Gordon McPhee

                                                John 10: 11-18

RECOGNIZING THE BAD STONE

Introduction:

The Book of the Acts of the Apostles is so named to reflect the idea that the early Jesus movement, beginning in Jerusalem, was focused on the reconstituted original twelve apostles who followed Jesus. However, that story only comprises the first one-third of the book and the prominent players in the rest of the book, Stephen, Philip, Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, etc. and most notably, Paul, are not part of the original twelve and only Paul is concurrently an apostle, although by his own attestation, the least. One can’t say it is the “Acts of Paul” or we’d have no explanation for the first third of the book and the prominence of Peter and John. Some have suggested it be called the “Acts of the Holy Spirit” because of its blockbuster opening on the Day of Pentecost, but that prominently announced presence of the Holy Spirit, although assuredly at work, is not conspicuously expounded.

Thinking about our reading this morning, from Acts chapter 4, I like what some have suggested as an appropriate name for Luke’s sequel to the Gospel, “The Acts of Jesus Christ”. In Acts 4:12 Peter exclaims of Jesus, “Salvation comes no other way; no other name has been or will be given to us by which we can be saved, only this one. (MSG)” The Book of Acts is about the beginnings of the church, the body of Jesus, at work in this world by the Holy Spirit through His many agents, Peter, Paul, the apostles, and many others who make up this messianic Jewish movement, to establish His eternal presence on earth till he comes again to renew all things. Jesus is portrayed as the solid rock, the cornerstone on which our faith is built, the keystone that holds everything together. If we, as the human builders of His church, remove that stone, Jesus, everything collapses. We can try to keep everything else, Jesus’ teachings, His exhortations to humility, unity and love, caring for the poor, sick and needy, and seeking peace, but if we do not keep the cornerstone, Jesus Himself, everything else is just dust in the wind.

Sermon:

The story from our reading, in Acts chapter 4, actually begins back in chapter 3. Peter and John are going to the Temple in Jerusalem to pray, when Peter (you remember him, impulsive, speak and act before you think, Peter) spies a cripple asking for a handout and says the well-known line, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” The man gets up and leaps and bounds around praising God and a huge crowd gather prompting Peter to preach a sermon very similar to the one he delivered on the day of Pentecost. However, this time the temple leaders hear and see what’s going on and arrest Peter and John. The next day they set them before the Sanhedrin, the religious governing body in Jerusalem, and question them asking, “Who put you in charge here? What business do you have doing this?”

Now you might think their question refers to the healing of the lame man, but doing good things, like healing someone, even miraculously, wasn’t frowned upon or a crime. When Jesus performed miracles no one got upset because of the healing, only that He did it on the Sabbath or accompanied it by forgiving sins as well, which, notably, only God could do. No, we’re told in verse 2 of this chapter that they were “indignant that these upstart apostles were instructing the people and proclaiming that the resurrection from the dead had taken place in Jesus.”

Two things upset them. First, these unknown and uneducated Galileans were teaching their people in their Temple, without having first gotten permission. Second was that they were teaching a doctrine of resurrection. Most of the Sanhedrin was made up of Sadducees, a very strict, literalist Jewish sect who stuck, if you’ll excuse the term, religiously to the teachings of the Torah. They did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. One was supposed to glorify YHWH by how one lived one’s life in this world and He would reward them in this world. They disagreed vehemently with the Pharisees, whom they regarded as liberals, and certainly didn’t want these upstarts, Peter and John, spreading these teachings in their territory.

The author of Luke phrases the question they ask the apostles in such a way that Peter can reply as if it was about healing the lame man. This opens the door for him to establish that the power to heal the lame man was in the name of Jesus. But here, I think, Luke anticipates what may have later become whitewashing interpretations of what he is trying to convey. Peter doesn’t just reply by saying, “Jesus”, but specifically, “Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.”

Unlike what you might assume, he’s not trying to accuse the Sanhedrin or lay blame for Jesus’ death on their doorstep. Luke is ensuring we don’t make the mistake of thinking ‘in the name of Jesus’ is just some catchphrase for some set of beliefs that represent a certain sect of the Jewish religion. There were many groups of that sort, the Pharisees and Sadducees being the largest and most prominent. Also, the ascetic Qumran community who separated themselves from other Jews and because of whom we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. History hints at other individuals and groups who sported ideologies linked to traditional Judaism but each with its own way of addressing their present-day concerns; some more radical than others; not unlike society today. Solomon’s portico in the Temple, where Peter and John would have been preaching, and the common marketplaces, where people thronged, were that generation’s social media. Anyone could proclaim to the attentive listener what they thought was wrong with the world and how it should be cured. The Sanhedrin were acting as the moderators of the Temple space, intervening when an opinion they thought was too radical was introduced.

Luke uses Peter’s dialogue to make it known this is not a teaching or ideology. Jesus is the name by which the man was healed, or rather, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Christ is one of those enigmatic words used in the Bible, like synagogue. It’s a Greek word meaning anointed. However, when the Bible translators run into this word in Hebrew, the formal biblical language, or Aramaic, the commonly spoken language of Israel, they don’t translate it into English as they do with everything else, they leave it as it is in the original language, messiah. It should be the English anointed. Likewise, when translating from a Greek text, as Luke and Acts are, they neglect to translate Christ into anointed, but just leave it as the Greek word Christ. In some way, it attributed some mystical power to the name but unfortunately, now we lose the author’s intended richness of the meaning of anointed. Over the centuries this became a standard treatment, and the words came to take on special significance in English so that now, if you translated the words properly into the English anointed, no one would buy your Bible. Fortunately, you have me, ‘Mr. Know-it-all’.

