By Johnny Zokovitch
In this time between Easter and Pentecost, in her daily liturgies, the Church has been reading stories from the Acts of the Apostles. The Sunday liturgies in particular have been focusing on the early chapters of Acts. I’m a big fan of these beginning chapters of Acts; the portrayal of the Early Church in these passages paints a picture of a community powerfully living in contrast to the society around them. What the early Church aspired to seems an almost utopian dream–yet these verses serve to set a standard by which our churches today and our own practice of discipleship ought to be measured.
For instance, one of the most challenging passages, especially for those of us living in the United States in the 21st century, comes from Acts 4. In verse 32 we learn that the communion of the Early Church is demonstrated by sharing—not just any type of sharing, but material, economic sharing. They held all of their possessions “in common.”
About a quarter century ago, one of the regular exhortations of demonstrators against corporate globalization was that people were not created to serve the economy but rather the economy was created to serve people. The implication was that an economic system is only just and acceptable insofar as it meets the needs of the people; conversely, unjust systems which value the bottom line over people are unacceptable. For Catholics, every pope of the last two centuries has echoed this description of the Early Church when they have called on economic systems and ideologies to serve human needs, specifically the needs of those who are the most vulnerable, the biblical “least of these” (Matthew 25).
The passage in Acts goes on to express in the particular what this “everything in common” looked like:
- No needy person among them
- Those who owned property or houses would sell them and put the proceeds into service for the entire community under the direction of the apostles
- And the apostles would distribute those proceeds based on the needs of each member of the community
It is a really stunning witness. And it makes clear that the Early Church understood how the value of their witness to Jesus would be understood by others according to how they took care of one another.
Some of our churches still use familial terms like “brother” and “sister” when referring to members of the congregation. For the Early Church, there was nothing “symbolic” about those terms. The expectation was that each member would really be taken care of as if they were an actual brother or sister. As new converts joined the community, concretely it meant entrance into a new family (and often ostracism from the family, tribe, or community to which they formerly belonged, along with the implications of lost livelihoods and economic security which those institutions offered).
As with the teachings and practices of Jesus, many of our churches spiritualize (i.e. soften or minimize) the practice of the Early Church so as to make it a nice story that requires very little of us. Passages in Acts which describe the profound economic equality and “classless” society of the early Christian community today get turned into appeals to tithe more, to practice charity toward the “less fortunate,” or worse, get skipped over in silence all together. Another choice would be to allow these passages to speak to the economic precarity that so many of us experience and to allow it to critique our churches’ full embrace of the capitalism that has infiltrated it at every level.
As the heirs to that original community of faith, let’s let their example make us uncomfortable with how far short we fall from that radical witness of our ancestors. Let it call today’s Church to delve more deeply into conversation about what kind of individual and communal economic practices we should be developing in relation to who we believe Jesus to be and who we say we are to each other. Let the witness of the Early Church draw us into wrestling with authentic questions of faith like how we spend our money, how we care for the needy among us, what our relationship is to our possessions, how our political or economic beliefs and ideologies jibe (or don’t jibe) with the scriptural portraits of Jesus and the Early Church.
This is what I have always loved and believed about these early stories in Acts: that they are meant to challenge us, to shake us and poke us when we have become too unquestioning and lazy about our own relative ways of being a faithful community in the world today. Such stories are not meant as a measuring stick for the rest of the world “out there;” rather they are aimed directly at us “in here,” at we who call ourselves “Church.” Let’s really hear them, and ask how we measure up.
Johnny Zokovitch is the former executive director of Pax Christi USA. He currently serves on the board of the Pax Christi International Fund for Peace and is in pastoral leadership atSt. Cronan Catholic Church in St. Louis. Read more from Johnny at https://johnnyzokovitch.substack.com/and sign up there to receive his articles directly to your email inbox.