4th Sunday of Easter (in Aarhus)
By Very Reverend John Arnold, Sunday 3rd May, 2009
The Preaching of Peter
It is widely believed that what established the Christian Church was a combination of the universal authority of St Peter and the preaching of St Paul. In fact, it was almost exactly the other way round. It was Paul, the second millennium of whose birth we celebrate this year, who had the care of all the churches and provided them with authoritative doctrine; it was Peter, who first preached the Good News of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, as the basis for all future developments.
The last four verses of the passage we have just heard is a précis or epitome of his message. Before we ask what that was, let us ask to whom it was, and indeed is, addressed and in what circumstances.
According to Acts, the appearances of the Risen Jesus to believers continued for about forty days until his Ascension. Ten days later at the Jewish Feast of Pentecost the Apostles were filled with the Spirit and Peter began to proclaim the Resurrection, claiming that it was the fulfilment of the Hebrew Scriptures and that those who heard it should repent, and be baptized. This message was confirmed by the healing of a lame man in the Temple and, as it says, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The story continues: ‘While Peter and John were speaking to the people, the priests, the captain of the Temple and the Sadducees came to them, much annoyed because they were teaching the people and proclaiming that in Jesus there is the resurrection of the dead. So they arrested them and put them in custody.’
Then we pick up today’s reading; ‘The next day their rulers, elders and scribes assembled in Jerusalem with Annas the High Priest, Caiaphas, John and Alexander and all who were of the high priestly family’ and so on. It is to them, the A-Team, the rulers of the universe, the capi di capi, that Peter, the former Galilean fisherman and renegade coward, preaches his sermonette, not to international crowds outdoors, as formerly, but indoors, in prison and to a very select, high-powered group, in response to their question about power: ‘By what power or by what name did you do this?’ Why is that their question? Why isn’t it, as you might expect at an impromptu inquisitorial trial: ‘What has happened? What is the truth of the situation?’ But no, the form of the question reveals what sort of people the questioners are. They are men of power; but they are also men with uneasy consciences about the source of their power. For these are the high priestly caste, not the ordinary priests and Levites, who come quite well out of the New Testament and who came in large numbers to believe in Christ. This is a semi-pagan clique of collaborators with the Roman occupation and with Hellenistic culture. One of them, Alexander, even has a Greek name. They are close to Herod, they are blackmailing Pontius Pilate, they belong to the Sadducees, a combined religious and political party who, unlike the Pharisees, deny any possibility of resurrection, they have seized control of the Temple and they have turned the House of God, not only into a den of thieves and what we would now call a financial institution, but also into a family business, cosa nostra.
No wonder Jesus began his ministry in Jerusalem by unmasking the racketeers and casting out the money-men, thus re-launching the provincial assault on metropolitan corruption, which had been typical of the prophets, Amos and Micah. Note that Peter deliberately and uniquely refers to him here as ‘Jesus Christ of Nazareth’, emphasising his northern provenance. No wonder he had to go, because, as they said: ‘He is preaching against the Temple.’ Of course, he was not preaching against his Father’s house, the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant and the Mercy Seat. He was preaching against the alliance of religion and power, of pride, avarice, envy and covetousness, against the loss of relationship with God and neighbour to which they lead, and against that loss of contact with reality and morality which could make them, for example, more worried about the dead body of Jesus remaining on the cross on the Sabbath, than with the injustice and atrocity of the Crucifixion in the first place. We in our generation missed the chance to preach, not so much against the Temple as against the City, when it was exhibiting similar symptoms of corruption and of corporate insanity; and now we must live with the consequences, and peoples poorer than us will pay an even heavier price.
But speaking against the Temple did not carry the death penalty; and that is where the High Priests used their hold over Pilate to have Jesus condemned on a trumped up charge of treason, which did. Now there is nothing anti-semitic or anti-Jewish about the focus on the responsibility of the High Priestly family here. It is simply that they are Peter’s audience; and he shows great courage in forcing them to face up to their responsibility, when they are his captors and he is their captive. In his next speech in public he widens the scope of responsibility for the crucifixion and says: ‘In this city… both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the gentiles and the people of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus.’ (Acts 4, 27): but, face to face with Annas and Caiaphas, he concentrates on their personal guilt, re-phrasing Psalm 118 to say: ‘This Jesus is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone,’ and he goes on to say: ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.’
I know that many people nowadays are troubled by this apparently exclusivist verse, just as they are by the words which St John’s Gospel ascribes to Jesus: ‘No man comes to the Father except through me’; and I want to say something about them. First of all, we have to ask what kind of statements they are. They are not general theological propositions about salvation and they are certainly not about damnation. Nor are they knockdown answers to questions about other faiths, which had not then been put. They are, rather, a mixture between a challenge and an invitation, and they are designed to elicit faith. St John says explicitly that his Gospel is written ‘so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.’ St Peter is giving a direct answer to the question, ‘In whose name did you do this?’ and that answer is, ‘Jesus Christ of Nazareth.’ Two thousand years later that same question cum challenge is addressed to us. It is existential; it requires a response. It is not proposed as a topic of conversation or designed to raise theoretical anxieties about the fate of those who have not so much as heard the name of Jesus. That concern may be well meant; it may lead to missionary endeavour, but it may be a diversion, a way of avoiding the challenge of discipleship.
Secondly, and more importantly, it raises the question of the nature of the God to whom we pray. Is this a unitary, totalitarian God, who makes arbitrary decisions about the ultimate destinies of men, women and children? Or is God a Spirit, whom we worship in spirit and in truth, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Himself a society or communion of persons bound together by love, who hates nothing that he has made and of whom it is a property always to have mercy?
These early chapters of Acts, which we read in Eastertide, are filled both with belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and also with the activity of the Holy Spirit. It took centuries for the church to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity,
but the experience upon which the doctrine is based is there already. The Letter to the Hebrews says that Christ, after his Ascension is in two physically impossible positions at once. He is seated at the right hand of God, but he is also standing before the Father, where he never ceases to make intercession for us. When we pray, it is the Spirit of Jesus praying in us, and our prayers, so long as they are aligned with his, are transmitted to the Father by the Son. We come to the Father through him.
Now, when I see the piety and devotion and concentration of, for example, my Muslim friends, I do not doubt that they are approaching God. I believe, though they do not, that their prayers, if like ours they are acceptable, are taken by the Spirit to the Father through the Son, and that in this way they do indeed come to the Father through him.
Not everyone would agree, but I believe that it is along these lines that we should develop and obey the impossible command to love, which Jesus gave to his disciples in the Gospel, and heed the words of St John in the Epistle: ‘This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his son Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as he has commanded us.’
Amen.
