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Having brought the apostles, they made them appear before the Sanhedrin to be questioned by the high priest. “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,” he said. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man’s blood.” Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than men! The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel. We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (NIV)

VERDICT…… LIFE!

Coming to terms with death and life
The ultimate outcome of an event is often established long after it occurs. This is painfully true in the case of events dealing with dark forces which claim the psyche. Take the example of the terrible Rwandan genocide which took place ten years ago last week as a case in point. The statistics are really hard to comprehend. In a country of roughly eight million people almost one tenth of the population was slaughtered with machetes and clubs in a hundred days while the world watched in silence! Death was everywhere. Can you imagine trying to bury 800,000 people in a country the size of Connecticut?
Why were these people killed? They were a minority Tutsi tribe in a country populated largely by Hutus. The Hutus wanted to preserve their majority status. People have been martyred for lesser reasons. It is, however, a horrible defect in our common humanity that we can do such things to one another. If you don’t believe in sin, go to Rwanda!

What can transpire, ten years after such a terrifying atrocity? A Hutu husband weeps quietly as he tells how his children watched while he was given the “option” to butcher with a machete his Tutsi wife or be killed along with his children. Countless thousands of Tutsi women who were raped by Hutus now are dying the slower more horrible death of AIDS. Members of churches in this most Christian nation in Africa are becoming members 500 recently built Muslim mosques because they cannot stand the fact that their pastors cooperated with the Hutus in identifying the Tutsis—often to save their own skin. Slaughters took place within their very churches. It is a country now more characterized, said one official, by nightmares than by dreams. How does one move away from such death a decade later—or a thousand years later? Or ever?

This last week, the Rwandan government staged a three-day genocide conference which drew participants from around the world. Strikingly, however, only Belgium was represented from the Western nations which attempted to muster the “good taste” to avoid the use of the word “genocide” during those fateful months in 1994. Now, a small nation struggles to understand whether the stench of death which controls their psyche can be released, washed away, removed? Can they move forward? How can one forgive, forget or move on with life in the face of evil so monstrous that it’s hard for us even in the West to talk about it?

The question of how one moves from death to life is a challenging one for any of us, even if the event is not as morbid or horrifying as were the deaths in Rwanda. In today’s lesson, the disciples who had been struggling with the implications of one crucifixion (a disgustingly cruel death) of their pioneer and savior, as Peter calls him here, now sought to make sense of their experience of his return to life. It’s one thing to come to grips with a savage and seemingly unjust execution. After all, such things are not unknown in human experience. To enter into the meaning of new life was more than they had bargained for as disciples. It’s wonderfully instructive for us to follow the thought patterns which the tradition remembers, to see how they came to accept the new reality and what it did for them personally. It will be interesting also to ask whether such acceptance could be helpful to the people of Rwanda, as well as to us in all the little and big deaths we experience in our daily lives.

Two deaths struggling to find life
In the six short verses of this text there are two forms of death, all too familiar to us, struggling to find new life. The first form of death relates to the evil which results when people like you and me can’t get past the question of who was right and who was wrong. There are two examples of this here. Some of the apostles found themselves in jail because the Sadducees objected to their preaching about the resurrection. Why should this concern them? Because the Sadducees were a major religious party that did not believe in things like resurrections! They were “jealous,” we are told in v. 17, allegedly because too many people were staking their lives on a teaching which they opposed. We know about dead-end situations all to well, not to mention, of course, that there are plenty of people in our own day who find the concept of resurrection, as did the first disciples themselves, “idle gossip.” But to fight about it… to jail people because of religious disagreements… to wage war between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland… between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq… between Hindus and Christians in Punjab… wars which for decades have led to despair and hopelessness and very real deaths! This is what was beginning in our text and this is what has never ceased in our world to the present time.

The second example of the kind of death which results from an inability to get past who is right and who is wrong results from a disagreement about the role Jewish authorities played in the crucifixion of Jesus. Those who reviewed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ like to give the impression that they have a poignant issue with which Gibson can be charged: Anti-Semitism. But listen to the Book of Acts, written by the Apostle Luke on this matter. The leaders of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish authorities, say to the apostles “… you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man’s blood,” And the apostles reply “The God of our fathers (and, of course, “their” fathers) raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree.” Of course, they were guilty. There is no question about it. Assessing their guilt, however, does not make one anti-Semitic. Someone needs to get a dictionary! Anti-Semitism, like prejudice and racism, has to do with seeking to denigrate or destroy a people, as in genocide, simply because they are Jews or Tutsis. This was not happening here. There was a disagreement about who was right and who was wrong and trials and imprisonments would not resolve the matter any more than mind-control or suppression of ideas or human rights abuses solve disagreements among people and nations today. It is a dead-end situation, a kind of death, which results from resolving differences by name calling, condescension and suppression.

