Tabitha
Acts 9:36-43

May 2, 2004

Unless you were born an Israeli or Palestinian, the geography of the Bible always remains somewhat distant. When one reads about Jesus going into a certain place, the inclination is to translate that into geography familiar to you. There is a wonderful 19th century painting of Jesus walking on the road to Emmaus with the two disciples, and the road is a wooded English country path.

I always thought I had an advantage when it came to Biblical geography. In my Sunday School we did march through a lot of the Old and New Testament, and it was this story in the Book of Acts that made some of us sit up and notice. Simon Peter is summoned to the aid of a beloved Christian woman Tabitha who lives in the town of Joppa. Well, we all knew Joppa: it is a suburb to the northeast of my hometown.

Actually, we had a hard time reconciling our Joppa with the events of the Biblical Joppa, but it was a back door way of emphasizing that the stories of the New Testament are our stories. The Bible happens, must happen, in our back yard. When the Bible is so foreign, so exotic and eccentric, it cannot mean much to you and me now. But it’s right outside the ring road, so we are involved in its story.

The Book of the Acts of the Apostles has a seductive agenda as the second book written by the evangelist called Luke. Not in every last detail, event, and teaching, but in many places the apostles are found replicating the deeds of Jesus, almost to the letter. Such a case is this story of Simon Peter and Tabitha. Jesus, of course, is the God-Human who is able to perform great miracles of healing and compassion. It would be natural to consider his accomplishments as memorable one-timers, something beyond the ken of incomplete and imperfect human beings. Yet, no, the apostles do it without a self-conscious thought. The awful weight of the Gospels and Acts is that you and I have the capability of being like Jesus at least some of the time and are expected to do so.

The preamble finds Peter somewhere else in a town called Lydda. He was not in the right place for what follows. Few of us ever are when family and acquaintance dilemmas arrive. We are sent word, and then we respond sometimes when it is already too late.

The right person is Tabitha, probably an older widow living in Joppa, about 15 kilometers away. Just as Saul had a second Greek name Paul, so Tabitha is also known in this bilingual region by a Greek name Dorcas. Dorcas seems to be the name most remembered in church circles, for she presents the model of the female servant and minister.

Tabitha Dorcas receives a eulogy concerning her work with the poor and needy in Joppa because she has just died. No dramatics about it, she became ill and died. Her friends and devotees washed her body and laid her in an upstairs room, a sort of laying in state. Messengers were sent to Peter in Lydda to waste no time and come to Joppa. What did they expect he could do now that she had died?

Same thing happened to Jesus with Jairus’ daughter. Jairus or some one else fetched Jesus with great urgency to rush back to a dying girl. Try as he could Jesus couldn’t rush enough, getting waylaid by the woman with the internal bleeding who touched his coat. By the time he finally arrived, the professional mourners were out in force, weeping and wailing in front of the house. The girl was really dead.

Peter arrives too amidst the mourners’ liturgy, though a somewhat different scene. Instead of pure hysteria, they show him the clothes she had made for the poor and bereaved. They too were widows, knowing her personal difficulties and now intensely feeling her loss. Tabitha had had an impact of life upon the community. They’ll know we are Christians by our love and by our sewing.

Just like Jesus, Peter shooed everybody outside the house. You can’t go about raising someone from the dead with all that racket going on, nor all the curious faces waiting for something spectacularly entertaining. Peter knew that the only other being in the room with him had to be God. It would take all his prayer, all his strength, all his love. Tabitha was lying in the upper room, and we know that an upper room in the choreography of the Gospels is not a neutral room. Something would happen here.

Just being in that room was not something a good religious person was supposed to do, especially a leader like Peter who would have been perceived almost like a rabbi. An observant Jew would not be in contact with a dead body, for doing that would have made him immensely unclean. The narrative does not say he touched her, but being that close was just as bad. Death was the force meant to be feared and avoided. Everything that death touches is destroyed.

Peter had seen death destroyed, so after deep prayer he turned to Tabitha. Jesus had commanded Jairus’ daughter with words so powerful the Gospel writers remembered them in Aramaic, “Talitha, qum” – “Little girl, get up.” Peter had been in that room with Jesus. How could he forget? “Tabitha, get up” – one letter difference.

Peter too gave her his hand and helped her up and showed her alive to her friends and the saints of the church. No one was able to stop talking about it, and many felt compelled to put their trust in Jesus from that moment on.

Peter, it needs to be underlined, was not Christ. He was not any different from you and me in terms of his physiology and spirituality. He was fully human, perhaps at times, but certainly not fully or even partially God. The fact that he healed as Jesus did, told a dead woman to start living again, is not due to a divine personal nature. But is there any doubt that something significant of God was in him?

I am not going to pretend that we should get out there and start raising the dead back to life. I have never been present when that has happened. Yet the reason you and I are here is not to allow death to overwhelm and defeat us before we die. Death wants you to give up and join it. It rages today in Iraq and Palestine, in the violence of our cities, in the addictions that rob body and mind of any vitality, in the prejudices that deny human beings from being able to make mistakes or to achieve miracles. Peter knew he could not keep with polite social conventions and avoid contamination with the unpleasantries of death. He went in alone and sat down with death and told the living person to get up and start living again.

This episode ends on a seemingly irrelevant note about Peter’s sojourn in Joppa. He stayed with a certain Simon, a tanner. A tanner is a person who makes useful items out of the skins of animals, dead animals to be precise. It was considered one of the dirtiest and more despicable professions imaginable. Grappling with dead animals could not only make you sick, but infest your soul. Tanners were perpetually unclean, and Peter was no longer going to worry about it. I am going to assume that Simon the tanner was a new Christian, so Peter knew that the most important and most lively part of Simon was his spirit and his compassion. Death no longer had power over Peter nor over his host Simon. The safest place to stay in Joppa was at Simon’s. The safest place for you to stay is where someone has died and come back to life.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan