Easter III

Acts 4:5-12
1 John 1:1-2:2
Luke 24:36b-48

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Just about two weeks ago, our attention focused briefly on S. Peter’s treachery. Three times he denied that he knew Jesus, that he had any relationship with him. “I do not know the man.” (Mt. 26:74) In the gospels, Peter is not a model of faithfulness. We recall Peter unable to watch and pray with Jesus in Gethsemane – at Jesus’ great hour of need; we recall Peter initially refusing to let Jesus wash his feet; we recall Peter tempting Jesus, and Jesus telling him, “Get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me; you are not on the side of God, but of men.” (Mt 16:23)

After the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, Peter is transformed, a new man. He knows what he’s doing. He is resolute and purposeful. He gets it. In today’s lesson, he proclaimed, “There is salvation in no one [other than Jesus]. There is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved.” (Acts 4:12)

Peter made this bold, courageous proclamation before the Jewish religious establishment. Peter and John had just healed a lame beggar at the gate of the Temple, and then Peter had told the astonished crowd that his own power and piety had not healed the lame man, but rather Jesus, the man who they had denied and murdered, had risen from the dead and had now made the lame man strong. Peter’s preaching about the risen Christ angered the Temple authorities. They wanted to silence Peter. So they arrested him. Authoritarians always try to suppress dissent and ideas that threaten or challenge them.

Today’s scene from Acts is Peter’s trial. The religious authorities interrogated him, “By what authority or name do you these things?” Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, pointed out the absurdity of being arrested for doing a good deed and then proclaimed the good news that Jesus is alive, that Jesus has healed the lame man, that Jesus is the only way to life and salvation.

Peter knows the deeper truth that each of us should see ourselves as the lame man. Of all people, Peter knew of his limitations, his feebleness, his moral weakness. Despite his unfaithfulness, he had experienced the healing power of God’s love, and now nothing will prevent him from talking about it. He put it in stark terms, “If you want life, if you want healing, the only way is Jesus.”

These are hard words for our culture. We know a great variety of religions, most extremely admirable. We know that there is great goodness in other religions, that non-religious people are often highly moral and noble, that Christians hardly have a monopoly on goodness. Indeed, we know that the Church has erred frequently, that the Church has often acted in authoritarian and evil ways. Given our often unsavory history, many Christians now tend to say, “Jesus Christ is true for me, but not necessarily true for everyone. Other religions provide faith and truth for their followers. What’s true for me is not necessarily true for everyone else.” We may even get coy and reticent about proclaiming the good news and baptizing people of other faiths.

Peter would have had none of that. None of the early Christians would have tolerated that view. They knew all about other religions, and while they recognized good in them, they knew Jesus. They had a personal relationship with Jesus. They knew that he had risen from the dead. They knew his power, a power perfected in meekness and love and mercy.

The resurrection changed everything. They understood that all of history turns on it. It showed that Jesus was indeed the way, the truth, and the life. They felt an urgency, a joyful privilege and responsibility, to tell people – all people – about Jesus. Faith in other things, in other religions, was not just as good as following Jesus. Other religions didn’t worship the God who has raised the dead and who gives eternal life. “So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Christianity makes an absolute claim: Jesus is the son of the one true God, and in him we have life. It’s inescapable throughout the gospels, and trying to explain it away is dishonest.

Still, we get nervous about such absolutism. Rightly so. 9/11 shows us the horror that such religious certainty can cause. We could also add the Christian butchery of the Crusades and the Thirty Years’ War, much further removed from our consciousness, but the source of much more suffering.

Religious intolerance and violence and hatred do not come from faithfully following Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. Christians are being unfaithful to Jesus when we don’t respect people of different beliefs, when we try to use Jesus to justify hatred. Christianity grants us no prerogative of contempt for other people. We should see the image of God in all people.