In addition to these two examples of death resulting from disagreements about who is right and wrong, the text introduces the death which results from assuming that tradition
is more important than vision. In Texas, at the present time, perhaps even throughout the United States, we are inundated with television commercials telling us to vote for a person because, among other things, he is a conservative. Of course, there are fiscal conservatives and legal conservatives and many other kinds of conservatives. In general, however, the surmised mood of the country implies that it is better to vote for those who toe the incumbent party line, follow the rules, and cling to tradition. Conservatives, from a dictionary definition standpoint, fear change. Was such a philosophical stance characteristic of the apostles? What do you think? People who often got in trouble by sharing new ideas on the temple grounds? Men and women who ended up in prison for their radical idea? Jailbirds as paradigms for you and me? What can happen when people who do not want any change come face to face with those who are proclaiming at the encouragement of God (v.20), “Go stand in the temple courts and tell the people the full message of this new life.” How quickly we condemn those among us who bring new ideas, who talk in religious settings about issues which seem to us secular, or in secular settings about issues which seem to us religious? Constitutional battles rage because we don’t listen with open minds. TV and radio pundits take their shots without airing both sides of a story. Newspaper headlines announce the results of polls showing embattled people, many of whom have never studied the issues. Confrontations and deadly plotting results when people are not at least open to the prospect that alternatives may propose better solutions than the so-called tried and true. Closed-minded people have the smell of death about them.

Does this text have any solutions for these differing kinds of deaths in our social settings, in our personal lives, when we can’t get past who is right and wrong? When we can’t accept new ideas and cling only to approaches we have always used? It is interesting that apostles who could have carried on the arguments ad-infinitum—who could have said to the Sadducees, again and again, “there is too a resurrection!” and to the Sanhedrin “you did too kill him”—went on to more important things. Being the innovators and visionaries and followers of their Master that they were, they said that the main point was that all this happened so that Jesus “might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel.” (v. 31) Instead of haranguing about whether resurrection happened or did not, instead of insisting that the Jews recognize their implicitness in the crucifixion, they focus on meanings, on the result and impact of a dead Jesus now become alive. Through his resurrection, they say, we have life. We can set aside the old arguments; we can say we’re sorry without having to determine who was wrong. We can rejoice in the freedom which forgiveness gives no matter how horrible the atrocity… how dead-ended the argument. Here is something for victims in Rwanda. In Northern Ireland. In Punjab. For young men and women who even today say “how can there be a resurrection?” For husbands and wives who cannot get past blaming each other. For anyone who is locked in a dead-end situation. Repentance and forgiveness opens new doors to new life—and this is how we come away from it all. This, regardless of our current views and beliefs, is where we make our beginning.

Insisting on life when death cries foul
Can this really work for you? Is there power for your life in these words? I think the example of a lifestyle shared in a book and movie from several years ago can be helpful to us. Robin Williams played the lead in a true story about a young doctor called Patch Adams (also the name of the film). Adams was nothing short of alternative. He was unwilling to conform to the expectations of established authority. He was convinced that traditional medicine was not helping patients, that the morbidity rates were too high. Somehow, he felt the patient’s spirits needed to be involved and that a doctor should do whatever it took to rally, to encourage, to motivate, to challenge patients even if rules were broken. The authorities in the hospital wanted to expel this intern and the dean of the medical school tried to prevent him from graduating. Adams began to question his life’s mission, but one day he watched a butterfly (the ancient symbol of the resurrection) and he became convinced that death was not an alternative, hospitals or anywhere. Life was the only option—and he had to carry on. Nothing could stop him. He finally graduated to the chagrin of the dean, but to the cheers of fellow students and former patients.

The apostles had this view as well, and it surely can be ours. If the human verdict for Jesus was death, God’s verdict was life. If anger, hatred, and jealously insist on making the cycle of revenge and blaming an ongoing one, then someone needs to shout “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” If people can’t get past who was right and who was wrong, then someone who has experienced the new life in Christ has to call them into a new reality. If death itself cries “foul” because “we’ve never done it this way before,” then someone needs to give a witness with the ancient cry of the church, “Christ is risen!” If terrible atrocities break out like the Rwandan genocide, we dare not remain silent because the witness to repentance and forgiveness is not optional: “We must obey God rather than men.” If in the very real problems and depressions of our personal lives a brother or sister feels judged and condemned, it is our privilege to remind them that God’s verdict of life for Jesus is our verdict as well: “Because he lives, we too shall live.”
And if we, with the first apostles, come to fear that the meaning and power of this new life is more than we bargained for, we need to hear those to whom we are being called to bring our witness loudly cheering us on.

Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus
Concordia University at Austin
Austin, Texas
dzersen@aol.com