A sermon on Acts 2: 14a, 36-41 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
The biggest shock of the resurrection turns out not to have been that a dead person got up and came back, but something else. It was that he was utterly unlike what everybody assumed a dead person coming back would be like.
You don’t have to be a fan of zombie movies to relate to the usual assumption. If the dead come back, they are going to have some scores to settle. And if the reason they were dead is that they were brutally persecuted and murdered, then nothing could be more terrifying than the prospect of them coming back, seriously pissed off, hungry for vengeance, and you’ve got no known way of killing them again.
That’s the assumption most of us would make, and you can see it in the story we heard in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter tells the crowd, “Know for sure that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Or to put it more bluntly, “You are the people who took to the streets demanding that Jesus be killed, and sure enough, he was tortured to death. Well, look out, because now he’s back with the power of God on his side!”
Hearing that, we are told, they began asking same the panicked question we’d probably all be asking in that situation, “What can we do?”
Our news feeds have been dominated by the idea of retribution lately. In times of war, every strike on either side is followed by calls for retribution. Every strike is seen as step too far, and as something that must be avenged. And, of course, we see almost daily reports of Donald Trump promising retribution on anyone who doesn’t support him the way he thinks he should be supported. We might frequently disagree with the analysis that justifies a particular call for retribution, but the logic of retribution is something we can all relate to — we feel it deep in our bones.
In a pastoral conversation two days ago, one of you said to me, “I, and a lot of people I know, have been having some very unChristian thoughts about Donald Trump.” I could relate to that immediately, as I’m guessing most of you can. Especially this week after Trump criticised the Pope for calling for peace, and then published a picture of himself as Jesus Christ. He seems to become more and more unhinged with every passing day, and the whole world is paying the price.
But the thing that struck me about that comment, and the thing that I also deeply related to, was the acknowledgement that there is something “unChristian” about the thoughts that Donald Trump stirs up in me. At some level that I struggle to put my finger on, I know that there is something a bit off, not just about Trump, but about my reactions to him.
It is tricky to unravel, because there is absolutely no doubt that Donald Trump’s attitudes, pronouncements, and behaviour are genuinely offensive, terribly destructive, and absolutely deserving of careful criticism and condemnation. But the fact that I so deeply relate to that confession of “unChristian thoughts” tells me that there is something else going on too. Careful critical analysis is not unChristian. But I instinctively recognise that it is being accompanied by something else that is unChristian. I may struggle to name it or define it, but at some gut level, I know it.
I think what I’m noticing in myself, and maybe you can relate to this too, is that I am not just engaging in careful critique, but that I am sliding into outright contempt for Donald J Trump. And what I am noticing about that feeling of contempt is how good it feels. It feels good precisely because it is something that so many of us share, so it feels really unifying. Really unifying and really righteous. The unity that is grounded in our utter contempt for this man, reassures us that we are not like him, that we are so much better than him, that we are united as the good people.
But here’s the thing — the uncomfortable thing that probably reveals why we carry this nagging feeling that there is something unChristian about this — the powerful unity grounded in shared contempt for a thoroughly contemptible human being is actually the exact same thing that the Jerusalem crowd were feeling when they waved their fists and chanted in unison, “Crucify him. Crucify him.”
When we are caught up in a chanting crowd, we have all collectively decided what’s wrong with this object of our contempt. We have decided what he deserves, and we feel immensely good about ourselves for being on the right side of that. And in the safety of the unanimous crowd, the feedback loop just keeps reinforcing the righteousness of our furious condemnation.
Donald Trump is no Jesus, no matter how much he’d like us to think he is, and his attitudes and actions deserve sustained and courageous critique. But when we slide into that “unChristian” crowd-fuelled contempt and begin wishing that someone would crucify him, we risk inadvertently cooperating with his Jesus delusions.
Now Donald Trump leaves us in no doubt about the fury he is ready to unleash on anyone who criticises him or fails to support his every move. And when the Jerusalem crowd cry out, “What shall we do?”, they too are in no doubt that if the victim of their mob fury is coming back from the dead, he’s going to make Donald Trump look like a pussycat.
But the shock is that when he does come back, he is utterly unlike what everybody assumed a murdered person coming back would be like.
Far from the terrifying all-powerful figure we might have expected, the risen Jesus appears kind of innocuous, easy to miss. Even his closest followers don’t notice him, or don’t recognise him, and even when they do, they are not quite sure. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. A fishing boat full of his followers see only some figure on the shore, barbecuing fish over an open fire. And the two disciples we heard about in our gospel reading saw him as just a fellow-traveller, a stranger on the Emmaus road, and even when he begins talking Bible with them, opening their eyes to all sorts of new angles, as he has done so often before, they still don’t recognise him until after they have invited him in for the night and sat down to a meal with him.
