Peter and the Knock at the Gate of Mary, Mother of Mark

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Full script

Imagine a gate in a wall, in the dark, in a city on a hill. It is the middle of the night, or just after it, and the street outside is empty. Behind the gate there is a courtyard, and behind the courtyard there is a house with one lamp burning in an upstairs room, and in that room there are a great many people who have not gone to bed.

A girl is walking across the courtyard in her bare feet. She has been sent to see who is knocking, because someone is knocking, quietly, and a little nervously, the way you knock when you do not want the neighbours to wake. She comes to the gate. She does not open it. She puts her mouth close to the wood and says, who is there? And a voice answers from the other side. And she knows the voice. She would know it anywhere. And she is so astonished, and so happy, that she does something that you and I would probably do as well. She turns around and runs away, and leaves the man standing in the street.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter twelve, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather, the soldiers' chatter, the supper, and the quiet moments between the verses, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us begin with the man on the wrong side of the gate. His name is Peter.

You know Peter already, if you have been listening for a while. He is the fisherman from Galilee with the loud voice and the big heart, who walked on the water for a few steps and then looked down. He is the one who said, to Jesus, you are the Messiah, and who a little later said, I do not know the man. He is the one who was forgiven on a beach beside a charcoal fire, and who was asked three times whether he loved. In tonight's story he is older. A good many years have gone by since the lake. His hair is probably greyer, and his back is probably a little stiffer, and he has had a lot of practice at being the person other people turn to when they do not know what to do.

We should also say, since the two traditions listening tonight have different habits when they talk about him, that we are going to talk about Peter here the way Luke does. He is an apostle. He is one of the twelve, and one of the leaders of the community in Jerusalem, a man the others look to. That is true in Luke's book, and it is true for Catholic and Orthodox Christians alike, and it is as far as we need to go tonight.

Now we should talk about the city, and about the year.

The city is Jerusalem. The year is somewhere around forty-four of the common era, which is about a dozen years after the first Easter. In the years since, the community of the followers of Jesus has grown, and it has spread, and it has had its troubles. The story of the deacon on the Gaza road, who we heard about last time, belongs to those same years. Stephen has been killed. Saul, who once hunted the followers of Jesus, has become Paul, and has gone away to preach. A man called Barnabas has been sent to Antioch, up in Syria, where the followers were first called Christians. And the believers in Jerusalem are still there, still meeting in houses, still sharing what they have, and still saying their prayers.

The country at this time has a king. This is unusual, because for most of the years around then the Romans ran things through governors, and the governors were not much loved. But for three short years, from about the year forty-one to the year forty-four, the Romans handed Judea to a king of the old royal family. His name was Herod Agrippa, which is confusing, because there were a lot of Herods, and they were all related, and several of them were nasty. This one was a grandson of the Herod who, in the story of the Christmas star, was afraid of a baby. Agrippa had grown up in Rome, among the emperor's family and friends. He had a gift for being liked by whoever was in charge. And now that he was in charge himself, he wanted to be liked at home as well.

Here is a thing worth noticing about people who want to be liked. They watch the crowd. They find out what the crowd wants, and they give it to them. And in Jerusalem in those years, there were a good many people who were uneasy about the new movement of Jesus's followers, who did not like how fast it was growing, and who would be glad to see someone put a stop to it.

So Herod Agrippa did what a man does who wants to please the crowd. Luke puts it very briefly, and we will put it just as briefly. He laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. And he killed James, the brother of John, with the sword.

That is all that Luke says about James. It is one short sentence. It is a sad sentence, because James was one of the first friends Jesus called, one of the sons of Zebedee, one of the three who had been on the mountain and in the garden. We will not say any more about it, because it is bedtime and because Luke does not. But we will say that Peter knew James. They had been on the same boat. And so when we meet Peter in the story, we are meeting a man who has just lost a friend.

Luke goes on. When Herod saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also.

Notice that word, pleased. It was not hatred, exactly, that moved Herod. It was that he saw it made people pleased. Sometimes the hardest things in the world happen because somebody wanted to be popular.

And it was during the days of Unleavened Bread. That is the week of Passover, the great spring festival, when the city is crowded with pilgrims and the air smells of baking and of lambs. Herod had Peter seized and put in prison, and he handed him over to four squads of four soldiers each to guard him. That makes sixteen soldiers for one fisherman. It is a great many. It tells you what kind of a man Herod took Peter to be, and also something about how nervous he was, because Peter had been in prison before, and had got out, and Herod did not mean to be embarrassed twice.

