What He Could Not Ask For

He had a place. Every morning someone carried him to it and set him down beside the gate called Beautiful, where a beggar could do his only work. Lame from birth, he had never once stood on his own feet. His whole economy was the cupped hand and the coin dropped into it.

So when Peter and John came up at the hour of prayer, he asked them for money. Peter said, "Look at us," and the man looked, "expecting to receive something" (Acts 3:5). What he got was a sentence: "I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" (Acts 3:6). Peter took him by the right hand, and the ankles that had never held him held him. He went in "walking and leaping and praising God" (Acts 3:8).

Tim Keller lingered on the smallness of the request: the man asked for a coin because a coin was the most he had learned to want — legs were not on the list of askable things.¹

We ask for a coin. He means to make us walk — that would be a fine takeaway, and it is true. But notice that the man never asked for legs, and he never asked for Jesus either. He got nothing on his list. He did not have the standing to want what he was handed, and that is not the same as wanting too little.

The crowd comes running, and Peter refuses the credit: "why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk?" (Acts 3:12). The power has a name. "You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead" (Acts 3:15) — and it is that risen life, through "faith in his name" (3:16), that has put a man born lame on his feet. Resurrection is a bodily thing, a standing-up, and one had happened in a tomb outside the city; here its first aftershock reaches a beggar's ankles. Luke's word for the leaping, hallomai, is the verb Isaiah's Greek uses of the day God comes to save: "then shall the lame man leap like a deer" (Isaiah 35:6). The echo is Luke's, not ours.

The man had always been brought as far as the threshold; the newness is not that he is let in but that he walks in, and the first thing he does with a working body is worship. He goes in because Jesus went out: the Author of life suffered "outside the gate" (Hebrews 13:12) for a man laid outside one.

Not every body is healed at the gate. His standing-up, given early, is what every believer is promised late, in the only name "given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). He got a pair of working ankles, and the name of the man they came from. He belonged to someone now. That was the larger of the two.