Silver I Don't Have, but Stand Up

The friends of Jesus still went up to the temple every day to pray, and at three o'clock one afternoon, Peter and John climbed the steps together.

Someone else had come to the temple that day, the way he came every day. He came lying down. His friends carried him through the crowded streets, up to the temple, and set him down beside the gate, because he had never taken a single step on his own. He was born that way, and by now he was more than forty years old.

(The gate was called Beautiful, and it was. Its tall doors were covered in shining bronze, so heavy that, people said, it took twenty men to swing them shut at night.)

All day the man held up his hand to the people going in. "A coin for a poor man! Please, a coin!" Some people dropped one in. Most walked a little faster. (Giving to the poor on your way to pray was counted a very good deed, so a temple gate was a clever place for a beggar to sit.)

When he saw Peter and John, he held out his hand. "Please, sirs. Something for a poor man?"

Peter stopped. So did John. They looked straight at him, and Peter said, "Look at us."

The man looked up. His fingers opened wider. Here it comes, he thought. A silver coin. Maybe two.

"I don't have any silver," said Peter. "I don't have any gold."

The man's hand began to drop.

"But what I do have, I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk!"

Then Peter took him by the right hand and pulled him up.

At once the man's feet and ankles grew strong. Bones that had never held him held him now. He sprang up and stood. He took one step, and another, and then, because forty years is a long time to wait for your legs, he jumped. (He had never learned to walk, so he did it the way toddlers do: mostly bouncing.)

In through the Beautiful Gate he went, walking and leaping and praising God, with Peter and John hurrying to keep up. "Praise God! Look at my feet! Praise God!"

The people in the temple courts turned around in the middle of their prayers.

"Isn't that the man from the gate?"

"The one who sits and begs?"

"It can't be!"

"It is!"

They stared at his feet, and then at his face, and they could hardly believe either one. Most of them had walked past him at that gate for years.

Peter had no money to give, and no power in his own hands. The strength was in the name he spoke. Not long before, the man with that name had been killed outside the city walls, and on the third day God raised him from the dead. Now his name had lifted a man off the ground at the temple gate.

The prophet Isaiah had once promised that when God came to save his people, the lame would "leap like a deer." Jesus had done exactly that. Lame people had come to him in these very temple courts, and he had healed them. In Peter's own house, Jesus had taken Peter's sick mother-in-law by the hand and lifted her up. He had gone up to heaven now, and he was still doing it, through his friends, in his name.

Jesus was reigning in heaven, and his kingdom was here on earth too. At the Beautiful Gate, it came in leaping.