Jesus didn’t just die; Roman authorities executed him. Carceral power – the ability to arrest, imprison, try, sentence, and execute people – is an important character in today’s first reading, driving much of the action. Indeed, carceral violence shapes the life of the early Church as described throughout Acts of the Apostles. As in today’s reading, advances are often coupled with the threat of incarceration or outright execution. Acts is about, in part, how the Apostles make sense of their call, their memories, as well as their hopes and expectations in the wake of Jesus’s departure.

Jesus’s people are traumatized. They are grieving and confused. The opening scene of Acts of the Apostles (1:6-11) picks up the final conversation of the newly resurrected Jesus with the remaining Apostles (Lk. 24:49). Their final question to him shows the political aspirations of his earliest followers: “Lord, has the time come for you to restore the kingdom of Israel” (Acts 1:6). For a moment, they thought Jesus’s resurrection meant a dramatic reversal of their situation. Unfortunately, Jesus tells them that it’s in God’s hands and then floats away. 

Let’s hang on to their humanity and what was no doubt an extreme mixture of desolation, uncertainty, hope, and outright confusion. They gave up everything to participate in a years-long movement. It was going great! A comrade sold them out to the government, costing their teacher his life on charges of sedition and casting them as coconspirators. At their lowest, most vulnerable moment, Jesus mysteriously returns, but he has some good news and some bad news: God will send the same Holy Spirit to them that empowered Jesus’s ministry, but they are still outlaws because the political vision they had been striving for won’t be fulfilled yet.

This frenetic oscillation persists throughout Acts: Each sign of the early Church’s progress seems to be accompanied by a reminder from the narrator that it takes place under mortal threat from the Roman Empire and its local client government, led by King Herod Agrippa and the Temple authorities. The Apostles receive the Holy Spirit, perform some miracles, preach, and things are going great (2–3)! They get arrested and tried (4–5:22). They win some more converts (5:12-16), then they get incarcerated again (5:17-42). New leaders distinguish themselves in service to the growing community, and then a mob executes one of them, Stephen, under the auspices of Saul (7:54-8:1).    

The injection of Saul sheds important light on the scope of the policing the early Church faced. It’s easy for those of us with no connection to the region to blow by the places named in the Bible, but they are illuminating. Saul’s participation marks the Church’s persecution as a regional legal/religious affair. Saul is a long way from home; Jerusalem and Tarsus – in the southern coast of modern Turkey – are not neighboring cities. He even plans to expand his persecution to the early Christians of Dasmascus, whom he would arrest and extradite back the 135 miles to Jerusalem to stand trial. 

Fortunately for the community in Damascus, he converts before he arrives. When he tries to connect with the community in Jerusalem in today’s reading, he does so as the (former) embodiment of carceral power. He is both a Pharisee and a Roman citizen by birth from one of the most important cities of the eastern territories. Importantly, the latter means that he has both formal and informal rights that his non-citizen Jewish counterparts could not have access to. The fear with which the disciples meet him is informed by all of this. The reversal of his situation from prosecutor and executioner to fugitive is dizzying. 

In her 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, scholar and activist Angela Davis asks a simple yet generative question: “Why do we take prisons for granted?” It helps to remind us that long-term imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment is a relatively recent global phenomena, originating in the United States. Today, 1.9 million people wallow in America’s prisons, jails, immigration detention centers, child prisons, and involuntary psychiatric facilities. The U.S. is unique on the global stage: While we account for only five percent of the global population, we have nearly 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. 

How can people who take prison for granted begin to empathize with the disciples’ fear of Saul? I sometimes wonder if we can begin to appreciate just how fantastical and grave an act of violent imprisonment was in the imagination of the text’s earliest audience. So extraordinary, that the power of God is demonstrated in repeated acquittals and even a couple miraculous jailbreaks (5:18-42; 12:5-17).

To be transparent, I believe that for those of us in the United States, living in a country that incarcerates so many people has brutalized our internal lives. In light of that, I offer a few questions for your reflection: How could we possibly hear the word today with empathy for the disciples when we have been desensitized to people, including tens of thousands of children in cages?

The movement to stop Cop City is a decentralized, broad-based coalition of students, faith leaders, community organizers, and activists of all stripes. They have all been met with varying degrees of police repression. Police have harassed and intimidated organizers of the successful petition campaign to have the project scrapped. The Georgia attorney general charged 61 movement workers under the state’s racketeering-influenced, and corrupt organizations (RICO) law for things such as “social solidarity,” “collectivism,” and “mutual aid.” At least 41 additional members have been charged under the state’s expansive domestic terrorism laws. In January 2023, a multi-agency task force of police led a violent raid on a peaceful encampment of forest protectors, shooting 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán 57 times. They died instantly.