Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Silver and gold I have none
Acts 3:1-10
1 Peter and John were going up into the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour. · WEB
The first recorded miracle after Pentecost is done to a man everyone in the city had walked past, and it is done with a name rather than a technique.
The scene is set by a routine. Peter and John are going up to The Temple at the ninth hour, the afternoon hour of prayer — which is to say that the apostles of a movement three thousand strong are keeping the same devotional timetable they kept before Pentecost. Nothing has been reorganized. They are going to pray at the time people pray.
The man is set up by a longer routine still. He was lame from birth, carried and laid at the gate daily, and the crowd will shortly recognize him as the fixture they had all seen there. That detail is doing quiet work. His condition was congenital, so no one could suppose he had lately been ill; his position was habitual, so no one could suppose he was a stranger brought in. Every element that would make a healing hard to verify has been removed before the healing occurs.
His situation is worth stating exactly. He is at the door of the temple and he does not go in. Whatever the reason in his case, a man in his condition sat at the threshold of Israel's worship asking for coins from the people walking past him into it — and he had done so long enough that his begging had become part of the architecture.
He asks for money and receives an interruption. Peter fastens his eyes on him and says Look at us, and the man looks, expecting to receive something. The exchange is not incidental. Begging depends on not being seen as a person, and the first thing that happens to him is that two men insist on his attention and give him theirs.
Then the sentence the scene is remembered for. I have no silver or gold, but what I have, that I give you. The disclaimer is literal — these are men who have just been described laying proceeds at one another's feet — and it is also the shape of the whole book. The church of the early chapters is poor and is not embarrassed about it, because the thing it has to give was never purchasable.
The command is given in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, and Peter takes him by the right hand and raises him. The name is not a formula that operates on its own; the next chapter will show men trying to use it that way and failing badly. It is an authorization, and Peter is careful to say so within minutes.
What follows is described with a physician's precision and a witness's delight in the same two verses. His feet and ankle bones received strength; leaping up, he stood, and walked, and went in with them walking, leaping, and praising God. A man who has never once borne his own weight does not simply gain the power to walk — he would still have to learn it. The text says he leaped. And he goes into the temple, through the door he had been sitting outside for forty years, and the first use he makes of his legs is worship.
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