Out of Control!

Acts 4, Psalm 23, 1st John 3, John 10

One of the themes running through the readings this morning is control—quite interesting, as we prepare to make our small but essential contribution towards deciding who will be in control of the country for the next few years. It probably won’t make any difference who I vote for, but I’ll do it anyway.

Some of the more hysterical commentary has been amusing, to say the least: ‘If you vote for them, everything will go out of control! Do they mean ‘out of control’, or ‘out of our control’?

When the Temple authorities heard about what Peter, James and John had done, and what they were saying about it, they moved quickly in an attempt to regain control. It was as if an alarm had gone off somewhere: UNAUTHORISED SPIRITUAL ACITIVITY!

Imagine! God is working in the Temple without our imprimatur—we can’t allow that. There were, of course,  two or three different fears in the minds of the authorities. One was the entirely legitimate fear of civil disorder followed by a Roman crackdown, another was the rather less respectable fear of being sidelined and upstaged by the ‘un-entitled’, and the third was probably a simple fear of the unknown.

What can we learn from this, with the privilege of hind-sight and an uncomfortable feeling that we are not exactly the ‘un-entitled’. Possibly, that new life often comes from outside our previous experience, that many things are beyond our control, and that the unknown is not always to be feared.