And Luke tells us what Herod was planning. He intended, after the Passover, to bring him out to the people. The festival was a time for feasts and not for trials, and so Peter was to be kept until it was over. That means that Peter had a number of days. He knew, and everyone in the city knew, that those days would come to an end.

So Peter was kept in prison. And then Luke gives us the line that the whole story turns on, in six plain words. But earnest prayer for him was made to God by the church.

Let us go and look at the prison, because Luke wants us to see it.

We do not know exactly which prison this was. There was a fortress in Jerusalem, the Antonia, built beside the temple, and there was Herod's own palace, and either could have had a cell. We shall not pretend to know. Let us only imagine that it is a stone room, small and dry, and cool in the daytime and cold at night, with a door of heavy wood, and with a smell of old straw. There is a little window high up, which lets in a thin grey light in the mornings. And on the floor there is a man lying down.

He is not alone. Luke is careful about this. Peter was sleeping, he says, between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries before the door were keeping the prison.

So the picture is this. On the left, a soldier, chained to Peter's left wrist. On the right, a soldier, chained to Peter's right wrist. Two more soldiers outside the door of the cell. A second guard beyond them. A third beyond that. An iron gate at the end of the passage leading to the city. And in the middle of all that, a fisherman, lying on his back with his eyes shut.

And here is the thing we want to stop on. Peter is asleep.

Luke does not say, Peter was awake all night, pacing, going over what he might say. He does not say, Peter lay there trembling. He says that Peter was sleeping, and he gives us the picture of it, and then he tells us the way the angel will have to wake him. This is the very night before Herod meant to bring him out. It is the last night, as far as anyone knows. And he is asleep, soundly enough that an angel has to nudge him.

How can a man sleep like that? We do not know, and Luke does not say. We might guess a few things. Perhaps he was tired, because he had been up for many nights, and his body simply gave out. Perhaps he had said his prayers, and said them again, and found that he had nothing left in his hands to hold. Perhaps he had learned something by this time about the difference between the things that are in your power and the things that are not, and had put the second sort down, the way you put down a heavy basket at the end of a long walk. We would like to think so. And we like to think of it, too, that there is a church not far away, in a house, awake in the lamplight, praying for him. He is asleep because they are awake. That is a thing that can happen. One person sleeps because another keeps watch.

Let us listen to the cell for a minute. The soldier on the left snores very faintly. The soldier on the right shifts and the chain clinks. Outside the door, the sentries talk in low voices about nothing much, about the price of oil, about someone's cousin, about whether the new officer is any good. Somewhere in the city a dog barks and stops. The night is going on in its ordinary way.

And then Luke says: And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by him, and a light shone in the cell.

Notice how quietly it begins. The angel stood by him. It did not break the door down. It did not shout. It is easy to forget, when we think of angels, that the first thing a messenger of God does in most of these stories is just to be there. It stood by him, and a light shone.

We have talked before in this show about angels, and we will say again that they are not people who have died, and they do not have wings because they earned them. They are creatures made by God to carry out his purposes, and they are, as far as we can tell, very good at being quiet when it is needed. This one is not named. Luke says only the angel of the Lord, which in both our traditions has sometimes been read as one of the great messengers, and sometimes simply as a messenger. We will not try to guess.

And this angel does something very practical. Luke says that it struck Peter on the side and woke him. It is not a blow, not really. It is the kind of tap that you would give a friend who has dozed off in a chair. Peter's side. Peter, wake up.

And it says: Get up quickly.

There is something nearly funny about this, if you hold it up to the light. The angel does not say, Behold, Peter, the Lord has sent me. It says, get up quickly. As if there were a bus to catch.

And Luke says: And the chains fell off his hands.

They simply fell. They were not cut. They were not unlocked. They slid off his wrists, and the soldiers beside him did not stir. Luke does not explain it, and we shall not, either. We will only say what he says, which is that God did it, through his messenger, and that no soldier woke.

The angel gives its instructions, and each one is short.

It says: Gird yourself and put on your sandals.

So Peter pulls his belt tight around his tunic, and finds his sandals in the dark, and puts them on. And you can see why that matters. Whatever is going to happen, he cannot do it barefoot with his clothes hanging loose. It is a small, sensible thing, and the angel does not skip it. Even in the middle of a miracle, there is time to put your shoes on.

Then it says: Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.

And Peter does. He wraps his cloak around his shoulders, as a man does who is going out into the cold. And he follows the angel out of the cell.