While we firmly hold Jesus as the way to salvation, we can see God working in other religions. The Holy Spirit is not captive within the Church. We recognize in other faiths goodness, truth, and beauty. Christian absolutism is not exclusive. We know that God wants to save every one, that heaven is inclusive.

Even in the Acts of the Apostles, while emphasizing that Jesus is the only way to salvation, S. Luke leads us to anticipate a ‘universal restoration,’ “broadening the hope to include all Jews and all Gentiles, even of all the cosmos.” In his first letter to the Corinthians, S. Paul says that “at ‘the end,’ after ‘all [enemies have been put] under [Christ’s] feet,’ including death as the ‘last enemy,’ then God will be all in all.’ (1 Cor 15:24-28)” We must not put limits on our God’s kindness, forbearance, and patience. (Rms 2:4) We must not limit his mercy and charity.

One of the most fundamental core values of Christianity is to love other people, especially people different than we are. It’s welcoming the stranger, being friends with people who don’t share our views, loving them, being merciful to them.

Christianity should expand our sympathies and our understanding. Sure, our faith gives us strength in times of need, comforts us, but if it’s authentic, it doesn’t leave us where we are. It’s often taking us places where we would rather not be. It challenges us at every turn. If we think that we’ve got it made, that we’re among the favored people, that our spiritual lives don’t need much growth, that being unsettled and uncertain is bad for us, we need to think again.

Fear is a sin. It’s not trusting in God. I used to think that the besetting sin of our age was greed, but more and more I’m inclined to think that it’s fear. It leads to rigidity, stunts growth, cuts us off from other people. The more unlike us a person is the less we’re likely to try to understand him. Our culture today is increasingly divided. We feel more threatened by differences.

Recently, Russell Baker reviewed a new book about the art of conversation. Despite our nation’s earnest piety centered on the Word, Americans are suspicious of words. The great film director John Ford boasted about how few words he permitted his actors to speak. John Wayne and Gary Cooper, icons of the American persona, were self-styled men of action, not of words.

But we know that through words we experience the Word. In this parish especially, our love of beautiful language, our use of beautiful language in worship, comes from our sense of encountering the Word in words. And we also encounter the Word in the words of other people. The similarity of the words ‘communication’ and ‘communion’ is not coincidental. The exchange of words, good conversation, nurtures friendships and spiritual growth.

Among other things, good conversation requires us to listen attentively, to consider other views seriously, to refrain from promoting ourselves, to follow whimsical meanderings, to prevent disagreement from flaring into anger. Baker writes, “The good conversationalist must never go purple with rage, like people on talk radio; never tell a long-winded story, like Joseph Conrad; and never boast that his views enjoy divine approval, like a former neighbor of mine who car bumper declared, ‘God Said It, I Believe It, And That Settles It.’”

Jesus isn’t a crutch. We approach him in humility, remembering that Jesus consistently shocked and offended people, remembering that none of his disciples fully understood him, and we are mad to think we can. But so often – left and right, high and low, everywhere – we use Jesus as a cudgel to straighten out those with different ideas. He’s not to be used to demonize people who hold different views. It’s a great blessing to be immersed with people of different backgrounds, different views, different understandings. Conversations, building relationships and friendships, engaging other people help to prevent us from demonizing other people.

So often we commit the sin of Adam, that is we confuse ourselves with God. We do that when we pass judgment upon others. Jesus told us, “You judge with human limitations, human standards; but I don’t judge anyone.” (John 8:15) S. Paul wrote, “How unfathomable are his judgments! How mysterious are his ways!” (Rms 11:33) We don’t know his judgments, but we do know his love. We know that Jesus loves every person, regardless of what they think or do. Our job, our prayer, is to love the same way.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. Jaroslav Pelikan, Acts, Brazos Press (2005), p. 68.

2. Pelikan following Bp Kallistos Ware, p. 67.

3. Russell Baker, ‘Talking it Up,’ The New York Review, May 11, 2006, p. 4.