Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
What God has cleansed, do not call unclean
Acts 10:9-16
9 Now on the next day as they were on their journey and got close to the city, Peter went up on the housetop to pray at about noon. · WEB
Peter is shown a sheet of animals and told to eat, refuses three times, and is left baffled — because the vision's subject is not on the sheet.
The timing is arranged to the hour. As the messengers approach the city, Peter goes up on the roof to pray at about noon, becomes hungry, and while food is being prepared falls into a trance. A man who wants his lunch is shown a meal.
What he sees is a container like a great sheet lowered by four corners, holding all kinds of four-footed animals of the earth, wild animals, reptiles, and birds of the sky. The categories are comprehensive and deliberately mixed. Then the command: Rise, Peter, kill and eat.
His refusal is instant and is stated as a lifelong record. Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean. Two words are used, and they are not synonyms. Unclean is what the law itself never permitted as food; common is what was permissible in principle but defiled by contact or association. Peter is claiming a clean record on both counts, and no one contradicts him.
The answer is the sentence the whole chapter turns on: What God has cleansed, you must not call unclean. It is repeated, and the whole exchange happens three times — the number that will match the men standing at the gate downstairs, and the number of times Peter once denied his master before dawn.
The crucial fact is what happens next, and it is stated before anything is explained. Peter is very perplexed in himself what the vision which he had seen might mean. He does not think he has been given a new diet. He has just been told something and has no idea what it was, which means the surface of the images was not their content — a fact supplied by the text rather than argued into it.
The meaning is given twice, both times by Peter, and both times it is about people. Standing in the centurion's house he says, God has shown me that I shouldn't call any man unholy or unclean Acts 10:28 — his own account of what the sheet meant, delivered within a day of seeing it. And reporting to the Jerusalem church afterward he tells the story again and lands it on the same conclusion: God gave them the same gift, and God has also granted to the Gentiles repentance to life Acts 11:18. Neither time does he mention food. Neither does anyone who questions him.
The logic of the vision, read that way, is exact. The law's food distinctions were the most visible daily marker separating Jew from Gentile; a Jew could not share a table, and therefore could not share a life. To show Peter that boundary lifted in the image and then explain it of persons is to say that the wall which the food rules built socially is not to keep him out of that house.
What the vision does not do is announce a change in what God had said about anything. Peter's protest is never rebuked as ignorance; the correction is what God has cleansed — a divine act with an object, and within the hour Peter is standing in a room identifying the object. Three men are already at the gate, and the sheet came down three times.
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