14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, …
36 “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” 37 Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” 38 Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” 40 And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” 41 So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.
Acts 2:14a, 36–41 (NRSVue)
The End is Nigh!—reads the hackneyed placard of the self-appointed doomsday prophet on the urban street corner. Yet he is ignored by all the passersby, who take his panicked urgency to be a sign, not of prescience, but of mental instability. The crowd’s passivity is understandable. After all, for all the prophet’s bluster, the end has not—so far—come, and the corrupt world rolls on
Does the apostle Peter’s message have a similarly hollow ring? “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation!” (Acts 2:40). Yet here we are, two millennia later, and the corrupt world rolls on. How, then, should we hear Peter’s timely urgency? Can we find a relevant critique from Peter in this prophetic call to action—and is it possible to avoid the anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic baggage that has long freighted this text?
The Revised Common Lectionary holds the narration of the events of Pentecost and the beginning of Peter’s sermon (Acts 2:1–21) until the Day of Pentecost in May. But here, in the Easter season, we proleptically read the conclusion of that sermon and the gathered crowd’s response (Acts 2:36–41). The outpouring of the Spirit upon the community of disciples in that upstairs apartment in Jerusalem had caused a scene. Peter explains the phenomenon as the eschatological fulfillment of biblical prophecy: “In those days, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh” (see Joel 2:28–32; Acts 2:16–21). “Those days,” Peter interprets, are the days of Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection.
After rehearsing those significant events, Peter turns to the diverse crowd and declares, “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified” (2:36). The term “house of Israel” is rare in the New Testament (only six occurrences), and the full phrase “the entire house of Israel” (pas oikos Israel) is unique to this verse alone. Both forms are common, however, in the exilic prophecies of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible. “The house of Israel” became a collective identity marker that signified the inclusion of all Jews—those in the homeland as well as those exiled or living in diaspora—in one united family with a shared fate. Peter rightly invokes this moniker in naming the unity of the Jewish crowd gathered from all corners of the scattered empire. But what did Pentecost pilgrims have to do with Jesus’s crucifixion, which Peter so pointedly lays at their feet?
This is precarious ground to tread. Blaming Jews as a collective for the crucifixion of Jesus has been the pretext for centuries of blood libel and violent oppression against vulnerable Jews by Christians with state power. Such anti-Jewish violence must be renounced and every effort made toward reparations, while the claim of ongoing Jewish culpability for Jesus’s death should be summarily rejected. Problematic texts, like this passage from Acts, need to be interpreted with greater nuance.
While Peter does consider the death of Jesus to be a collective Jewish responsibility (a literary claim that is rightly subject to critical interrogation), Jewish blame is not his rhetorical emphasis. Despite the problematic “you,” Peter would surely include himself and all Jesus’s followers—all of them Jews—in the collective “house of Israel” he is addressing. He is not accusing the gathered bystanders of individual, willful murder. Rather, he envisions the death of Jesus as a tragedy that affected and implicated the whole people together in a kind of passive complicity, including pilgrims who may have been hundreds of miles away when Jesus was executed. But just as all were implicated in Jesus’s death because of their membership in the house of Israel, so all are made beneficiaries of his resurrection and included in the promise of forgiveness and the gift of God’s Spirit. This is Peter’s point. Peter is promoting good news at Pentecost, not blame.
Peter is emphasizing the universal ramifications of Pentecost. What the bystanders were witnessing was not meant only for the individuals gathered in the upper room. It was an eschatological outpouring intended for the whole house of Israel. This is why Peter invokes the prophet Joel, who envisions the gift of God’s spirit for sons and daughters, young and old, free and enslaved, men and women. The universality of God’s gift was vividly pictured in the diversity of the crowd hearing Peter’s message.
In the same way, the invitation to repent and be baptized (i.e., to initiate into the community of Jesus’s Way), and to receive the benefits of Jesus’s resurrection, was intended for the whole house of Israel—extended universally through time (you and your descendants), and universally across space (all who are far away, 2:39). Even the phrase that is sometimes interpreted as a caveat (especially in my Reformed theological tradition, which emphasizes limited atonement) that this promise applies only to those whom God calls (2:39), is in this context an expression of limitless inclusion: “everyone [hosous an] whom the Lord or God calls…,” that is, inclusion in this promise is for all irrespective of time or place. While Peter’s language in Acts 2 emphasizes universality among Israel specifically, the book of Acts goes on to include Gentiles in that “far away” community, to whom the same promise of forgiveness and the Spirit is given.
All this universality makes it easy to overlook the odd particularity of the way Peter’s speech concludes: “And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation’” (2:40). Like my response to the doomsday prophet at the beginning of this essay, I am tempted to look the other way—feeling a little embarrassed for Peter who seems to have gone slightly off the rails at this point. The great apostle is known for impulsive outbursts, after all (e.g., Mark 8:32; Luke 9:33, 22:33; John 13:9). What happened to his timeless message of hope and promise? Why this sudden, time-embedded urgency? Does someone from his social location on the margin of his world even have the authority to call for this kind of disruptive response?
For the Peter of Acts 2, the universality of the good news had powerful implications for the particular, here and now. Those who would attach themselves to this universal Jesus Way needed also to extricate themselves from what Peter called “this corrupt generation.” The Greek term here is skolios, from which we derive our term for the condition of “scoliosis.” Peter evaluates that his generation was bent, crooked, corrupted. One could not participate in the community of liberation while continuing to roll along with the status quo of an unjust, bent world. Despite his low social standing, Peter believes that the outpouring of the Spirit, universally, regardless of status, qualifies him to raise his voice like this against a generation of bent political power and religious authority.
Perhaps Peter’s insult was aimed at the Roman occupiers of his people. They were most obviously the bent generation, exploiting the vulnerable for the empire’s benefit. But I suspect that Peter also had an internal critique, implicating some particular responses to their oppression: corruption among some who worked the imperial system for their own gain at the expense of their neighbors, schemes of violent retaliation among others that would ultimately end in destruction, and passive acceptance of oppression by many others who, understandably, accepted their fate and did whatever they could to survive another day in a colonized world. But even passive complicity with the colonizers was unacceptable to Peter’s sense of the gospel’s urgency.
Peter’s call to “save yourselves” was not a call for Jesus’s followers to physically remove themselves, like the escapist community at Qumran by the Dead Sea. It was a call to renounce participation in the corruption of their generation and to establish new liberative social systems that would lead to its transformation.
Such a proactive social-spiritual project is described in the following verses:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved (2:42–47).
According to Acts, the nascent Jesus Way was marked by intimate, joyful community, dedicated worship, radical economic sharing for all, and special care for those with need—an embedded community of liberation that began to transform their society as day by day more were added to their number.
Our separation from these events by two millennia may incline us to lean into the universal and timeless side of Peter’s gospel. But we ought not to overlook the immanent, time-embedded nature of it, too. For we also live in a bent generation. What would it look like, for those of us who align with the gospel of Jesus, to “save ourselves”? Shall we continue to roll on with the status quo of a capitalist economic system that benefits the most privileged and causes suffering for the most vulnerable? Do we accept the industrialization and energy gluttony that strangle our earthly home and send climate disaster upon the poorest of the world? Can we keep our lives as they are, while the bombs we pay for are dropped on divine image bearers in Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, Lebanon?
Saving ourselves is not about creating an escapist bubble of churchly naivety while the world crumbles around us. Because the gift of the spirit is universal, meant for all who are far away, we are impelled to act in the particularity of our own moment and context, to renounce unjust systems and build new ones that will liberate and transform.
