One gate, and the Door it points to

The Gate Called Beautiful

Every day a man was carried to the same spot. Acts tells us he was lame from birth, and that his friends set him down at the temple gate called Beautiful so that he could ask alms of those going in to pray. For him the threshold was a boundary he could not cross. He sat at the door of the house of God and never passed through it on his own feet, receiving coins from worshipers who stepped over him on their way inside. Then one afternoon Peter and John came up to that gate at the hour of prayer, and the ordinary transaction was interrupted. The man asked for money. Peter fixed his eyes on him and asked him to look, and the beggar looked, expecting a gift. What he received instead undid the daily pattern of his life. At the beautiful gate, in a name he had not spoken, the threshold he had never crossed opened wide.

“And a certain man lame from his mother’s womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple;”Acts 3:2

The gate in Scripture

The third chapter of Acts opens quietly, with Peter and John going up together to the temple at the ninth hour, the appointed time of prayer. The scene is domestic in its ordinariness. Two disciples keep the rhythm of Israel's worship, and at the gate they meet a fixture of that worship, a man everyone knew, carried and set down there daily because he had been lame from his mother's womb. His post was the gate called Beautiful, the entrance through which the devout streamed. Seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, the man asked them for alms, the same request he made of everyone. Peter's response begins not with a coin but with attention. He looks steadily at the man and tells him to look at them, and Acts notes that the beggar gave heed, expecting to receive something. Then comes the sentence that has echoed ever since. Peter says that silver and gold he does not have, but what he does have he gives, and in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth he commands the man to rise up and walk. What follows is described with physical care. Peter takes him by the right hand and lifts him, and immediately the man's feet and ankle bones receive strength. He does not merely stand. He leaps up, and stands, and walks, and then enters the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. The one who had only ever sat at the door now goes through it on his own legs, and his first act inside is not to beg but to worship. The people recognize him. They know this is the man who sat asking alms at the Beautiful gate, and they are filled with wonder and amazement at what has happened. A crowd gathers, and Peter, seeing the astonishment, turns it at once away from himself. He insists that neither his own power nor his own holiness made the man walk. The name of Jesus, and faith in that name, has given the man this perfect soundness in the presence of them all.

What it comes to mean

The detail that the man was lame from birth matters. His was not a recent injury that might one day mend. It was the whole condition of his life, a helplessness he had never known the absence of. He could be carried, positioned, and provided for, but he could not enter under his own power. This is why the gate is the right stage for the miracle. He belonged to the threshold, neither shut out entirely nor able to come in. Peter's famous words deserve to be weighed rather than merely admired. He does not pretend to a wealth he lacks, and he does not despise the coin the man sought. He simply names what he actually has to give, which is greater than money and of an entirely different order. The exchange the beggar expected was small and daily, a little metal to keep him alive at the door one more day. What he received made the door itself obsolete for him, because now he could walk through it. There is honesty here about the limits and the reach of the church's gift. Silver and gold the apostles did not have, and the church has never been able to meet every material need. Yet the deeper poverty of this man was not the absence of coins but the absence of strength, and that Peter could address only because the risen Christ was addressing it through him. The healing is not a denial that money matters. It is a claim that the man's truest need lay past what money could buy. We should notice that the healing sends the man inward and upward, not merely onward. He does not simply walk away cured to resume an independent life. He walks into the temple, into worship, praising God with his whole leaping body. The gift restores him to the very communion the gate had guarded, and it makes him a sign. The crowd that had stepped over him now cannot ignore him, and their wonder becomes the opening for Peter to preach the name that healed him.