00:00:00 – 00:00:11
Clint Loveall
Hey, friends, welcome back. Happy Monday. Thanks for joining us as we continue through the Book of Acts. The first chapter today finds us beginning in verse 15.

00:00:15 – 00:01:54
Clint Loveall
Interesting material, I guess, in some ways to look into, there is both some deep transitional waters here, and there's essentially some. some administration. And I think to see the church navigate some of both of those things is interesting and not something we always see a lot of. So I'm going to jump in at verse 15 here. I'll probably just read down through, what would that be? Looks like, maybe verse 19. And then we'll work our way through it and see if we get further. But in those days, Peter stood up among the believers, together the crowd numbered about 120 persons, and said, friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus. For he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry. Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out. This became known to all the residents of Jerusalem. So the field was called in their language, Hekeldoma, which means the field of blood. For it is written in the book of Psalms, let his homestead become desolate and let there be no one to live in it, and let another take his position of overseer.

00:01:57 – 00:01:58
Clint Loveall
I think,

00:02:00 – 00:03:10
Clint Loveall
I think it's easy, Michael, to under-imagined. imagine in the aftermath of the resurrection, the reality of losing one of your own. And the story of Judas is far more complicated in the Gospels. He makes, basically, there's this one reference here in Acts, or he's not a big concern in the book of Acts. I'll just say that. Having said that, this is interesting language, who he was not. numbered among us and was allotted his share in the ministry. And so it is fascinating that this first snapshot of a small 120-person movement waiting for inspiration is still unpacking what it means that there was a betrayal by one of their own as they got to where they are, they got there by this path of what Peter calls Judas's wickedness.

00:03:11 – 00:06:25
Michael Gewecke
So the place where we're picking up the story is an in-between kind of place, and that's intentional. We're transitioning out of the stories of Jesus, of his revelation, of what he's done, as told in the first book, which would have been Luke, the gospel. Now we've had Jesus ascend. We've already sort of talked through how that going up is this moment that then sets up the fulfillment of all of the things that Jesus was teaching about the coming of the spirit, the equipping. And so in this in-between moment, because we're not to Acts 2 yet, which is going to be this pivotal enlivening of the life of the early church, we're in this moment in which we zoom into, I think in a very like almost a documentary kind of sense, we zoom into this moment in the life of the church. And we see that there's a need for there to be direction, there needs to be orientation. And make no mistake about it, Luke has chosen to make sure that we know that work is being done by Peter. Peter is the rock. Peter's the one who's going to exercise, especially in the front part of the book of Acts, a great deal of leadership in the development of the church. And so we're to know that he's the one who stands before the believers, not a huge number, by the way, 120. So this is not a huge movement. And then the first thing he's going to turn to is scripture. And so, Clayton, I think sometimes we as Christians rush past this. It's really, really important to slow down and realize the early Christians were avid readers. and interpreters of Scripture. They didn't just read it for what it meant. They read it for what implications it had to be followers of Jesus Christ. That's built in from the very beginning of the text. And so those Christians that come, and there's actually some who make this argument, Christians and those who are no longer Christians, you'd say, you know, the church, the modern church, they'd say, it is just all about not doing Jesus things. It's all about the sitting for a sermon and all of this liturgy. stuff in worship. I would actually point to a text like this and say, this is evidence from the very beginning that Christians turn their attention to scripture, and they believe that those scriptures had something to say about the lives that they're living in the world. That's exactly what Peter's going to do. And he is doing that for the very reason that you pointed out. There's a huge gap here. The gap is there's 12 disciples. There's 12 tribes of Israel. There's 12 thrones that we see in revelation. The problem is there's no longer 12 because one of those 12 is the betrayer. So presented with that problem, Peter is offering a scriptural interpretation towards a kind of very administrative purpose towards the end of we are now going to need to undergo a process of finding that 12th person. There's going to be reasons for that or there's going to be qualifications for that. But I just think it's really interesting that the place he goes is going to be scripture and it's going to require interpretation to move forward.

00:06:26 – 00:07:20
Clint Loveall
I think we also might underestimate. We've had a little bit of this conversation before in the book of acts, and we'll circle back to it repeatedly, that this group, a relatively small group here, particularly when you talk about leadership, these 11 men, maybe a couple of key women, they are building this thing from inside of it. They don't have a blueprint of what it's going to be. They're searching scripture for clues. They're finding direction as they feel God's leading them in the texts, in the prayers, in the interactions with one another. But it's not like they are opening, you know, build a church for dummies and go through steps one through five. So they have this man,

00:07:21 – 00:07:43
Clint Loveall
Judas, and we'll talk about what it says about him in a moment, but he's no longer with them, and that leads them to the simple decision of, do we replace him or not? And as they seek for that discernment, they get to a place where they believe they should, which is the back half of this story, which we can talk about. Now,

00:07:44 – 00:08:25
Clint Loveall
the sort of parenthetical here that Luke includes is a little bit of background on what happened to Judas. And we probably should say at the outset, Michael, that it's a relatively different snapshot than it is in the Gospel of Matthew, where we're told he tries to give the money back and he throws it down. and then he goes and hangs himself here. He buys a field with the money that he got and then either jumps or falls in such a way that he bursts open.

00:08:28 – 00:09:11
Clint Loveall
So there are ways that people have tried to reconcile those stories that after they wouldn't take the money, then he bought the field, and then he was hanging himself. But after he was hung, he fell. It could also be that there were just two versions of what is the case moving that Matthew gets to one of them, that Luke gets to another. Your own reading of scripture and how comfortable you have to feel with everything lining up will determine what you do with these different stories or what seem to be different

00:09:11 – 00:09:11
Michael Gewecke
accounts.

