The Second Sunday of Easter
ACTS 5:27-32: The courage shown by Peter and the apostles as they stood before the Sanhedrin was a direct result of the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus of Nazareth. The Peter who cowered in the temple on the night of Jesus' arrest now stands before the high priest and the council to proclaim publicly that Jesus is Leader and Savior.
Peter and the others had gathered together at Solomon's Portico to preach and to heal. The sick were carried into the streets and laid on cots and mats so that Peter could heal them. If even his shadow fell on them, they believed, they would be healed.
The authorities took action. They arrested the apostles and put them into prison. But the flimsy prisons of Jerusalem could not hold these prisoners. An angel of the Lord, said the story, opened the prison doors and brought them out. The angel also instructed them to return to the temple and proclaim their message.
When it was morning, the high priest called the council, the Sanhedrin, together and demanded that the prisoners be brought before them. When the temple police went to the prison to bring out the prisoners, they found it empty. Then word came that the former prisoners were preaching in the temple from which they had been arrested. The temple police sallied forth again and brought Peter and the apostles to stand before the council. Charges were brought upon them: slander and insubordination, disturbing the peace of Jerusalem. They ordered the apostles to cease and desist in their teaching.
Peter's answer was quick: "We must obey God rather than men." God had sent Jesus to this world, they said, and the leaders of Judea had executed him. But God thwarted their action. God raised Jesus and exalted him to God's right hand. This was the highest honor that could be given to the risen Lord. The one "who sat at the right hand of power" was the one who carried out the decrees and edicts of the ruler. The concept was built on the political realities of the day. The ruler kept himself invisible from his people by staying in the royal throne room apart from them. Often the potentate wore a veil over his face, so that no one, not even his closest retainers, could see his face. One man, a prime minister, was seated at the king's right hand. The king would whisper his desires to the minister, and the minister would go out among the people to carry out the wishes and desires of the king. God was the king who was remote from the people, said this image of the heavenly court, and Jesus was the prime minister who came into the world to proclaim the will and word of the Lord. The risen Jesus had now returned to the heavenly throne room, but in his spirit he was still active in carrying out his divine ministry among the people of the world.
Two names were given to the exalted Lord. He was Leader and Savior. The title "Savior" is familiar to us. Jesus saves us from our sins. He also saves us from confusion about the truth, from wandering aimlessly through life, from loneliness in the midst of the crowd, from fear of death. "Leader" is more obscure to us. "Archegos" is the Greek word. In Greek philosophical tradition, it has more the meaning of "Founder." It is the term used for the originating power or cause of all things, the first cause which is origin of all that is. The Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) had picked up this term and used it for the heads of the ancestral households of Israel. The Letter to the Hebrews used the term to declare that Christ is the eternal, perfect model (archegos) of one who through obedience and sacrifice gains access and acceptance in the presence of God (Heb. 2:10). Because of his archetypal role, he is now "seated at the right hand of the throne of God" (Heb. 12:2). (These definitions are based upon comments by Howard Kee, To Every Nation Under Heaven, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, The Trinity Press, 1997, p 82) While the term lacks denotative meaning for us, I suspect it was used at this place in Acts through the auspices of the Hellenist branch of the church, whose position influenced the writing of the Letter to the Hebrews.
"We are witnesses of these things," said Peter. 'These things" include the death of Jesus, his resurrection, his exaltation, and his sending the spirit to those who obey him. To be a witness to these mean to have seen these things occur. But the word "witness" is "marturion" in Greek. "Marturion" carries the sense of "martyr," standing up for Jesus Christ to the point of one's own death. Peter stood before the Sanhedrin on this momentous day and witnessed to what he had seen. On another momentous day, in another place, he would also be a witness, a marturion, a martyr to the faith that he held so dearly.
PSALM 150: Psalm 150 is a psalm of unrestrained praise. Gather your instruments, says the psalm, your trumpets, your lutes and harps, your stringed instruments, your tambourines, your pipes, your cymbals. Bring them into the sanctuary. Take them outside under God's mighty firmament. Sing and dance. Taylor (IB4:759-760) remarks, "The psalmist follows the usual form in calling people to worship; but he means for the rendition of the psalm to increase the volume of sound until in the closing half-line voices and instruments together reach an impressive climax." Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!
