The Death Sentences of Ananias and Sapphira

One of the more disconcerting passages in the New Testament is found in the book of Acts, chapter the 5^th, when Ananias and Sapphira are summarily and divinely executed. We first read of Ananias’ sudden heart failure:

¹ But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, ² and with his wife's knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles' feet. ³ But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? ⁴ While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.”⁵ When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. (Acts 5:1-5)

Three hours later, his wife Sapphira suffers the same fate.

What seems troubling to some (by which I mean to me) is that Ananias and Sapphira appear to receive so-last-testament-style capital punishment for not giving all they could to the poor.

But that is not the case. At least I don’t think so. ¹ 

That is not to say one should not give all one can to the poor (the purpose of the apostolic collection), or that it is not sinful to withhold what can be given for alms. It is rather to say that Ananias and Sapphira were, I reckon, guilty beyond garden-variety greed. I believe that their guilt was compounded by three factors—I don’t know which is the most serious, but my gut tells me it is the third of this enumeration:

First, when they presented the partial gift it appears they implied it was a full gift.  This compounded their greed with bald-faced lying.

Second, they delivered the reduced gift with "it's all about me!" pomp and circumstance, laying it directly, we are told, at the feet of the apostles. So to greed and lying we add rank hypocrisy, which is rarely a good combination.

Which brings us to the third distinctive, and I think the worst. For  Ananias and Sapphira have the dishonor of blotting the nascent church with its first stain of corruption. Back up to chapter 4, and you read of the church as we all hope it could be. A church that needs no corrective apostolic epistle. It was probably the closest example ever to Spurgeon’s famous adage: “The day we find the perfect church, it becomes imperfect the moment we join it.” Ananias and Sapphira provide us with the lesson that the church will have to deal with the sins of its members, and God takes it very seriously.

And God takes the mercy ministry of the church seriously. I think the modern evangelical community should take that lesson to heart. What percentage of your church's budget is for aiding the poor in your community compared to its foreign mission budget?

I don't know how to make the comparison, because mercy ministry is relatively inexpensive but requires a great investment of time. Foreign missions are expensive, but you can cut a check and be done with it. I don't know what budget calculus to use that takes into account money and time, but if there is one, I'd speculate that a healthy church would have comparable line items for mercy and for missions.

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¹ I need to say that Ananias and Sapphira did not receive injustice. Sin is a capital offense, and God would be perfectly just to take us all out. But mercifully, he allows most of us to live for a short while. Ananias and Sapphira are an exception, ² but not one that impugns God’s character, but rather one that reminds us that we all are breathing on the basis of stays of execution. For if the greed of Ananias and Sapphira always led to immediate death, there’d be, for sure, no traffic jams. Anywhere.

² For some reason this reminds me of the physicists' joke regarding that elusive particle, the neutrino. Neutrinos barely interact, and there are gazillions of them (mostly from the sun) passing through your body at any moment, and then most pass right through the earth. Given all these uncountable neutrinos passing through your body, calculations show that one will actually stop in your body on average about once every 70 years. That's the one that kills you. <sup>3

3</sup> That's the joke. Not funny? Give me a break, we are physicists.