible Moments: Ananias and Sapphira

There are a lot of WTF moments in the Bible. There's the one from the Old Testament where a guy tries to catch the Ark of the Covenant from falling and is zapped by God for it. "But wait," you think reading this for the first time, "wasn't he trying to help?" Then there's the one where some teenagers call Elijah "old baldy" and then God sends bears to maul the kids for it. Yeah, that seems a bit harsh, too.

Most of these WTF moments are found in the Old Testament, but there is at least one in the New Testament that leaves people scratching their heads -- the story of Ananias and Sapphira. You know how it goes, they are a little stingy with giving (as in they don't give 100% of their income to the church) and God strikes them both dead while Peter says "So there!"

We read this story and are shocked and disturbed by it. I mean, let's be honest, if someone you know was struck dead -- for any reason at all -- you would be shocked and disturbed of course, but you don't give 100% of your income to the church, and no one you know does either. So why are you not dead? Again, like with the bears and the bald guy story, the consequence seems shockingly out of proportion here.

The intent of the story is clearly not that we think, "Wow, God is being really unjust here," but that is exactly what we do think when we read this. If the point of the story was supposed to be something like, "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had" (Acts 4:32), we are so distracted by the killing of this poor couple that this point is completely lost on us. Instead the story becomes about us questioning God's character. Is God like Jesus? What about Ananias and Sapphira?

A common approach to dealing with this kind of thing in the Bible is to either seek to explain why the violence is in fact good and right (the conservative approach), or to seek to show that what seems really violent was actually merciful and nice, and we are just misreading it (the progressive approach). In both cases, the approach is really kind of similar. It involves lots of "well, you have to understand that the Greek word here really means..." arguments, and in the end comes out to trying to make the problem go away so we can say that the Bible supports our view (regardless of whether this is a conservative or progressive view).

I can of course understand the appeal of this approach, but it is ultimately dishonest. Sure, there are times where we really do misunderstand, but then there are stories like Ananias and Sapphira which are... well... pretty much just what you think they are. It's a story about a God who is violent, and who kills disobedient people. The intent is to fill you with terror. The story says exactly that, "Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events" (Acts 5:11).

So how do we make sense of this? Let's consider the context. These are a people who have a history of the prophets telling them that whenever someone is sick, or a natural disaster happens like an earthquake, famine, fire, and so on, that God was punishing them. If you got cancer back then the assumption was you did something bad. If a hurricane destroyed your house this must be because you were guilty and were being punished. If you were born with a deformity or mental handicap then this must mean you were cursed.

We don't think that today. It's a really awful thing to think. And the reason we know that, frankly, has a lot to do with Jesus changing how we see the disadvantaged, the poor, the sick, and the unclean. There is a major shift in the New Testament that pushes back against this view that suffering is deserved punishment for sin (a view that was not only typical of Judaism at the time, but also of Greco-Roman culture as well). We see the beginnings of this protest in the Old Testament in books like Job, the Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, and Jesus continues in that tradition of protest, taking it to a new level.

But changing a people's mind about something that they have believed for centuries does not happen over night, or even over a few decades. So we still do find in the New Testament examples of people holding on to the narrative of a punishing and violent God. Here in this story we see people applying the same explanation that had been given over and over when bad things happened -- someone has a crippling illness, someone dies of a heart attack, someone is assaulted by robbers, someone's roof caves in -- and their pre-scientific go-to explanation is always "God did that, so you must be guilty."

Maybe Ananias and Sapphira died of a heart attack. Maybe the story was exaggerated so much by the time it got to Luke that we can't really know the full details of what actually happened, but what I do think we can say is that this is an example of where the New Testament is still (to borrow a term from Girard) a text in travail, a text in labor pains. Just as the New Testament has a less than ultimate view of slavery, so in places it has a less than ultimate view of who God is.

As with slavery, this is where we need to learn to read on a trajectory, to recognize where the New Testament is headed -- in this case in understanding that Jesus shows us the ultimate revelation of God's heart and character -- and where we need to learn to plot a course that can take us beyond where they were able to get at the time leading us to where Jesus is pointing us.

The view of God we see in Ananias and Sapphira is the old Zeus/Mars/Yahweh, the warrior view of God, and it is a wrong understanding of who God is. It just does not line up with reality. God simply does not kill bad people. Maybe we even wish he did, but that is just not how life works.

The New Testament has an alternative understanding of a God revealed in weakness, a God found in the horror, shame, and failure of the cross. It is a vision of God that is, if you really can face it, scandalous and shocking. As Juergen Moltmann has pointed out, this vision of God is way more radical than any atheism. Yet somehow -- just as the cross leads to Resurrection -- it is an understanding of God that can lead us to life and hope that is stronger than death.

Hey look, this is a post about Easter. Bet you didn't see that one coming!