Peter and John were going up to the temple area
for the three o’clock hour of prayer.
And a man crippled from birth was carried
and placed at the gate of the temple called “the Beautiful Gate” every day
to beg for alms from the people who entered the temple.
When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple,
he asked for alms.
But Peter looked intently at him, as did John,
and said, “Look at us.”
He paid attention to them, expecting to receive something from them.
Peter said, “I have neither silver nor gold,
but what I do have I give you:
in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, rise and walk.”
Then Peter took him by the right hand and raised him up,
and immediately his feet and ankles grew strong.
He leaped up, stood, and walked around,
and went into the temple with them,
walking and jumping and praising God.
When all the people saw him walking and praising God,
they recognized him as the one
who used to sit begging at the Beautiful Gate of the temple,
and they were filled with amazement and astonishment
at what had happened to him.
This is our first reading at mass today, and this morning, when I read it , it reminded me of a story that my friend, Walter Hooper, told me. Walter was C.S. Lewis’ secretary, and they were walking down the street at Oxford and passed a panhandler. Lewis reached into his pocket, pulled out some change, and threw it in the beggar’s hat.
“Why did you do that?” says Walter, “You know he’ll just take that money to the pub and buy a drink with it.”
“Well,” says Lewis, “That’s what I was going to do with it.”
So that story reminded me of something that happened to me when I was seventeen.
You see, my sister worked for five years at a homeless shelter in Galveston, Texas, and I was driving her to a soccer game one afternoon, when we stopped at a light where a panhandler was wearing a sign that said, “Will work for food.” As he came walking up to the car, I tried to avoid eye-contact. But my sister, who was in the back seat, rolled down the window. “Kristen!” he shouted, and stretched out his hand, “You got a dollar for me?”
“Jimmy,” she says, “You know I’m not going to give you money.” All the homeless people in Galveston have the same name, Jimmy, because it helps them avoid the authorities.
And Jimmy laughs and says, “Yeah, I’d spend it on crack.” Then he reaches into the car and pats her on the head. “You have a good day now,” he says.
And she says, “I’ll be praying for you.”
So we’re about three blocks on, and I said to my sister, “You rolled down your window to tell him you weren’t going to give him money?”
And she says, “I know where he can get food. He’s a client. Money isn’t what he needs.”
“So what does he need?” I say.
“Eye contact,” she says. “He needs to be treated like a human.”
So a few blocks later, there’s another panhandler at the light, and I go to roll down my window, and she shouts, “Don’t do that!”
And I say to her, “I was going to make eye contact.”
And Kristen looks at me like I’m about three years old, and she says, “No, stupid. That’s mean. It’s like you’re faking him out. Just smile, wave, and shake your head.”
“But you rolled down your window,” I said, and frankly, my feelings were a little hurt.
“I rolled down my window,” she says, because Jimmy is my friend.”
Now, what strikes me about this passage from Acts of the Apostles is not that they cure a crippled beggar, but that Peter looked intently at him…as did John. That he in return looked intently at them…and that…Peter took him by the right hand.
We are told that the crippled man spent the rest of the day “walking and jumping and praising God”…and I have to wonder if he did that because he could walk…or because Peter shook his hand.
If I’d shaken the hand of the first Pope, I’d have been jumping up and down too.
