Easter Sermon: Privilege and Responsibility

Acts 2:22-41

 

INTRODUCTION

With privilege there comes responsibility.  It’s something we all accept—at least in theory. 

 

Probably nobody embodies that principle more than HM the Queen.  Being head of state grants her all sorts of privileges, from living in some of the most fabulous homes in the country, to meeting the most powerful and interesting people in the world.  It is her privilege to be listened to when she talks.  Her opinions matter. 

 

But the privilege of wealth and status brings a heavy responsibility.  It’s a responsibility she takes seriously.  She works hard.  She makes sure she is always well briefed.  She cannot be seen to show political partiality.  She can never express her private opinions publicly.  She must always seem to be interested in whoever is introduced to her.  How she conducts herself has repercussions so she must always be on her guard. 

 

It’s a shame that some of our politicians don’t seem to have learned that lesson.  Being an elected representative is a privilege.  It opens doors that otherwise would remain shut.  In return the people expect you to exercise your power responsibly.  They don’t expect you to be fleecing the tax-payer for every penny you can get. 

 

Good parents have always regarded raising children as a privilege and a responsibility.  The responsibility is enormous.  The kind of adult they will become largely rests on your shoulders.  Yet their is no joy quite like the joy of seeing your children grow, mature, and eventually stand on their own two feet. 

 

I as a minister very much feel the privilege and responsibility of my calling.  I’m always humbled when people trust me to conduct the funeral of a loved one, or share with me some burden they’ve been carrying.  I count that the most profound privilege.  And therefore I have a responsibility to be sensitive, discrete, trustworthy. 

 

Privilege brings responsibility.

 

BRIDGE

The disciples were well aware of this.  They had spent three years in the company of the Lord Jesus.  They had seen his miracles close up.  They had heard his teaching and were so familiar with it it had become in-grained in their minds.  What a privilege.  If Jesus had lived and died like any normal person that would have been privilege enough. 

 

But more than this.  They were witnesses to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus from the dead.  They saw the empty tomb.  He appeared to them on several occasions; he ate breakfast with them; he explained the truth about the kingdom of God to them.  Like students who are conscious that it is their privilege to be taught by a particular professor, the disciples were only too well aware that they were in a privileged position. 

 

Peter reveals this feeling of theirs in Acts 10:41 when he is preaching the gospel to the Roman centurion Cornelius and his friends.  Peter says of the resurrected Jesus:

He was not seen by all the people but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

Theirs was a unique privilege.  And therefore they felt strongly their responsibility to tell others what they knew.  Read through the book of Acts and the sermons preached by the apostles and you cannot help but notice that they always climax with the resurrection. 

 

Yes, they always preach the cross of Christ.  But they never stop there.  For a dead Jesus is no use.  We see it here in Acts 2.  In v.23 Peter refers to the cross:

This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you with the help of wicked men put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

 

Peter doesn’t skirt around the crucifixion. It happened and he makes no bones about why it happened.  Though it was God’s eternal plan that his Son should die, it was human sin, our sin, that nailed him to the tree.

 

But the story doesn’t end there.  v.24:

But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

 

We find the same pattern all the way through Acts.  For example, just look at 3:15:

You killed the author of life but God raised him from the dead.  We are witnesses of this. 

 

And be clear about this.  When Peter and the others spoke about Christ’s resurrection, they were speaking literally.  They weren’t redefining death to make it more palatable. 

 

The recent death of Jade Goody has revealed once again just how confused and misguided so many people are about death.  They talk about their loved one being the brightest star in the sky.  You don’t need to be an astronomer to know that dead people don’t become stars.  Everyone knows this.  Yet still we persist in this sentimental talk.  It’s a way of protecting ourselves from admitting that we just don’t know what happens in the after-life.

 

Is this what Peter are the others were doing?  Were they protecting themselves from an unpleasant truth they just couldn’t face?  Was this their way of saying, Jesus is gone but he lives on in our hearts?

 

Definitely not.  Peter quotes Ps.16.  It’s a psalm of David, written 1000 years previously.  Yet Peter discerns there is something prophetic about it.  The words of this psalm could easily be put into Jesus’ mouth.  In fact, there is a sense in which they are Jesus’ own words (v.27):

because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay.

 

David couldn’t have been speaking about himself.  Peter can point to David’s tomb right there in Jerusalem.  No.  These words can only be applied to Jesus.  He is the Holy One whose body was not left in the grave to return to dust.

 

When the disciples spoke about Christ’s resurrection they weren’t speaking spiritually or metaphorically, still less sentimentally.  They were speaking literally. 

 

The crucifixion and the resurrection: you can’t have one without the other.  Without the resurrection Calvary was defeat; and the cross an emblem of despair.  Paul says in 1Cor.15:17,18:

if Christ has not been raised your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.  Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 

Without the resurrection nothing was achieved at Calvary—no sins forgiven, no hope of eternal life. 

Without the resurrection Jesus turns out to have been an over-optimistic idealist, with an inflated opinion of himself. 

 

I find this very challenging.  As a preacher my aim is always to take my listeners to the cross, the place of forgiveness and reconciliation.  But I must ask myself: do I leave them at the cross, or do I take them on to the empty tomb?  Do I make enough of the resurrection? 

 

It’s a challenge to us all.  After all, we claim to follow a living Lord, not a dead martyr.  We claim to have a vibrant, vital relationship with Christ.  We’re not like a Burns Society that meets to remember the life and times of our favourite historical character and to quote some of his best loved sayings. 

 

We gather Sunday by Sunday to engage with our living Lord Jesus.  We meet to renew and strengthen our relationship with him.  We meet to listen, collectively, to his word; for his words aren’t merely sweet to the ear; they are the very words of life to us. 

