The wind He sent ahead of us

Luke opens his second book by looking back at his first. ‘In my first book, O Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach’ (Acts 1:1). Began. The word does quiet work. If the Gospel was what Jesus began, then this book — the one we have read for seven days now — is what He keeps doing. Acts is not the story of the Church getting on without Him. It is the story of Christ continuing His own work by another means.

That is why the first ten chapters feel less like the apostles’ biography and more like a single sentence opening up. In chapter one the risen Lord gives the map: ‘you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (1:8). Then He tells them not to go anywhere. ‘Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift the Father promised’ (1:4). The mission is given, and the first command is to sit still and wait for the wind.

It comes at Pentecost. A sound like a mighty rushing wind, tongues like flames resting on each of them, and a room full of ordinary people suddenly able to be understood by everyone (2:2-4). Peter stands up to explain it, and his explanation is not about the disciples at all. It is about Jesus — crucified, raised, exalted — who ‘has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear’ (2:33). The whole spectacle has a single author, and He is not in the room. He is at the right hand of God, pouring.

Before my mother went into a surgery she was afraid she might not wake from, she wrote letters and left them where we would find them. One was instructions — the practical things, who to call, where the documents were. But the last line of each was not an instruction. It was a sending: do this, and know I am with you in it.

For a long while afterward those letters did more than the instructions ever could. The to-do list got finished in a week. The sending lasted years. When I did the hard ordinary things she had asked, it did not feel like obeying an absent person. It felt like she was somehow still moving in the room, her will alive in our hands.

That is the strange shape of these chapters. Jesus gives the apostles a map and then withdraws from sight. But what fills the room after He goes is not His absence. It is His Spirit, His breath, poured out so completely that everything they do next is really Him doing it through them. The marching orders were never the point. The presence behind the orders was.

Simon Peter, a Galilean fisherman called by Jesus, who at the trial denied even knowing Him three times. In these chapters he is a transformed man: standing before the same crowds that condemned his Lord, preaching the resurrection without flinching (2:32), declaring that there is salvation in no other name (4:12), and saying with the rulers, ‘we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard’ (4:20). By chapter 10 he is being stretched again — sent into a Gentile home he never would have entered on his own.