And Luke gives us one of the most honest sentences in the whole of Acts. He went out and followed him, he says, and he did not know that what was being done by the angel was real, but thought he was seeing a vision.

Think about that. Here is an apostle, a man who has seen the risen Lord, who has watched the sick healed and the dead raised, and yet he is walking through a prison in the middle of the night behind a shining figure and thinking: this must be a dream. We find that very comforting. It means that you can be walking right through the middle of something wonderful, and not be sure it is happening. And it means that Peter was not a man who expected rescue. He had not been lying there waiting for it. When it came, he could not quite believe it, and he went along anyway, one foot after another, like a man who has been told to follow and so follows.

Let us follow them down the passage.

They pass the first guard. Luke says so, simply, they passed the first and the second guard. We are not told how. We are not told that the guards were asleep, or that they looked the other way, or that they could not see. We are only told that Peter and the angel walked by them, and that nobody stopped them. We might picture two men in a dim passage by the light of a torch on the wall, sitting with their backs against the stone, and a pair of travellers going past with no more notice than a breath of air. We cannot know. We do not need to.

They pass the second guard. And now they come to the gate.

It is the iron gate that leads out into the city. It is the last thing between Peter and the street, and it is the strongest thing in the whole prison. And here Luke says something lovely, in a single phrase. The gate opened to them of its own accord.

Of its own accord. As if the gate itself were glad. We do not think that Luke means the gate was alive. We think he means that nobody was seen to open it, and that it simply swung wide, the way a door does in a house when somebody on the other side has been waiting with a hand on the latch.

And they go out. And they walk along one street.

We would like to say something about that, because it is easy to read past. They walk along one street. That is the whole of the angel's escort. It does not take him all the way to the house. It does not carry him, or fly him over the rooftops. It brings him out through the gate, and along one street of the city, and then, Luke says, immediately the angel left him.

So there he is. It is the dark, quiet hour before dawn. He is standing on a street corner in Jerusalem in his cloak and his sandals, with no chains on, and nobody beside him. The light is gone. The air is cold and smells of woodsmoke. Somewhere nearby a rooster is thinking about it.

We think this is one of the loveliest moments in the story. The angel has done what it was sent to do. It has brought him out. And now it is up to Peter to do the next thing. Notice that God did not do the walking for him. He got him as far as the corner and then trusted him with the rest.

And now, Luke says, Peter came to himself.

That is a lovely phrase. He came to himself. As if all this while he had been somewhere else, in a half-dream, and now, in the cold air, with his own two feet on the cobbles, he came back. And he said, out loud, or to himself: Now I am sure that the Lord has sent his angel and rescued me from the hand of Herod and from all that the Jewish people were expecting.

Now I am sure. Not before. We think that is a very Petrine thing to say. Peter is the kind of man who needs to put his hand on the wall before he believes it is a wall. And he has done it. He has felt the cold air, and looked at his unchained wrists, and he is sure.

What does a man do who has been rescued from prison on the last night of his life? We might expect him to run and hide. We might expect him to go to the other end of the country. Luke tells us what Peter did instead. He considered, he says, and he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John who is also called Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying.

He went to find the people who were praying for him.

Now we should stop and say a word about this house, because we are going to be there for the rest of the story.

Mary is a woman of some means, it seems, because she has a house with a gate, and a courtyard, and a servant, and a room big enough to hold a crowd. She is also a mother. Her son is John, who has another name, Mark, a Roman name, which many Jews of that time carried alongside their Hebrew one. This is the same Mark who, tradition says, will one day write down a gospel. In Luke's book he is a young man at this point, and he will go on to travel with Paul and Barnabas, and have some disagreements, and some reconciliations. We meet him again at the end of this very chapter. But tonight he is a son at home. It is his mother's house that is lit up in the middle of the night.

Later traditions have a lot to say about this house. Some Christians in Jerusalem have long believed that it stood on the spot where a church stands today, and that it may have been the same house with the upper room where the Last Supper was held. We cannot say that, and Luke does not say it. We mention it only because it is a lovely thing to wonder about, and because we are quite sure of the part that matters. It was a house with a lamp in the window, and people in it who would not go to bed.

So Peter comes to the gate. And now we are back where we began.

It is the middle of the night, or the end of it. The street is empty. Peter stands at the outer gate of the house, and he knocks. Luke says, And when he knocked at the door of the gateway, a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer.

