Acts (2 of 7)

In my eagerness to write about St. Paul, I skipped over Acts. In its own way, Acts evinces a radical break with the mindset of the Old Testament, but the break is more hidden. There is, in this book, no personal narrator and little of the internal or the subjective. And there is still a sparseness to the storytelling, a shortage of detail. Yet this sparseness does not produce the openness, the ambiguity, the strangeness that characterizes the Old Testament.

Reading the OT, we may understand the physical events but we rarely can be sure what they mean. Samson takes a liking to a Philistine woman, and he goes down to a place called Timnath to see her:

…and, behold, a young lion roared against him. And the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand: but he told not his father or his mother what he had done. And he went down, and talked with the woman; and she pleased Samson well. And after a time he returned to take her, and he turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion. And he took thereof in his hands, and went on eating, and came to his father and mother, and he gave them, and they did eat: but he told not them that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion.
(Judges 14:5-9)

What on earth is going on here? Why was there honey in the lion's carcass? Did Samson do wrong in eating it and giving it to his parents? Why didn’t he tell them where he got it? Did all of this have something to do with Samson's intention to wed a non-Israelite? The text never answers these questions. We are left to make our own meaning, a meaning which can only appear definite if we insist on burying the ambiguity inherent in the text beneath a rigid religious program.

I have picked one out of hundreds of examples. Nearly all the narrative sections of the OT, and even some of the legalistic sections, have this opacity, this refusal to reveal any clear, fixed system of meaning. Even God’s will often does not supply a fixed point. Sometimes, in a passion, he purposes destruction, only to be talked out of it by a mortal. Often he claims to be on the point of abandoning his previous plans. After the flood, he strikes what sounds very much like a note of regret. 

In the OT, we find a vast sequence of events from which we must make our own meaning, and this meaning therefore comes after the events: first they occur, then we look at them and interpret.(*) In this context, sparseness—the absence of interstitial details, of interior thoughts, of mood, of atmosphere—constitutes a shortage of clues, an openness to many different readings. The text is like a skeleton without flesh or ligaments: it can bend into all sorts of shapes.

But in Acts, the events seem to come already embedded in a definite system of meaning. For a new plan has entered the world, a plan that sweeps up everything and determines in advance the pattern of events and the significance of each one; a plan in which there is not room for negotiation or revision. So the sparseness of Acts becomes not ambiguity but simply brevity.

Here again we find that the gospels do not fit nicely into either category. The four evangelists seem to know the meaning of their story and to present it in order to send a particular message; yet at the heart of that story is a character who refuses to conform his words or his actions to any straightforward system of meaning.

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