Beautiful Gate
Reading
This passage tells us about two men (Peter and John) who
were about to enter the Temple. And there they encounter a man with weakness (disabilities) and was left
there to ask for alms from those who visit the Temple. The place where he sat
was said to be called as Beautiful Gate. While religious people entered through
this beautiful gate, this man, who was left to ask for alms. This as it may sound strange but this incident is often used in preaching and even we personally often question, why this disabled man near a beautiful gate.
As noted earlier this is usually and very popularly preached and interpreted by preachers as “The ugly beggar
at beautiful gate and how God touched and made him beautiful again”.
Which I think is one horror in Biblical interpretation and a terrible cruelty
meted out to the person in the passage.
Beautiful gate and the disabled people made to sit there (“People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the
Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple”).
We note that “people would lay him there”, I think that’s the clue for us to
identify the beautifulness of the gate. Temples had beautiful gates and these
gates are decorated to have people who are weak and should ask for alms in their inability. Which invariably makes
those who are religious and pious, who enter in feel good by dropping a penny. This
act of almsgiving itself made the gate Beautiful for them. Sadly, religious
institutions cultivate the idea of almsgiving as form of attaining salvation.
J. L. Gillin a sociologist writes:
“charity became
a means of securing forgiveness of sin to the giver, a means of grace.
Almsgiving, no longer the means of primarily of helping a fellow-man in need,
became fundamentally a method of washing away one's sins.”[1]
This is true in the case of Beautiful gate.
What would the pious religious and guilty ridden patrons of the Temple do
without someone to make them feel good and beautiful? That someone is arranged
by the society and religious orders by bringing in and filling them with people who are
without strength to sit and ask for alms. They are the ones actually bring
beauty to the Gate, because through them these pious are made beautiful through
their pittance of mercy in giving their alms. What a cruel system of so-called
Beautiful gate?
I think Luke was deliberate in giving the
name “Beautiful Gate” to the incident. Dennis Hamm notes that there were two
gates to the Temple, one was called Nicanor Gate and the other Shushan Gate.
The later was sometimes called as Beautiful Gate, but he says that it was a “poor
place to beg”[2] because was not much used by the residents. But, in giving that
name Hamm writes that, the authors “historical inaccuracy ... may, on another
level, embody the deepest meaning of the historical event."[3] I think the deepest meaning of the event is to contradict the very
meaning of “Beautiful” by presenting to us the ugly side of religious mechanism
of alms giving.
And this event is subverted even further by bringing in two
more into the scene (Peter and John), whose very words strike at the heart of
the incident. They say “Look at us … I have no silver or gold”, this brings
them to the alms receiver (beggar, I would like to avoid this word strongly) level.
These are the real religious and pious, who could instantly identify with
someone at the gate. Yes, Identify and not objectify them as means for salvation.
Peter and John identified with that person who was left there for sake of
others salvation in and through alms giving. But Peter and John subverted the
whole idea of alms-giving as means of salvation to the point of becoming
materially emptied in their self-identification.
What was their idea of salvation? “…What I have I give you…”
what do they have? as aforementioned they don’t have silver or gold. But, they
gave that man strength to “Stand up and walk”. Let us not romanticize it too
much, and get carried away by the miracle story. The strength of the miracle is
in strengthening and including the excluded by giving them strength.
It is easy for the machinery of religion to make victims of
weak and strength less by using them to display false piety and false humility.
But those are only Beautiful Gates for the so-called religious to make
themselves look good by casting away few pennies. How many campaigns have we
see in religious institutions which display pictures of the weak in their
website and in their so-called outreach programmes. Religious institutions in
the name of charity and other horrendous names exploit people by displaying
their tear stained and dishevelled faces and bodies just to make a feel-good of
them-selves. A false humility and piety which are only Gates so called “Beautiful”
Gates, these Gates don’t invite but only exclude the weak and the exploited.
But it is one who identifies with them has the power to
include them. Those who have Silver and Gold can enter through any door secular
or sacred without any discrimination. But those who have neither Silver nor
Gold will have to create a building without Gates and doors but has only people
as pillars (porticos v. 11) strengthening each other.
