The Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14a, 22-32
1 Peter 1:3-9
John 20:19-31
Psalm 16
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
TODAY we have occasion to revisit the first recorded Christian sermon. In Acts 2, it’s now fifty days after Easter, the Feast of Pentecost (which came fifty days after Passover), and the apostles are in Jerusalem where Jesus, after he arose, told them to wait until they received “power” from heaven (Luke 24.49; see Joel 2.28-29). Now the power had come; God’s Spirit landed on them like tongues of fire, and they miraculously spoke in the native tongues of Jews from all over the known world on pilgrimage to the holy city for the feast. What gives rise to the sermon is actually an accusation that the apostles’ unusual behavior means they’re drunk. Peter’s denial of the accusation begins the first Christian sermon.
What interests me is Peter. Peter himself is a fascinating character, and his story is one of my favorites in the bible. He could be fiery: John’s gospel tells us Peter took a sword and cut off a servant’s ear in the Garden of Gethsemane when men came to arrest Jesus (John 18.10). One writer translates the Greek word for “ear” there to mean “little ear” or “earlobe,” which suggests Peter was making a horizontal swipe with his sword, probably trying to cut off the servant’s head. Not meek behavior. Peter impetuously swore he would follow Jesus to his death, but the role he played in Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t that of a faithful disciple but that of a traitor. The night before Jesus died Peter showed himself a coward, cursing Jesus and denying him three times. But now the apostle who cowered before a servant girl (Luke 22.33-34), stands in the heart of Jerusalem before a hostile, sneering crowd and accuses them of Christicide, of having killed the Christ, the Messiah of God.
A remarkable transformation. So what changed? What happened to Peter between the crucifixion and Pentecost? I believe Peter really meant it when he said he would follow Jesus even to death, but he lacked the will and his best intentions fell under the weight of his fear. When the chips were down, he couldn’t live up to the standards he had set for himself and he couldn’t keep the promise he’d made to Jesus.
That’s the problem with discipleship through sheer force of will: It usually doesn’t work. Peter’s story sheds light on the difference between obedience to God as an exercise of the will, what some would call faith in “religion,” and something radically different, which is faith in the gospel, obedience as an exercise of the heart. The very heart of “religion” is moral observance as a means of salvation, but that’s precisely what Jesus came to destroy. Alexander Schmemann wrote: “Christianity . . . is in a profound sense the end of all religion . . . . Nowhere in the New Testament, in fact, is Christianity presented as a cult or as a religion. Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man. But Christ who is both God and man has broken down the wall between man and God. He has inaugurated a new life, not a new religion.” Religion says: “If I just try hard enough to live like God wants me to live – if I just treat people like I would want to be treated; if I give a dollar to the homeless woman in McPherson Square; if I tithe, don’t cheat on my wife or my taxes, and I’m careful to say my prayers – then God will accept me.” Religion runs on the principle that man can work his way up to a distant God.
The gospel runs on the fundamentally different principle that says God worked his way down to us, overcoming every barrier that separated us, even sin and death, and he did it in Jesus. That’s what Peter found out when he met Jesus after the resurrection on the shore of the Sea of Tiberius and Jesus told him: “Come and eat with me.” (Jn 21.12) Sharing a meal meant friendship, and not even betrayal kept Jesus from saying “Peter, no matter what you’ve done, you are my friend.” That’s what transformed Peter from the “inside-out,” and it can transform us too: God accepts us, therefore we work hard to please him in our lives, not the other way around. In the shards of his betrayal, at breakfast on the shore, Peter came to know Jesus in a new way, not as a master who demands obedience but as a savior who loves and forgives his betrayers.
From that point on, we see a different side to Peter.