He’s just not big-noting himself. He’s not demanding attention or publishing grandiose AI pictures to assert his own specialness. He’s just kind of there, where nobody really expected him and barely even noticed him.
Trump tries to present himself as Jesus. He’s saying “Look at me, I am the powerful one. Notice me. Recognise me.” But the crucified and resurrected Jesus presents himself as a gardener, a barbecuer, a fellow pedestrian, saying “I am the stranger, the outsider, the no one. Will you accept me. Will you welcome me?”
These are not just two different men with two different personalities. They represent two completely different pictures of what God’s presence looks like and where it shows up — one in a blaze of power and self-assertion, the other on the margins, barely noticed, easy to walk past. And what the story in Acts keeps pressing on us is that we have a persistent habit of expecting the first and being surprised by the second — not just about Trump, but about ourselves, about where God shows up, about what we’re actually looking for when we look.
When we realise what we’ve done — that we’ve been caught up in a frenzied mob whose contempt for someone ended up in horrific violence — of course we expect to be confronted by the heavy hand of power and retribution. They were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what can we do?”
That’s not just, “where can we hide?” The assumption is that guilty human beings can perhaps buy mercy for themselves. Perhaps if we put up a solid gold statue of him somewhere, he will pardon us. “Brothers, what can we do to appease the furious anger of this God who we persecuted?”
But the answer the Apostle Peter gives to the crowd is completely unexpected. Peter couldn’t have imagined it himself just a few days earlier, but now his answer is a replay of his own experience. Something has happened that has turned his worldview upside down, and he’s still scrambling to get his own head around it, let alone explain it to the crowd.
What has happened is that the crucified and resurrected Jesus turned up and made himself known, but without even the slightest hint of vengefulness about him. Not even a trace.
He doesn’t come offering to make a deal that will give us a way back into his love. He simply shows up overflowing with love. Instead of naming a price for forgiveness, it is apparent that he has already so thoroughly forgiven us that he is behaving as though he’s got nothing against us at all.
And so Peter’s answer to the crowd is his attempt to pass on what he himself has experienced in these previous few days. He knows that what Jesus has given him, Jesus is giving to everyone, but how to describe it?
“What should you do? Repent, and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that you will know your sins forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
This is not repent as some kind of transaction to purchase forgiveness. It is repentance as turning your life around and reorienting it to the astonishing love and forgiveness you have just discovered have been given to you as sheer gift.
Jesus doesn’t care what we were expecting from him. This is who he is, and he gives himself to us freely. 100% gift.
And it is that free gift of himself that begins to utterly transform us. It begins to transform us by breaking us free from the fearful logic of retribution. And it continues to transform us by reshaping us in the image of that gratuitous love and mercy. The whole story of Jesus begins to gather us into itself, so that our stories become aspects of his story, his story of love and life and freedom and hope.
As that happens, we begin to reflect the image of that story to others. Just as the people who encountered the risen Jesus were bewildered by his lack of grandstanding, of big-noting, of lording it over cowering subjects, so as we begin to reflect his image, they will be increasingly bewildered by us. As we are reshaped by his story, those looking at us will see something that makes very little sense to anybody who still assumes that the whole world is governed by the rules of retribution — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
They will see a love without rules, a love without boundaries, a love that welcomes the image of God, of the risen Jesus, in whoever it appears to us in — the stranger on the road, the refugee, the gardener, the one huddled over an open fire cooking a meagre meal.
Just like Peter, back at the time of this story, our experience of finding ourselves unexpectedly loved and accepted becomes a call to live our lives likewise. All those who encounter us — and especially those who are off to the sides, keeping their heads down, hurting, fragile, afraid — all should similarly find themselves unexpectedly loved and accepted, and suddenly alive with new hope.
If they see in us instead an obsession with being winners, with being powerful and famous and unquestionably right, we will be falling far short of our calling. The closing verse of our reading from the Acts of the Apostles tonight told us that about three thousand persons were added to the company of Jesus’s followers that day. What people were seeing in the transformed believers was such a beautiful picture of the life and love of God, that thousands wanted in.
That’s our calling, but the most beautiful thing about it is that this is not a calling we have to struggle and strive for. It is a calling to simply surrender so fully to that overflowing love and grace ourselves, that it will shine through us openly and attractively and compellingly, and draw others into the unexpected new picture that has been opened up to us — the picture of wounded hands embracing us in love, of a stranger by a fire offering us forgiveness, of a chance encounter with a fellow traveller who set our hearts burning within us.