14. The Man at the Door
After his miraculous escape, Peter] went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying. Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant named Rhoda came to answer the door. When she recognized Peter's voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, "Peter is at the door!" "You're out of your mind," they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, "It must be his angel." But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, they were astonished (Acts 12:12-16). The story of what happened after Peter's miraculous rescue from Herod's prison seems almost trivial by comparison to the events of the angelic rescue itself, and we can only presume that the details are recorded in order to teach a lesson rather than for their historical importance.
Luke tells us that once Peter realized what had happened to him was not a dream and that he was truly free, he went at once to the house where he knew believers would be present. A number of believers were, in fact, gathered there – praying for Peter's safety and release.
Many commentators give a rather negative account of how the servant girl, Rhoda, acted when Peter knocked on the door. These comments range from the more charitable - which tell us Rhoda was so overcome with joy to realize Peter was standing at the door that she could not think clearly and ran to tell the others rather than opening the door for him – to some rather less charitable commentaries which go as far as to suggest that Rhoda was probably "just a simple servant girl" (apparently intimating that not much could be expected of her).
These commentaries all miss the tension of the situation. Peter's arrest did not take place in a vacuum. Persecution was already well underway, and the gathered believers were probably extremely on edge concerning their own safety and that of all Christians at that point in time. It seems perfectly likely that when a knock came to the door late in the night, the homeowners instructed the servant Rhoda to go to the door to see who was there – but not to open the door. Such a situation seems just as probable as any shortcoming on Rhoda's part, and Luke does not intimate in any way that the young woman was too excited to think clearly - just that she immediately ran back and told the disciples that it was, in fact, Peter at the door.
But focusing on Rhoda's message misses a major lesson in this account regarding the reception of the message. It is ironic that the believers were almost oblivious to the answer to their prayers when it did arrive, and that they almost refused to accept that their prayer was answered even when they were repeatedly assured it was true. Even when they saw Peter for themselves, "they were astonished" (vs. 16).
We can apply this story to ourselves by remembering that we should never pray and presume the prayer is perhaps not likely to be answered. That is doubting prayer at best, and unbelieving prayer at worst.
A second lesson we might consider is that when we pray, we should not then make physical arrangements that presume the prayer may not be answered. Note that Luke records not only that the door to the house was locked, but also that the "outer entrance" was locked. Middle Eastern homes still often have this same arrangement, with the house door set within an exterior court or vestibule area with its own "outer" door. If the believers had truly expected Peter's release, they might have at least left the outer door open for him.
These points may seem easy to make with the benefit of hindsight, but the details of this part of the story of Peter's rescue seem so small and otherwise so historically unimportant that they are surely there as reminders to us rather than being historically significant. They remind us that we should never presume that prayer is unlikely to be answered or that it is not being answered; and we should never make arrangements, due to lack of conviction, that actually hinder the outcome of the requests we make.