For us, Jesus Christ means the Jesus who isn’t the neighbour’s gardener. He’s the one we worship, the Son of God who died on the cross to take away our sins. But for the readers of Acts in the first and second century, he was Jesus, anointed.

Anointed, at that time, meant commissioned for some special job, and usually, it inferred something God was commissioning you to do. So, David was anointed to be king. As was Saul before him who David often referred to as ‘God’s anointed’. Aaron, Moses’ brother, was anointed to be High Priest and all High Priests after him were likewise anointed to the office. And prophets were anointed to their calling as it says in  1 Chronicles 16:22 and Psalm 105:15, “Do not touch my anointed ones; do my prophets no harm.” Unfortunately, by using the Greek word Christ we lose the rich context that Luke is positing on this name. Jesus is anointed, but by leaving the anointing unspecified, he becomes Prophet, Priest and King, all in one, the proclaimer of God’s Word, the intermediary for our sins, and the Lord of all creation.

The idea of “The Messiah”, that we assume, didn’t exist in Hebrew culture. Many were indeed looking for a messiah, someone whom God would commission, or anoint, to some prophetic, priestly, or most popularly, kingly office to lead the Jewish people into a time of renewal and, preferably, independence from the domination of Rome. But they weren’t expecting what this passage in Acts is proclaiming; someone anointed with power and authority from God, to proclaim, to heal and to command.

That name, Luke says, is Jesus. The authority is anointed by God over everything. It is all bound up in a man from Nazareth. A man who isn’t an icon, or a fiction, or a new ideology but a flesh and blood man who they knew, spoke with, arrested, and accused, and who, at their hands, could be and was, killed on the cross. He’s not accusing them of murdering Jesus, he’s reminding them that the power that healed the lame man standing before them is a human, whom they know, and who is God’s anointed Prophet, Priest and King, Jesus of Nazareth.

Peter calls this Jesus anointed of Nazareth, the cornerstone. The stone they threw out, which they recognized as a bad stone, is, by the evidence before them of the lame man healed, the very cornerstone of all they, as the leaders of God’s people, are supposed to be building. Readers of Acts who had also read the first book, the Gospel, would remember that in Luke 20:17 Jesus had quoted Psalm 118:22, “The stone the masons discarded as flawed is now the capstone! This is God’s work.” Luke portrays Peter remembering how Jesus used these same words when speaking to the chief priests and scribes. The stone the builders rejected as flawed has become the cornerstone of the building, the keystone of the arch, is how Jesus portrayed himself.

It’s not the Torah, the Sermon on the Mount, the Articles of Confession, or the Catechism that will save anyone. None of the sacraments of the church will bring you to salvation. No creed or good deed or liturgy or discipline will lead you to righteousness. Only the name of the man Jesus. God’s anointed king, priest and prophet, God incarnate, but also, still a man who walked on this earth and could face the sting of death.

There are very few places left in this world where it is acceptable, or even possible, to say with Peter of Jesus, “Salvation comes no other way; no other name has been or will be given to us by which we can be saved, only this one.” We can freely suggest that the principles of our Christian faith when duly stripped of their unsavoury cultural bits of gender and heterosexual specificity, can contribute to an illumined code of human morality and conduct. But to suggest for a moment that Jesus of Nazareth is the exclusive way to reconciliation with the creator God is considered completely backward and bordering on the sensibilities of hate speech. Even in the halls of our mainstream church communities, one is encouraged not to use exclusive language, so as not to offend. I think we’ve heard enough over the past decade or so to know that this stems from the church’s participation and even encouragement of colonialism and imperialism around the world. And justifiably so.

But I think the author of Acts, through the words of Peter before the Sanhedrin, helps us navigate our way through this great conundrum. How do we live out our faith in a world that demands we answer “Who put you in charge here? What business do you have doing this?”

Our answer to our neighbours and community, or even our fellow Christians, cannot be the tenants of our religion. When I walk into the house of someone whose culture and background are different from mine, there would normally be no animosity shown toward me, unless, of course, I begin by telling them everything about their home and way of life that is wrong because it is different from what I know. Except in the case of outright prejudice, people usually like people, it’s the baggage they bring with them and belligerently thrust upon others that creates the problems.

What we, like Peter and John, bring to the world, and our neighbour, is Jesus Christ of Nazareth. A man who, because He is also God and God’s anointed prophet, priest and king, gave His life and died on the cross so our sins are forgiven and whom God raised again to eternal life so that we would also be raised to new life with Him. God chose to become a man somewhere in the world and in time. He chose to become a descendant of Abraham and to be named Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph of Nazareth. He could have chosen to be a woman. He could have been Asian, born in China. Or Slavic, Indian, Australian or American Aboriginal. But to do what needed to be achieved he had to be Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

We should never apologize for saying as in John 14:6 that Jesus is “the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from [Him].” We’re just introducing someone to a person who could easily be their neighbour. A fellow African with all the same habits of culture as Jesus bore the full life of a Jew in Israel. We’re not asking people to become good little St. Simeon’s Anglicans, or at least we shouldn’t be. And maybe that’s a big part of the problem, both for us and for the whole church in the past two thousand years. Acts 4:4 tells us that about five thousand were added to the church in only a few days after Pentecost and Peter’s first sermon. I said his second sermon was very much like his first; the same message he delivered to the Sanhedrin; not belief or ritual or catechism, but a man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Let’s not mistake the name of Jesus for a bad stone. The bad stones are the many other more comfortable things we present to the world as the way to salvation. “Salvation comes no other way; no other name has been or will be given to us by which we can be saved, only this one … the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the One you killed on a cross, the One God raised from the dead.”

Amen