RESURRECTION AND REPENTANCE

David Rensberger

Oakhurst Baptist Church

April 23, 2006

Acts 3:12-19

Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7

Luke 24:36b-48

It seems kind of strange to be looking at a passage from the book of Acts just a week after Easter, rather than waiting until the time after Pentecost. But the lectionary jumps right into Acts for some reason, and who are we to ask questions? It’s not like anybody here is going to rebel against that kind of authority.

Turning to the book of Acts at this point does remind us that, as important as Pentecost and the giving of the Holy Spirit are, the event that made the church the church was Easter, the resurrection of Jesus. It was their encounter with Jesus, triumphant over oppression and death, that transformed his followers from disciples into apostles, from learners at the feet of their great teacher to proclaimers that God had done something entirely new in the world, something utterly beyond anyone’s expectations, including their own. And I don’t mean just the Twelve. The gospels remind us that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Salome, and other women, as well as Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus, all had that encounter and became messengers of the good news.

So the mission of the church, though it receives its energy and direction from the gift of the Holy Spirit, is grounded in the Easter discovery of the risen Jesus. It’s appropriate, then, that we should begin considering what that mission is while the joy and astonishment of Easter are still upon us. “Mission,” I have to say, is something I tend to think of as duty, business, work, rather than joy and amazement. But the mission of the church, of the whole people of God, has at its heart that wild-eyed, crazed delight that seized those sisters and brothers on a Sunday long ago. I’m inclined to agree with those who say that we have truly found our mission when we know that something glad and good has found us, has taken hold of us and sent us out the door with both a purpose and a grin. If the mission of the church is essentially the good news of Jesus and the love of God made real in him, then both the substance and the manner of our message should be joy.

Both the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts were written by the same person, traditionally identified as Luke the physician, one of Paul’s co-workers. So we’re in the unusual position of having two texts by the same author among our readings this morning. What that makes me want to do is to look at them side by side and see what kind of consistency and overlap and interaction we might find between them. It’s lucky that there are places that actually pay people to do that sort of thing, otherwise I’d have a hard time finding work. I guess that’s part of what I mean about our mission being a thing that we feel glad about doing.

One of the things that Luke is very consistent about in his telling of the stories of Jesus and the early church is showing how predictions at one point in the story are fulfilled later on. The events in this two-part narrative are not only the fulfillment of the prophecies in Israel’s scriptures, but they themselves include prophecies that are fulfilled later on. From the angel Gabriel’s announcements to Zechariah and Mary, to the prophecies of Simeon and Anna, to Jesus’ own predictions that his followers would be persecuted and yet persevere, to the message that the Lord gives to Ananias about the mission of Paul, various characters in the story let other characters, and the reader, know what is going to happen.

What this does is to create a story with a strong sense that everything is part of a plan known to God and initiated by God. These events are not just ordinary happenings in history, much less random occurrences, but are set in motion and overseen by God with a definite purpose in mind. That purpose is the bringing of salvation to all humanity. The God portrayed in Luke and Acts is one who has a plan, not a detailed plan for the life of every human being, but an overall plan for the whole world. Even when things happen that seem likely to derail that plan, God incorporates them as well, and makes it known that they were part of the grand design all along.

When Jesus appears to his disciples in Luke’s Easter account, he tells them several things. Once he has convinced them, pretty much, that it really is him and he really is physically there, he begins to tell them what it all means. He starts by saying that all this is the fulfillment of what was written in the law, the prophets, and the psalms, corresponding to the three divisions of the Jewish scriptures. This is another way of saying that God had it all the way, that everything that has happened to Jesus and will happen to his followers is part of God’s plan. But he has to “open their minds to understand the scriptures” in order for them to see this. What this statement symbolizes is a fact that the gospels do not disguise: Jesus’ disciples had no idea this was going to happen, and neither they nor anyone else saw it predicted in their Bible before it took place. It was only after Jesus’ resurrection that they began the intense study that led them to identify messianic passages in the Old Testament that no one previously imagined might refer to the Messiah. This process of re-reading the Bible in the light of experience and re-evaluating experience in the light of scripture is one that Christians have been engaged in ever since. We forget about this sometimes, and think that the Bible is just a book that helps us prove what we already know. But from time to time Jesus comes to us again and opens our minds to understand the scripture, to see in them what God is doing—that is to say, to see that what is happening among us really is something that God is doing, whether we were ready for it or not.

And the original disciples had definitely not been ready for what had happened to Jesus. What kind of Messiah not only lets himself get arrested, but lets himself get crucified? Once he’s dead, what good is he? It was this very thing that they had to discover as part of God’s plan, unexpectedly present in the very scriptures that they thought they knew so well. So in Luke’s story Jesus tells them two things about himself, that as Messiah he had to suffer and that he had to rise from the dead. The crucifixion of the Messiah was not an awful tragedy, an incomprehensible failure, but a part of what God had in mind all along, even if no one on earth had seen it coming. And because he was the Messiah, he brought with him something that Jews had been hoping God would send along with the Messiah, the resurrection of the dead.

