Acts 10.34-43, Luke 24.1-12
“We are witnesses to all
that Jesus did both in Judea and in Jerusalem”. That’s what Peter says in our first reading. “We
are witnesses”. That’s partly just a statement of fact, of course. Peter
had seen Jesus at work. He’d travelled with him, lived with him, eaten with
him, had his feet washed by him. He’d seen Jesus speaking to the crowds, healing
the sick, and he’d seen him exhausted, asleep in Peter’s boat, frightened in
the Garden of Gethsemane. Peter had been with Jesus almost till the end. He was
the only disciple who’d followed Jesus when he was arrested, but his nerve had
failed him at the last minute as he stood in the courtyard of the High Priest’s
house. When people started asking him if he knew Jesus, he denied it all and
hid as Jesus was led away to be crucified. But after the crucifixion, Peter was
one of the first to see Jesus again – in a locked upper room, on the lakeside
in Galilee welcoming his disciples to a breakfast of barbequed fish.
He wasn’t the only witness we
hear about in today’s Bible stories though. The first to see the Risen Christ
were a group of women, who had supported Jesus’ ministry. They had watched
Jesus die and seen him buried in a borrowed tomb. That’s why they knew where to
go with their spices and ointments. That’s why they were the ones who
discovered that there was no body to anoint that the tomb was empty, that Jesus
was risen.
At first the other disciples
didn’t believe them. They were women. Women’s testimony didn’t count in a court
of law in their culture. Nor, it would seem, did it count in the court of the
disciples’ opinion – their words were dismissed as “idle tales”. But Peter
decided that he ought at least to go and check it out for himself, rather than
writing it off, and he found that it was just as they had said.
“We are witnesses” he said. He spoke of what he knew, and that was what
gave him and the other disciples of Christ authority when they talked about the
resurrection of Jesus. No one would have believed it otherwise. You couldn’t
make it up, and you wouldn’t want to either. After all, many of these same
disciples ended up being persecuted and killed themselves because of what they
said they’d seen. There was nothing in it for them – no power, no glory, no
status. If they knew it was a lie, if they knew they hadn’t seen it, there
would be no conceivable reason to make it up. People may choose to die for a
mistaken idea, but if we don’t die proclaiming a deliberate falsehood
about an event which we know is untrue.
They could have followed the
way of Jesus as a dead hero, a wise man whose teachings brought wisdom to the
world – history is full of them, people whose stories inspire others. There
would have been nothing wrong with that. But these people, who had been there,
insisted, even at the cost of their own lives, that he wasn’t a dead hero, but
a living friend. I can’t explain it, and I have long ago given up trying to. I
don’t know what we would have seen if we had been there in first century Jerusalem
with a video camera, but I know that these witnesses were sure that Jesus, who
had died, was now alive. To them that was the proof that God hadn’t deserted
him when he died on the cross, that he really was who he said he was, God’s
chosen one, doing God’s work, and because of that, the message he had
proclaimed, about God’s love being for everyone, really was true.
“We are witnesses” says
Peter.
Of course, we can’t say the
same thing, at least in the sense that Peter meant it. We haven’t seen
the risen Jesus appearing in a locked room or on a lakeside, or trudging along
the road with us on the long road to Emmaus.
But that doesn’t mean that we
can’t bear witness to the resurrection. Those of us who call ourselves
Christians today do so because in some way we have discovered the power of the
resurrection in our own lives. It’s a different sort of witness, but just as important
– perhaps more so. A former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, once got into a
lot of trouble in the press for saying that the resurrection was “more than
a conjuring trick with bones”. But he was right, despite the furore. If the
resurrection was only about something that happened 2000 years ago, thousands of miles away, seen
by people who are now long dead, it would be an amazing story, but nothing more
than that. Christian faith proclaims, though, that the resurrection of Jesus is
a living event, happening in our lives day by day, for us to discover anew.
Peter is talking, in the first
reading we heard, to a Roman centurion called Cornelius and his household. Cornelius
has heard about Jesus and his message, and wants to know more. Think about that
for a moment. He is a Roman centurion. It was the Romans who had crucified
Jesus, Roman soldiers who had driven the nails into his hands, who had hoisted
the cross up, with the weight of Jesus’ body on it, who had watched and
sneered, gambling for his robe at the foot of the cross, until he died. Roman
soldiers were the enemy. To be fair, Peter had really struggled when Cornelius
had asked him to come to him, as I expect any of us would. It had taken some
pretty heavyweight intervention from God to get him to go. But Peter knew that
Jesus had proclaimed that God’s love was for everyone. He knew that even as
those Roman soldiers were driving the nails in Jesus had prayed “Father,
forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”, and he knew that by
raising him from death, God had affirmed that message, had proclaimed that love
was stronger than hatred, so in the end, he found the courage he needed, went
to Cornelius, and, to cut a long story short, Cornelius his whole household
were baptised and became followers of the way of Jesus in their own lives. Peter
was a witness to the physical resurrection of Jesus, but Cornelius became a witness
to the power of that resurrection to break down the barriers of suspicion and
hatred which ought to have made Peter run a mile from him.
That’s what the resurrection is about – not an event that
happened to Jesus and to those lucky enough to have been there and seen it two
thousand years ago, but something which enables resurrection to happen daily in
the hearts of those who follow him, people like Cornelius, who discovered a new
way to live, love and forgiveness that should have been unimaginable
It's the same for us. We can’t
witness that first resurrection in a graveyard in Jerusalem, but we can witness
the resurrecting power of God’s love in the graveyard of our own hopes and
dreams, in the situations where we feel that all is lost, as we discover that
love is still stronger than hatred, and life stronger than death today.
It can be hard to discover
and hold onto that on our own, which is why we need each other. We need to gather
as a church, however we do that. Hearing the witness of others can be vital
when our own faith falters. But when we’ve
found the good news for ourselves, it will spill out to those around us who
need to hear it too, spreading through our words, our actions, our attitude to
life. It’s not about denying the reality
of death or suffering – far from it; It is about declaring that they are not
the whole of the story or the end of the story. All around us we see death at
work – as the bombs rain down on Ukraine, as our planet faces the threat of climate
change, as people are ground down by poverty and injustice, as well as in the
personal threats and sorrows we face. Death is obvious, but we are called to
bear witness to the possibility of life, where no life ought to be, which brings
hope to places where despair seems to rule.
“We are witnesses”, says
Peter, and that is what makes all the difference to him. He has discovered the
power of God’s love for himself. This
Easter, God calls each of us to do the same, because if Christ has been raised
from death, then we can be raised from death too.
Amen
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