Rhoda. It is a Greek name, and it means a rose. She is a servant, a young one by the sound of it, which means that she is the one who gets sent to answer the door at odd hours. And we like to think that she was the kind of girl who does not mind. Perhaps she had been listening to the prayers from the stairs. Perhaps she had been sent down to put another log on the fire. Perhaps she had been awake as long as the rest of them, and was a little drowsy, and was glad of something to do.

She crosses the courtyard. It is cold underfoot. The stones are damp. She comes to the gate and she does not open it, because it is the middle of the night, and these are dangerous days, and a sensible girl asks first. There has been trouble in the city. James has been killed. Peter is in prison. A knock at night is not necessarily a friend.

So she says, who is there?

And a voice answers.

And, Luke says, when she recognised Peter's voice, in her joy she did not open the gate.

We love this sentence. We think it may be one of the funniest in the Bible, and one of the truest. She knew the voice. She was so happy, so surprised, so completely overcome, that she forgot the one thing she had been sent to do. She turned and ran, back across the courtyard, into the house, and left Peter standing in the street.

You know that feeling. You have had it. Somebody says something wonderful, and you cannot stand still. You have to run and tell the others. The joy gets there before the good sense does. And Rhoda, on the night of her life, was a girl in whom the joy went first.

Imagine Peter, on the other side of the gate. He has just walked out of an iron prison. And now he is waiting, in the cold, because a girl is so happy that she has gone to fetch somebody. He knocks again. We can almost hear him sigh. And we think, if we know Peter at all, that he may have smiled.

Rhoda bursts into the room. They are all there, perhaps thirty of them, or fifty, or more, kneeling and standing and sitting about on the floor, with the lamp in the middle and their faces tired and tender. They are praying for Peter. They have been praying, we may think, all night. And Rhoda comes in, out of breath, and says: Peter is standing at the gate.

And they say: You are out of your mind.

Think what that is like. The church has been asking God, with great earnestness, for Peter's freedom. And then the answer arrives at the door, and the first thing they do is tell the messenger she must be mad.

We should not be too hard on them, and we do not think Luke is. They had prayed, and they had meant it. But they had also seen James killed. They knew how these things generally ended. They were not unbelieving. They were frightened, and tired, and sad, and a person who has been praying for something for hours can be the last to expect it when it comes. It is very human. It is, we think, a great comfort, because we sometimes pray in just that way. We ask, and we do not quite expect, and when the thing comes we are the last to see it.

But Rhoda holds her ground. Luke says she insisted that it was so. She is only a servant girl, and no one has asked her opinion, and she has just been called mad by a roomful of her elders. And she says it again. It is Peter. He is at the gate. I heard him.

And they say: It is his angel.

Isn't that something? They would sooner believe that she had heard a spirit, a kind of guardian of Peter, come to give them a sign that he had died, than believe that he was standing at the door. It is an odd belief, and we will not go into it, because Luke does not. We only note that it was a thing people said, and that they said it because it was easier than the plain, astonishing fact.

And all this while, Luke says, Peter continued knocking.

He is still out there. The conversation has gone on for some minutes in the lamplight, with all its arguing and its insisting and its doubt, and the whole time, in the street, there is a man in a cloak, knocking at a gate. It is the kindest, most patient picture in the story. He has been rescued from a prison, and now he must wait for his friends to let him in.

At last someone goes. We are not told who. Perhaps it is Rhoda again, perhaps one of the men, perhaps Mary herself, with her shawl over her head and her heart going fast. They open the gate. And Luke says: And when they opened, they saw him and were amazed.

Amazed. They had been praying for this very thing, and now they stand there with their mouths open, looking at a grey-haired fisherman on their doorstep, a little muddy, a little out of breath, with his cloak wrapped round him and his sandals on his feet.

Now it is Peter's turn to be sensible. There is going to be a great deal of noise in a minute. They are all about to speak at once. They are going to cry out and laugh and weep and ask a hundred questions. And it is the middle of the night, in a city where the soldiers will be looking for him by morning. So he does a very Petrine thing. Luke says, he motioned to them with his hand to be silent.

Hush. Not so loud. Come inside.

And then he tells them. He describes, Luke says, how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. We would give a lot to have been in that room. We imagine him sitting on a stool, with a cup of something warm in his hands, and the whole house crowded round him, and the lamp burning down, as he tells them about the light, and the tap on the side, and the chains, and the sandals, and the iron gate, and the street. We imagine somebody laughing in the middle of it, and somebody else crying. We imagine Rhoda in the front, looking very satisfied.