Psalm 150 also is the last psalm in the Book of Psalms, the Book of Praises. If the Book of Psalms has shape and form of its own, as many scholars declare, this last psalm is related to the first psalm. Psalm One commended openness to God's instruction. Laments, confessions, thanksgivings, deprecations of one's enemies mark the psalms that follow. Then comes Psalm 150 and its climactic exuberance. Praise is spontaneous. It is singing and dancing, as Snoopy in "Peanuts" used to say, "To dance is to live!" It is offering one's whole life and self to God. If Psalm 150 is our guide, the faith prescribed in the Old Testament does not conclude with obedience. Old Testament faith ends in adoration.
REVELATION 1:4-8: John the Seer announces that he is writing to the seven churches in Asia. This superscription to the letter identifies both the writer of the letter and the churches to whom it is addressed.
John the Seer has to be differentiated from John the son of Zebedee, Jesus' Galilean disciple, and John the Evangelist, the Hellenist Christian from Jerusalem whose record of Jesus' ministry in both Judea and Galilee form the foundation for the Gospel of John. John the Seer lived a generation after the other two. His home was Ephesus on the Aegean Sea. He was a "prophet," which means that he moved from one church to another to bring his message of Jesus Christ. His circle of churches included Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. He had been arrested by Roman officials for not making the required sacrifice to the god Roma. He had been sent as a slave to the island of Patmos, down the Aegean Sea south of Ephesus. There he worked the granite mines whose stones were building the temples and shopping malls of the Roman Empire. There he had the visions that constitute the substance of his Revelation.
The verses before us, 1:4-8, are a liturgy of the church. The speaking parts in the liturgy are assigned to John, to God, and to the people of the congregation.
John speaks, echoing the words of Paul: "Grace to you and peace." Grace is the Greek word "charis." It was a characteristic word of greeting in Greek society. When applied to God, it meant "God treats us better than we deserve to be treated." "Peace" was the Hebrew word of greeting, "shalom." It referred to the well-being that surrounds the people whom God favors. "Grace and peace" indicate that the congregations to which this vision was addressed consisted of both Greek and Hebrew converts to the Christian faith.
John continues: "Him who was and who is and who is to come" is a description of God. This description was found in the Hebrew Bible. It describes the God of our past and our present and our future. Similar descriptions of God were found in other parts of Mediterranean civilization. The oracle at Dodona addressed Zeus as "Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be." Of Minerva it was said, "I am all that has been and is and shall be." Persians spoke of Ormazd as a god whose times were and are and ever will be. John may have had all these references in mind as he addressed those in the congregations who had previously been worshipers of Zeus or Ormazd but were now worshiping the God of Jesus Christ.
"The seven spirits who were before God's throne" may have been the spirit-representation of each of the congregations to which the letter was addressed. The congregations were pictured as seven spirits who continually praised God. This tells us something important about the place of worship in Christian experience. They may also have been seven favored spirits of God who were said to surround the throne of God and spend their eternity in praising God.
John goes on to say that the "grace and peace" comes not only from God but also through Jesus Christ. He gives three descriptions of Jesus in this superscription of his letter.
"He is the faithful witness." Everything Jesus did bore witness to God. Everything Jesus did was faithful to his God. Jesus was faithful even to death, the most gruesome of deaths, death on a cross.
"He is the first-born of the dead." He was crucified indeed, dead and buried, but God raised him from the dead. As such he is the "first-born of the dead." Those who are born of the spirit of God and Christ will also be raised from the dead.
"He is the ruler of the kings of the earth." John the Seer expressed this idea in many places in his writing. There are kings of the earth, John knew, and they exercised power. Their power was often oppressive power, and by his arrest John knew from personal experience what this power could cost a person. Rome was at the center of the world of power, and the other kings served Rome in whatever way was necessary for them to retain their borrowed powers. But the real ruler of these kings was Jesus Christ himself. As John says in his glorious doxology near the end of his vision, "He is king of kings and Lord of lords, and he shall reign forever and ever." John was stating his conviction that only the kings who served the love and justice of Jesus Christ were true kings, and when they were true kings they recognized the sovereignty over their lives of Jesus Christ.
