I just love this passage (and the verses that follow as tomorrow’s
first reading). It is so upbeat! It captures for me the essential
joy of Easter. You can just see the deliriously happy ex-cripple
dancing around Peter and John. And (in tomorrow’s reading)
you can hear Peter telling everybody what it all means.
If you have a moment, compare this story in Acts with John’s
account of an equally remarkable cure, Jesus’ healing of a
man born blind (John 9:1–37). There, instead of rejoicing,
which one should have expected, everybody ducks responsibility and
even knowledge. What blind man? What cure? Who? Nobody wanted to
get involved, to get into trouble.
If pious, observant, religious people could fail to see the finger
of God in such a remarkable occurrence, then what blindness might
we also be capable of? As we revel in the Easter gladness, let us
pray that God gives us the grace to see and believe, as did those
in the temple after Peter explained what had happened. “Many
. . . became believers.”