1.FIRST of all, he is radically Christological – Read the rest of Acts and see how often Peter begins speeches by talking about Jesus. He talks about Jesus in the Temple (3.11f) and before the religious elite (4.5f). At one point, when Peter and John are ordered not to talk about Jesus, they say “we can’t stop speaking about what we have seen and heard” (4:19-20). In John Stott’s commentary on Acts, he writes: “Our struggle today is how to be faithful to this apostolic gospel [and w]hat is immediately clear is that, like the apostles, we must focus on Jesus Christ. Peter’s beginning ‘listen to this: Jesus . . .’ must be our beginning too.”
Let me be clear: I do not mean we take Jesus into every conversation at work and at home and on the way. I’m sure Peter had lots of conversations when he didn’t start by saying “listen to this: Jesus . . . .” But Jesus had become the central truth in Peter’s life, and nothing was more important to Peter than honoring Jesus with his life.
2. SECOND, he was also bold – It’s easy to miss this, but Peter said even the crucifixion, which for all intents and purposes seemed to be a tragedy, was “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2.23). Peter perceives the benevolent hand of God even behind the crucifixion, so he trusts that same benevolent hand to be behind whatever came his way. So he writes in his first letter:
In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith – being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire – may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. (1 Pet. 1.6-7)
3. THIRD, Peter also found that the duty he had failed in had now become his greatest joy. If you’ve sung “Amazing Grace,” you’ve sung the words of John Newton, the rector of St. Mary Woolnoth in London when he died in 1807. Newton had been radically transformed, too. The son of a shipmaster, Newton went to sea for the first time when he was only 11 years old, and in a profession of tough characters, he was legendary for his profanity, lewdness, coarse behavior. He became a slave-trader but was converted to Christianity on a ship called the Greyhound in a North Atlantic storm in 1747. It took a while, but he eventually renounced the slave trade and influenced William Wilberforce, who campaigned indefatigably against slavery in England. What changed Newton? He gives us a hint in a hymn he wrote as a curate in Olney:
Our pleasure and our duty,
Though opposite before,
Since we have seen His beauty,
Are joined to part no more:
It is our highest pleasure,
No less than duty’s call,
To love Him beyond measure,
And serve Him with our all.
There’s a reason I wanted to talk about Peter today, on this first Sunday after Easter. The first time I ever heard Fr. Davenport talk about Holy Week at Ascension and St. Agnes he invite our catechumenate class to “Come to Holy Week – it will change your life.” He was right. Like Peter met Jesus in a new way on the shore, and it changed an impetuous, fickle young man into a confident witness to the transforming power of grace, we met Jesus in Holy Week. He washed our feet on Maundy Thursday, we stood at his cross on Good Friday and we found an empty tomb at the Great Vigil. He waits for us with a meal – he waits for us in a meal – in bread and wine, the sacrament of Holy Communion. He invites all of us who commit a thousand little betrayals every day to begin again as his friends. Beauty like that, the beauty of a forgiving, reconciling God standing ready to embrace us, transforms a slave into a child and duty into joy.
Our pleasure and our duty,
though opposite before,
since we have seen His beauty,
are joined to part no more.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
1. Michael Card, The Parable of Joy: The Wisdom of the Gospel of John (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1995): 206 n.10.
2. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002): 21-22 (emphasis in original).
3. John R. W. Stott, The Message of Acts: The Spirit, the Church & the World (Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity, 1994): 79-80.
4. “Newton, John,” in The Oxford Dict. Of the Christian Church, 3d ed. (Oxford: University Press, 2005): 1150-51. See “John Newton, Servant of Slaves, Discovers Amazing Grace!” in Glimpses of Christian History, no. 28 <http://chi.gospelcom.net/GLIMPSEF/Glimpses /glmps028.shtml>
(last visited 29 March 2008); “131 Christians Everyone Should Know: John Newton, Reformed Slave Trader,” in Christian History, no. 81 <http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/special/131christians/newton.html>
(last visited 29 March 2008).
5. John Newton and William Cowper, Olney Hymns: In Three Parts (W. Collins, 1843): 293
© 2008 Sam Wood