John gives Jesus yet another title: "He is the one who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood." The death of Jesus Christ freed us from our sins. The act of dying in our behalf is the ultimate description of the love of Christ, and God, for us. Wherever God touches this earth, God has to suffer, as those whom he loves suffer persecution and death.
"By his death he made us a kingdom of priests to his God and Father." This refers to Exodus 19:6, "you shall be to me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation." Each person in the holy nation of Israel, thought the priests who wrote this portion of Exodus, will be pure as a priest before God. John the Seer adopted this idea and says that the people of God, the people of the church, will be priests to one another in the holy kingdom.
"To him (Christ) be glory and dominion," he cries. And the people say, "Amen." This liturgical dialogue, like other portions of this opening section in John's vision, was most likely drawn from the rich worship of the churches of Christ.
The liturgy continues with another word from the Seer: "Behold he is coming with the clouds." "Clouds" were the vehicle that Israel and the early church had chosen to express the idea that the hidden one would appear again. Clouds revealed, and clouds obscured. Clouds revealed the glory of the sun as that glory was reflected in the clouds, and clouds hid the sun when rains and darkness were upon the earth. "Clouds" would carry the glory of Jesus Christ when he would return, just as at this moment "clouds of obscurity and of evil" prevented the faithful from seeing the Christ who was the center of their worship and of their lives.
"Every eye will see him, every one who pierced him." This seems to say that all on earth will see him, but especially those responsible for his death, who pierced his hands and feet, will see that he is the one who carries in himself the glory and dominion of God.
"All the tribes of earth will wail on account of him." Not only will the Jewish tribes, whose existence was very much on the mind of this Seer, but the other tribes as well, will wail on account of his death. These gentile tribes, spiritual descendants of Pontius Pilate and the Roman Empire behind him, will recognize that they too had a hand in the death of Christ, and they will mourn their part in his death.
And all the people in the congregation say, "Amen."
God now speaks: "I am the Alpha and the Omega." These are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and joining them together says that God is the power over everything. Identifying God in this way also reflects Hellenistic magical convictions about the properties of the Greek vowels. This Greek idea of the majesty of God is immediately followed by a Hebrew conception: God is "the Lord God, who is and was and is to come, the Almighty." The Book of Revelation not only heaps up titles for God but draws them from a wide range of sources in an effort to ground the narrative that follows in concepts of God that had currency for his audience, thereby increasing the authority of this vision.
And the people say, "Even so. Yea, it is true. Amen."
JOHN 20:19-31: The disciples of Jesus, his Galilean followers, had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the passover with him and instead were immersed in the awesome events of his arrest and crucifixion. Now they had heard from Mary Magdalene that Jesus was raised from the dead and that she had actually seen him. That evening they had withdrawn to a room, perhaps the same room in which they had eaten their last meal with Jesus. They needed to think and pray, and they needed to lock the doors of the room for fear that enemies of Jesus might come to arrest them and subject them to the same fate that he had suffered.
Jesus entered the room. "Peace be with you," he said. He showed them his hands and his side, his identifying marks. The resurrected body of Jesus Christ bore the marks of the pain and suffering that he had just undergone. And, says John, "they were glad when they saw the Lord."
The "peace" of which Jesus speaks is the "shalom of God," to use the Old Testament phrase. It is life at its best, the sense of well-being, when heaven touches earth, the sense I get when I recall the epitaph on the grave of the Scottish writer, Robert Louis Stevenson:
Here he lies where he longs to be
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter, home from the hill.
"Peace" in Greek meant "to talk with each other again," usually after some break in the relationship. The relationship between Jesus and the disciples had been broken with their desertion and his death. Now it is restored. They are talking with each other again. This is peace.
Add the peace of the moment to the joy the disciples felt, and we have a instant in time when the kingdom of God was fully present for them. Peace and joy were marks of the kingdom to come, and the disciples experienced these at the moment that Jesus rejoined them through the locked door.
Jesus then commissioned them to carry out his mission. "As the father has sent me, so I send you." That his spirit might be with them as they carried out his mission, he, said John, "breathed on them." The same word, you recall, means breath and spirit. Jesus' act carries us back to Genesis and God's creation of the first human being. Holding the clay figure in his hands, says the writer of Genesis, God breathed the breath of life into him. So Jesus, acting in God's stead, calls into being the new creation, when he breathes upon his disciples and bestows upon them the spirit of the new life. "Receive the Holy Spirit," he says.
