“What Shall we do”? the way of Conversion in Acts 2: 36-41,
Commentary on Acts 2:36-41
Having given his primordial Pentecost address, Luke tells us about the reaction of the crowd and Peter’s subsequent response. People ask: 'What shall we do?' Peter's response encapsulates the basic Christian message in four points: repentance, baptism, forgiveness, the gift of the Spirit. Two of the elements call for personal cooperation and two reveal the effects of Christian conversion. It is worth noting that Peter’s answer to the question what shall we do?” differs from the one given by John the Baptist in Lk 3:10;12;14.
1] One begins to respond to the kerygma by means of repentance. It literally means, “A change of mind” in this case about who Jesus was as the epitome of divine love. I suspect that the change of consciousness is the result of the light of God’s love revealing where there has been a lack of love in life. In other words, a change of mind to do with one’s image of Jesus as the Messiah, the divine Son of God, leads to a change in one’s awareness and behaviour.
2] Peter counselled those who accepted Jesus as Lord and the promised Messiah to repent and to be baptised, so as to be washed clean and to become followers of Jesus Christ and members of the Christian community.
3] Forgiveness of sins. When a believer was baptised, pardon was thereby granted for his or her sinful transgressions. Remission of the debt of sin is what had been achieved for human beings in God’s eyes by Jesus’ death and resurrection. In the early Christian centuries baptism was seen as a complete cleansing of all prior sins. Since post-baptismal sins were considered more serious and harder to atone for, many feared sinning after baptism and thus postponed it, sometimes until just before death, in order to avoid jeopardizing their salvation.
4] The gift of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit, the mark of the new phase of salvation history, ws shared by all those who reformed their lives and were baptised. Although it is not explicitly stated, there is good reason to believe as O’Donnell and Montague have pointed out in their influential book, Christian Initiation & Baptism in the Spirit: Evidence from the First Eight Centuries, that when adults were baptised in the early centuries of Christianity it was taken for granted that not only would they be baptised in the Spirit, they would also be likely to receive one of more of the gifts of the Spirit mentioned in 1 Cor 12:8-10.
Peter went on to say that his good news message was not only intended for the Jews, but also the Gentiles, who would become a major focus of the later chapters of the Acts.
Luke concluded his account of the first Christian Pentecost, with Peter fulfilling the role for which he had been commissioned, namely, bearing testimony about the risen Jesus. He kept urging his listeners to separate themselves from those who refused to accept his message. Such people belonged to a corrupt generation. Later St Paul would say to the believers in Rm 12:2, “Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God — what is good and is pleasing to him and is perfect.” Again, in Eph 4:17-20 we read, “you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. Luke concluded his account by telling us that whereas initially 120 people were blessed by the in-filling of the Spirit, by day’s end no less than 3,000 people had been added to their ranks as a result of hearing the kerygma and being baptised.