And then he says one more thing. He says: Tell this to James and to the brothers.

This is a different James from the one who was killed. Luke does not say more, but most readers take him to be the James whom the church remembers as a leader of the community in Jerusalem, called in the tradition the brother, or kinsman, of the Lord. Peter wants him to know, and the others as well. And then, Luke says, he departed and went to another place.

That is the end of Peter's part in the story, and Luke does not say where he went. He says only another place. There was no reason to say it. He might have had to hide. Herod's soldiers would be looking. The less said about where, the safer for Peter and for the people who hid him. And perhaps Luke himself did not know.

We will tell you quickly what happens at the end of the chapter, because it is part of the story and we would not like you to wonder.

In the morning, Luke says, there was no small commotion among the soldiers over what had become of Peter. Herod searched for him and could not find him. He questioned the guards. And then, because they had been responsible for him, he ordered them to be led away to execution.

That is a hard line, and we will not dress it up. It is what Luke says. A king's anger fell on the people who had been told to keep a man, and it was not kind to them. We will not say any more about it tonight, except that it is the way of men like Herod, who want to be liked and to be feared at once, and that Luke tells it plainly because it is true. The story of the angel is a story of God's freedom, but Luke does not pretend that the world around it was gentle.

And Herod himself went down to the coastal city of Caesarea, to stay there. Luke has a little more to say about what happened to him, but it belongs to another evening. And the chapter ends, a few verses later, on a quiet, bright sentence that we shall give you before we go. But the word of God, Luke says, grew and multiplied.

Now let us slow down, because it is late.

The lamp is burning low, and the story is nearly done. We have been a long way in one night. We have been in a prison and a passage and a street and a courtyard and an upstairs room, and we have met an angel and a servant girl and a king. It is a good time to look back over it all, quietly, the way you look back along a road you have just walked.

Think about the praying. Luke told us first, before he told us anything about the angel, that the church was praying earnestly. He puts it at the centre. A man asleep in a cell, and a room of people awake in a house, and the one holds the other up. We do not know how prayer works. Nobody does. But we know that Luke thought it mattered, and that he put it where he did.

Think about the gate that opened of its own accord, and the other gate that stayed shut. The iron gate, which no one could have opened, swung wide. And the wooden gate of a friend's house stayed closed for a while, not because of any lock, but because a girl was too happy to remember it. We find that a great comfort too. Some of the hardest doors in the world are opened for us in the dark. And some of the easiest ones wait a little because we are slow.

Think about Rhoda. She is not an apostle. She is not a saint with a feast day, so far as we know. Her name is not on the calendars. She was a servant. And yet hers is the voice that tells the truth in the room, while everyone else, with all their prayers, is saying: it can't be. Luke has made sure that her name is remembered. We would like to think that she would have been pleased.

And think about Peter, asleep. Let us leave him there, for the end of the night, the way we found him. Lying down, between the soldiers, in the chains, on the last night, with nothing in his hands. Sleeping. If you cannot sleep tonight, you might think of him. You might put down your basket, as he did, and let someone else keep the watch.

Here are the notes for the curious.

The story of the night is told in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter twelve, verses one to seventeen, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. That is our only source for it, and everything that the angel, Peter, Rhoda and the others do and say in the story is kept as Luke gives it. The king, Herod Agrippa the first, was a real ruler of Judea from the year forty-one to the year forty-four, and the Jewish historian Josephus tells of his reign and his death at Caesarea.

We invented the weather, the sounds of the city, the cell and its smells, the soldiers' small talk, the supper and the crowded room, and the little pauses between the verses. We also guessed at why Peter could sleep so deeply, and we said we were guessing. Luke does not tell us.

The house of Mary is a place in Luke's story. Some later traditions place it on a particular spot in Jerusalem and say it may have been the same house as the upper room, but Luke does not say that, and we named it only as a tradition. The chains, too, were venerated by Christians in later centuries, and both our traditions keep a feast of them, but that is a later devotion and we did not rely on it.

That's the story of Peter and the knock at the gate for tonight. Catholic calendars keep the feast of Saint Peter in Chains on the first of August, and the Orthodox keep the veneration of his honourable chains on the sixteenth of January, though calendars differ, and you will want to check your own. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing, from an old prayer, for the night. May the Lord keep watch while you sleep. May his angels stand by you in the dark. May every door that you cannot open be opened, and every chain that you cannot lift fall quietly away. And may you wake in the morning, rested, and glad.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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