There was more, too. The surprising news was not just about him, but about them. They were to be witnesses of these improbable events. Lots of people had witnessed Jesus’ crucifixion, though not many of them were his disciples. But now his disciples, his apostles, were to bear witness to what they had learned, that his horrible death had a meaning beyond being just the execution of one more Jewish rebel by the Romans. Above all, they were to bear witness to his resurrection, which had not happened in public and which no one was likely to believe without some pretty convincing evidence. They themselves were to be that evidence.

The result of their testimony to the meaning of Jesus’ death and to the startling news of his resurrection was to be repentance and forgiveness for all, “beginning from Jerusalem.” Luke presents repentance and forgiveness as what God offers the world in Jesus the Messiah. It is to be for everyone, but it begins in Jerusalem, which is Luke’s code-word for the Jewish people. This is the message that Jesus gives to his messengers on Easter day. And it is the message we find Peter preaching in the Temple in Jerusalem in the third chapter of Acts.

There is a remarkable correspondence between what Jesus tells the disciples in Luke 24 and what Peter tells the people in Acts 3. We get the impression that he and his colleagues have fully absorbed Jesus’ instructions and now, empowered by the Holy Spirit, are dedicatedly carrying them out. So they assert that the rejection of the Righteous One, the killing of the Author of life, was all foretold by the prophets, and so was his rising from the dead. This is proven by what we would probably consider a bad pun using a quotation from Deuteronomy 18:15, “The Lord your God will raise up for you from your own people a prophet like me.” But this kind of verbal play was standard in Jewish biblical interpretation at that time. Peter also insists that he and the other apostles are witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection, and at the end he delivers the altar call, still following the lines laid down in Jesus’ instructions on Easter. The risen Messiah is sent first to the people of Jerusalem, and he is sent to lead them to repentance from their wicked ways.

And what wicked ways would those be, exactly? Strangely, the text does not say. What it does say is that it is for “each of you” to be “turned from your wicked ways.” That is to say, rather than there being a standard list of wrongdoings, each person has the privilege and responsibility of considering his or her own particular sins. Certainly those sins may be not only individual but communal, our participation in the injustice, violence, and corruption of the wider society. But the specifics of our broken relationship with God are up to each person to work out with God.

Without this consideration, there could be something both disturbing and comforting about Peter’s call to his hearers to “turn from their wicked ways.” It would be comforting, on the one hand, to think that it is somebody else, not us, to whom this is addressed. It would be disturbing, though—at least I hope it would be—that these wicked others are Jews, the people of Jerusalem, as if somehow they in particular were to be singled out as needing to repent. The comfort, of course, is a false one, because though the message of repentance came first to Israel, the whole point of the book of Acts is that it did not stop there, but pressed on to encounter us as well. If we look a little closer, the disturbance may turn out to be unnecessary as well.

The whole point of Luke’s emphasis on the fulfillment of the prophecies of scripture is to show not only that God had a plan in the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah, but that God had kept the covenant promises made to Israel. The message of repentance comes first to them not because they are unusually sinful but because they are God’s people and God is faithful to them. This sermon, the second one that Peter delivers to a Jewish group in Acts, makes it as clear as possible that God’s covenant with Israel endures. It begins with a grand invocation of “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors.” This is the language God used when calling Moses to begin the work of the exodus. It marks the sermon immediately as a Jewish address by a Jewish apostle to a Jewish audience. Likewise at the end of the sermon, Peter affirms that his hearers are the heirs of God’s covenant.

If in a sense Easter marks the dividing line between Christianity and Judaism, it was not a line that was immediately clear and irrevocable. Many of the quarrels we find in the New Testament are still quarrels among Jews over issues that are essentially Jewish. Perhaps it was inevitable that Christianity would eventually go its own way. But the bitterness of the rupture was due largely to the language and the behavior of Gentile Christians who had forgotten or were unwilling to acknowledge the debt we owed to the Jewish founders of Christianity. Relations between Christians and Jews are beginning to heal now, and we can help in that healing by remembering that we as Gentile believers in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have in a sense received a gift from Judaism and owe a certain gratitude that is long overdue.