00:09:14 – 00:10:14
Clint Loveall
I think ultimately the takeaway in both stories are that Judas is guilty. He is guilty and either by his own hand or by divine act, he receives a punishment for that. And so there is now, again, in Luke's mind, there is this desolate field that's literally the word here, let his homestead be desolate. But because of what Judas has done, he will always then be remembered as the betrayer. And in some ways, this is the transition, Michael, right? Because this is the past. This is how they got to where they are. So let us pick an overseer. Let us pick a replacement and go forward. And so it's an interesting funnel through which this story goes, that they mention Judas at all, or that Luke feels compelled again to kind of revisit that part of the story. I've

00:10:14 – 00:13:28
Michael Gewecke
got two really quick things to make sure that, you know, we don't go too deep in this and it remains accessible. But one thing worth mentioning is any time that you have a hang-up or a question in Scripture, you're not the first person to have encountered that. And so very concretely, this idea of sort of finding what is the – the through line between Matthew's telling and Luke's telling here in Acts, that's been addressed for literally millennia. St. Augustine, who is a very prominent bishop in the early church, he argued that this is just the same telling from different advantages. Of course, many have argued that after him. But Clint, if you just fall on to that, I think you kind of miss some of the nuance and the color that this gives. And one thing, just to sort of illustrate that point, is in the Jewish world, taking your own life comes with it a huge amount of stigma culturally and religiously and theologically. So the act that Judas takes in the book of Matthew, which is largely written to that audience, there really doesn't need to be a lot of description for that to have a pretty vice-script kind of effect on the. reader. One commentator makes know of the fact that that is not the case in the Greek Roman culture. And so there's a sense in which it's far more neutral there. And so this telling that we have here in Luke emphasizes the bloody, the gritty, the grisly nature of the thing that happens to Judas and in a way arrest the reader in a same way that a Jew might have been arrested by the telling in Matthew. not that that's going to change how you read the text, but I think it colors it in an interesting way, that there's a way in which we, the reader, are supposed to know that the depth of Judas's betrayal, the impact that it had on the early church was such that it should shake us. It should grab us because it did grab them. It was an unbelievably huge betrayal of not just trust, but a betrayal of the Son of God, a way in which human sinfulness crosses the line. The only other thing I'll mention really quickly is the early church had scripture. They read them regularly. We would often call what they read the Old Testament, because they were reading from the Old Testament as their own scriptures, make note of the fact that this let his homestead be desolate, be no one to live in it, position of overseer. This is coming from Psalm 69, and that appears frequently in the new. Testament. And so scholars talk about how that was a widely accessible Psalm, a widely accessible text to the early church. And very clearly, they read it regularly and they interpreted it regularly. And I think for people who have a lot of distance from the early church in terms of time, that's a really neat thing to think that you can go back and read the same Psalm that they were reading and that has such a prominent place in the New Testament.

00:13:28 – 00:14:59
Clint Loveall
I think the last thing I would say maybe a little bit along those lines, Michael, is that if you know the book of Acts at all, and it's okay if you don't, we're glad that you're with us. But if you know the book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament, one of the deep divisions that is going to have to be addressed is this Jew and Gentile division. And it is interesting that in this very, very early picture of the church, we see a people who are still diving into Jewish scripture, what we now call the Old Testament. This is still the sacred writings by which they're trying to frame their experience and understand their story. there is not a disconnect where they simply said, oh, we're Jesus people now, we're, we no longer are tied to those things. This community remains deeply embedded in its roots. In fact, that's one of the things that's going to make some of the upcoming transitions in the book difficult. But though they very much understand themselves to be followers. of the risen Christ, they're still trying to understand what that means by looking to their own religious framework and their sacred scriptures, their writings,

00:15:01 – 00:15:25
Clint Loveall
again, what we call the Old Testament. And I think it's important to understand that, that as much as they were discovering as they went, some of what they were discovering were thinking were things. they already had access to. And that's an important characteristic of not only the early church, but I would argue the church of every generation.

00:15:26 – 00:17:02
Michael Gewecke
This is not a story. It's not a text from Max. I think most people are going to read in the morning before they go to work and say, you know, that's exactly what I needed to hear today. I just want to make one note here, though, and it sticks out to me, is that I read one scholarly commentary note who made the point that some of the… early language suggested that maybe this field is purchased by the Pharisees with the silver that he was given for the task of betraying Jesus. Well, that's Matthew's account. Yeah, right. And so because of that, if you read that into here, then what you could read this is that the field that he is, this, this field of blood is paid for with the price of his betrayal. And that Clint does have us ask ourselves, as it would have had the church ask itself, is what's worth the cost of our sinfulness, right? And we sometimes don't think of that. But he was willing to exchange the Son of God for money. What did that money buy him? It bought him a bloody field. And so that's so often true in our lives. We look at a thing and we say, oh, that's worth it. I'm willing to compromise my morals for that. I'm willing to betray the grace of Christ for that. And then what we discover on the other side of it is it's a field of blood. It's not what we bargain for. And I think there's a way, which there is a warning even to us in that.

00:17:02 – 00:17:12
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think the church has, from its earliest time, looked at Judas as an example and a warning of following your own interests.

00:17:14 – 00:17:55
Clint Loveall
Judas now is alone, even in death, desolate in a field where no one can live because he betrayed Jesus. He chose a path unlike the other disciples who now come together in Christ to try and form the church and to do the work of Christ. He stands apart as having betrayed him and chased worldly wealth and whatever else. And the church has always seen in that, I think, a pretty deep warning, pretty deep sermon about the dangers of that behavior.

00:17:56 – 00:18:08
Michael Gewecke
The church is in an in-between. It's growing. They are learning, and we're learning along them alongside them. Thanks for being with us here today. We look forward to continuing the study. We will see you all tomorrow. Thanks, everybody.