All Things in Common: First, the text says they “were together and had all things in
common.” This can’t mean they lived all in one building, or even in one
enclave. This is a tremendous number of people, in a time when whole towns
numbered in the hundreds. There would have been no building big enough.
Besides, it says they broke bread “from house to house.” Most of the people who
heard Peter’s pentecostal sermon had probably come to Jerusalem for the
festival season just past, and they went to their countries and carried this
exciting news with them. They must have done the same things in their homelands—praised
together in crowds when they could, and lived and worked in daily contact with
their own growing circles at home. But many lived there, or chose to stay. In
what ways did they exercise this commonality?
One possibility is that at first they may have
believed Jesus was coming back right away. It could have been an atmosphere
somewhat like that of the Great Disappointment in 1844, when thousands of
believers in the Advent thought Jesus was coming that year. They, too, lost
interest in earthly things, shared what they had, even left crops unharvested.
The early church does not appear to have gone to that extreme, but they did
share more than we’ve come to see as normal, even selling houses and lands so
they could meet each other’s needs.
It is certain that when a person truly gets hold
of the gospel—truly understands that Jesus has opened a clear path to the
presence of God for whoever will accept it—day-to-day mundane details of living
lose some of their hold. Once you get a glimpse of how much God loves you, and begin to return that
love, you start to notice those around you in a new light. If they have a need,
and you can fulfill it, it just comes naturally to do so, and you know it goes
both ways. When you have a need, you are not afraid to share it with these
brothers and sisters.
There have been endless attempts to recreate
something like this atmosphere, both spiritual ones such as monasteries,
convents, intentional religious communities, and a proliferation of cults of
all varieties, and secular ones such as the kibbutzim in Israel and
environmentally aware communes in various places. If they are places where people
visit for a certain length of time, they seem to retain their feel of “something
different”—more togetherness than we are used to. Something we like, but then
want to leave and go home, back to life as we find it more comfortable, not
quite so united. If they are communities people bind themselves to by lifetime
vow, and which are also bound by prayer, like monasteries and convents, they
can last for centuries, though not without lists of rules, often long and
minute. All other attempts generally seem to break down after a while and
disappear. Certainly state attempts at communism as a system of government have
not succeeded in providing for even the physical needs of citizens, let alone
an atmosphere such as described in Acts.
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