The New Testament never says that “the Jews” as a people betrayed Jesus. Peter’s speech, however, like others in Acts, does lay the blame on the people of Jerusalem; in the gospel of Luke it is their leaders and rulers in particular who are responsible for Jesus being handed over to the Romans. We need to be careful not to overlook the political nature of what is being said here. The sin of the Jerusalem leaders was their collaboration with the great Empire in putting Jesus to death. Perhaps they hoped to curry favor with the Romans by a display of loyalty or at least subservience. Perhaps they feared the message of Jesus and the changes and losses they might suffer if it were taken seriously. Perhaps they believed his nonviolent challenge to existing structures not only threatened them but would only provoke the Romans with no hope of success. This is how the traditional rulers of peoples that have been invaded and colonized by a foreign empire survive. But it seems that it is not resistance to power and authority but cozying up to them in this way that the gospels regard as sin in need of repentance.

Yet this sin has had a surprising outcome. Peter allows that it was done in ignorance. It wasn’t a deliberate rejection of God and the messenger of God, but a kind of mistake, a case of mistaken identity. Moreover, it turns out to have been a part of that plan of God. By means of what seems to us an act of horrible betrayal and cruelty, God brought healing and forgiveness to all the world. The cross and the resurrection of Jesus offer a deep and paradoxical answer to the question of the meaning of evil in a world created by a good God, evil that so often falls on the best of human beings. This answer is not about whether or how God participates in causing bad things to happen, but about how God makes use of them.

Human beings, given our freedom, have chosen to do a lot of harm. The Christian story of the cross and resurrection claims that God can and does take that harm and make something good beyond human imagining out of it. This does not change its nature as harm. The cross is still the cross, still unendurable suffering and degradation. But we believe that God picked up that suffering and made it a sign and a means of redemption and reconciliation. At Easter we also proclaim our belief that the suffering was not the last word, but that God intervened to turn the unbearably tragic into the unbearably joyful. God uses human wrong for good: that is part of the message of Easter, and it should bring us not only hope but courage to place ourselves at God’s disposal in the wrongful situations of the world, to help those who have been wronged, trusting the God who redeems the irredeemable.

So it was that Peter, in the story that leads into his sermon here, came upon a disabled man lying in the Temple itself and offered him healing. This is the famous story in which Peter looks the man in the eye and says, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And it is faith in the name of Jesus that lifts the man to his feet and sends him dancing and hopping and shouting his praise to God. Jesus, who had lived without any power but God’s, who had been rejected by power and authority but vindicated by God, now becomes a source of power for this utterly powerless and marginalized man. It happens because the apostle of Jesus speaks his name as the only gift he has to offer.

There is something fundamentally important about the way this plays out. Peter did not have what the man naturally thought he needed, but he gave him what he did have. And that, I think, is what we’re called on to do. We may not have miraculous powers to offer, but the Spirit has given us something, and that is what we must give. Silver, gold, stock options, miracles: whatever it may be that I don’t have doesn’t matter. It’s what I do have that God wants me to work with, to offer where it is needed as I become part of God’s work of redeeming and healing and offering transformation and forgiveness. “What I have I give you.” Let me suggest that you check the pockets of your soul, rummage around in the purse within you, see what it is that you have to offer in the name of Jesus, as the name of Jesus, to a disabled world that still thinks it mainly needs silver and gold.

For it is the name of Jesus that works repentance and forgiveness, faith and healing in these stories—not the sounds and syllables, but the name that gives access to the essence and power of Jesus and God’s work done through him. In that culture a name was not just a label for purposes of identification, but a “handle” in the most practical sense, the way to get hold of someone, of their essential personhood. In the case of a divine being, it was the means of access to their power. For the early church in Acts, the name of Jesus sums up all that he was and is, and all that God had done through him. It is not his death as such but his name, his entire mission and being, that brings salvation, redemption, healing. His name makes him present in the situation of need when his people call on him.

So when we bear our witness, it is the name of Jesus that brings his presence, his love, his mercy, his power into the world. What we offer in his name in a sense becomes his name, becomes the offer of love and transformation that God makes through him as we bear witness, whether by word or deed. We do have something to offer. Even in a pluralistic world where we are eager to join in the many-sided dialogue of religions, let’s never forget that we bring something to the table. We may need to listen, but we also need to speak if we are to be full participants in the conversation.

I’m not an evangelist or a missionary, and I’ve always felt a little guilty about not being willing to go knocking on doors or sailing to foreign lands to testify. I’m never eager to inject my religious beliefs into a conversation, even when it seems that they are clearly called for. I don’t know why this is; I must still need more therapy. So I’m making this appeal to myself as much as to anyone else. There is a time when this beautiful name needs to be spoken, when this symbol of the love of God needs to be part of the discussion. Part of our spiritual discernment needs to be an awareness of such moments as opportunities to share the gift and the testimony that we do have.

For this is what we, the church, the people of God in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, have to give to the world. We have this testimony to the living Jesus, this offer of healing in Jesus’ name. We have this call to repentance and transformation, to a new life with God, both personal and communal, this hope of the refreshment and restoration of all.