Then Jesus adds: "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." The disciples now receive the same power that God has and that Christ has: to forgive and not to forgive. They are given the right to bring persons into the fellowship of Christ or to refuse them entrance into it. This is an awesome statement and an awesome power. It can only be used in accord with the spirit of Christ.
Thomas had not been with the group when Jesus came into the room. When the other disciples told him that they had seen the Lord, Thomas was not ready to accept their testimony. He declared in no uncertain terms: "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe." "Will not" in Greek contains a double negative. It is the strongest statement of doubt that a person can give. Thomas gave it.
I have always thought that in doing this Thomas was transporting himself from the first century to the twentieth. In the first century, it was the "word" that was most readily believed, a word of testimony. In the twentieth century, we no longer believe what we hear; words surround us everywhere, and they have become cheap. We only believe what we can see and touch. In this respect, we have become like Thomas.
Yet is it true that we can only believe what we can see and touch? A writer named Hamilton in a book entitled Tomorrow (63) wrote this: "Imagine anyone today denying the reality of the invisible, like Thomas staking all life's meaning on a small fragment of reality that can be touched, measured, and verified; when everyone knows now, even the unlearned, that we are part of a tremendous scheme of reality which is mostly invisible to our eyes and beyond the range of our senses to perceive. The world, scientists say, is made of atoms. What do they mean, atoms? Show us some; let us see an atom. We don't see atoms; we believe in them. We believe in what we cannot see. And men who cannot see an atom split it. We can't see energy, gravity, electricity -- the invisible link between cause and effect. How many things we believe with confidence that we never expect to see at all. We have never seen an idea, felt a truth, or put our finger on a thought. The whole world of the mind, almost everything that is basic in personality -- all of it as invisible to our eyes as God is invisible. So people to whom seeing is believing -- who don't believe until they can touch and see -- are in a bad way: they live in too small a world; more than that, they live in a deceptive world."
But Thomas persisted. Thomas needed a vision of triumph as vivid as the former vision of defeat. He had seen the nails pounded into Jesus' hands and wrists, the spikes driven into his feet, the body hanging inert in great pain upon the cross. He needed a vision of resurrection so strong that it would blot out his haunting vision of the cross. He did one thing right, though. He did not break fellowship with his friends, the disciples. As Henri Nouwen wrote in his Genessee Diary (56): "Although Thomas did not believe in the resurrection of Christ, he kept faithful to the community of believers. In that community the Lord appeared to him and strengthened his faith. I find this a very profound and controlling thought. In times of doubt or unbelief the community can carry you along; it can be the context in which you recognize the Lord again."
Read the next: "Eight days later, Jesus' disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, 'Peace be with you all.'" Then he spoke to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side." Jesus knew Thomas' doubt, down to the exact words that Thomas had spoken to the others. "Do not be faithless but faithful," said Jesus.
Thomas did not do as he was told. He did not reach out his fingers or his hand. He had no need to do so. Jesus was there, Jesus had transcended any doubt that he had, and from Thomas' soul came the greatest confession of faith recorded in the New Testament: "My Lord, and my God." Jesus is lord, no question about it, Lord of the world, the community, his own life. More than that. Thomas sees Jesus as God, the one who speaks to us what God would speak, who acts in our lives as God would act, who guides as God would guide, who forgives us as God forgives. "My Lord and my God."
Jesus quickly responds. "Have you believed, Thomas, because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." This is the last and greatest beatitude that Jesus proclaims. With an eye on future generations, with an eye on us, he pronounces it. We have not seen the Lord, as did Mary Magdalene, Peter, James, Thomas, and the others. But we have an even greater blessing than they did. They believed because they saw the resurrected Christ. We are faithful to him without ever having seen him, because we believe the testimony the others have given to us and because we have experienced the power of the resurrected Christ in our own lives. To the likes of us Jesus says, "Blessed are you who have not seen and yet are faithful."
John closes this chapter of his book with the words, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name." For an explanation of this, I invite you to turn to my description of the Gospel of John, given before.