 

Without the resurrection none of that would be possible.  So we stand in a very privileged position.  We may not have seen Jesus with our eyes.  But as we were thinking the other week, we are those who receive Christ’s benediction (John 20:29):

blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. 

 

And our belief is not without reason; it’s not without experience. 

And therefore we have a responsibility to say with the first Christians:

God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses to the fact. (Acts 2:32)

 

It is our belief, our experience, our conviction that Jesus lives. 

 

Now you just can’t say that and expect to walk away as if it means nothing.  Saying “Jesus is alive” is not the same as saying “I believe in UFOs”.  To believe that Jesus rose from the dead brings with it the responsibility of a witness. 

 

So what does that mean?  What does it mean to be a witness to the resurrection in the 21^st century?  It really isn’t very different from what it meant to be a witness in the 1^st century. 

 

For Peter and the first Christians it meant saying something about Jesus.  v.36:

Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. 

 

That was an explosive thing to say, a revolutionary thing to say; both to Jewish and Roman ears.  It challenged everything they believed. 

 

To Jewish ears Peter is saying that the resurrection proves that Jesus is the Messiah (Christ is the Greek word, Messiah is the Hebrew word.  Both mean “anointed”.)  The Jewish expectation was that God would send his Messiah to deliver them from centuries of shame and disgrace at the hands of the heathen.  The Messiah would be a Son of David; a righteous king, a holy warrior.  All wrongs would be put right; justice would prevail.  That included Israel taking her rightful place as top nation.

 

Jesus was executed as a Messianic pretender.  If he truly were the Messiah, God’s answer to all the wrongs and injustices in the world, then he wasn’t the kind of Messiah they wanted.  A Messiah who said love your enemies and turn the other cheek was not what they had in mind. 

 

If Jesus did rise from the dead it would mean that he really was the Messiah, God’s Anointed One.  It would mean God was repealing their sentence of death; reversing their conclusion.  It would mean that all their ideas about ridding the Holy Land of pagan occupiers was wrong. It would mean that God’s way of dealing with our enemies is different.  God’s way is the way of love not hate.  God’s way is to reconcile, not alienate or demonise. 

 

That’s still a message the world is reluctant to hear.  The politics of hate and violence are as prevalent today as they ever were.  Phrases such as “the war on terror” fill us with dread.  We see someone dressed in eastern clothing, speaking an unfamiliar language, and we can’t help being suspicious.  We read of our brothers and sisters in Christ being persecuted in other parts of the world and we want to put a curb on non-Christian religions here. 

 

To be a witness to the resurrection is to be a witness to a different kind of power than the world knows; a more powerful power.  Other faiths may need the gun and the bomb to advance.  Militant atheists know only the power of mockery and ridicule. 

 

But we know a power that isn’t afraid to die; and to die not just once but daily; a power that isn’t afraid to be crucified.  Because it is resurrection power. 

 

The world knows nothing of this power.  It fears weakness, it fears humility; most of all it fears death. 

 

Who will tell the world of this resurrection power?  Who will model it for all to see?

Only those who can say, We have seen the Lord. 

 

When Roman ears heard Jesus referred to as Lord they immediately perceived a challenge to the emperor’s authority.  We associate the word “lord” with a minor member of the aristocracy.  But the Greek word for “Lord” kyrios was the title given to emperors. 

 

This was compounded by calling Jesus Son of God.  One of the ways the emperors acquired  unquestionable authority was to induct their predecessor into the pantheon of gods.  If your predecessor was a god, it followed that you were the son of a god.  And that brought a lot of clout in the ancient world. 

 

By calling Jesus Lord, by declaring him to be the Son of God, this tiny band of believers were staking a claim on the entire world for Jesus.  It was absurd.  But they were serious.  So serious that within a few years the might of the Roman empire was trying, and failing to stamp it out. 

 

Bible scholar Tom Wright describes these first Christians as “a collection of rebel cells within Caesar’s empire, loyal to a different monarch, a different kyrios.”

 

One of the great blessings of living in a democracy is that we are free to think and believe as we please.  The kind of mass rallies that were held in the former Communist states, with hundreds of thousands of voices chanting in unison their love for their leader is completely foreign to us. 

The kind of forces that seek to influence us are far more subtle.  But they are no less manipulative.  And they are no less demanding of lordship over our minds. 

 

Have you noticed how much prominence has been given to the bi-centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150^th anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species”?  I’m not saying that such notable anniversaries should be ignored; but it seems to me that the media, and the BBC in particular, have used the occasion to attack Christianity and the belief in a Creator God with unprecedented ferocity. 

 

Anyone who says “Jesus is Lord” is labelled unscientific and therefore not to be taken seriously.

 

It’s the same with public morality.  We are constantly bombarded with the idea that sex outwith marriage is perfectly acceptable.  Teenagers are encouraged to experiment with different partners of both genders.  We see it in the Soaps; we read about it the glossy magazines.  It’s glamorous, it’s exciting.  To stand apart from this kind of pressure, not to have stories of conquests and exploits in the bedroom is to draw derision from your peers. 

 

Again, what do you do when your boss tells you lie?  According to Lewis Hamilton he was just following Dave Ryan’s orders when he refused to admit deliberately letting Jarno Trulli pass him at the Melbourne Grand Prix—something that was against the rules. 

 

The Apostle Paul tells Christian slaves to obey their earthly masters as if you were serving the Lord.  But only as if.  If my boss tries to replace the Lord Jesus, making demands that conflict with my loyalty to Jesus, then I have to defy my boss.  Even if that will cost me my job. 

 

To be a Christian in 21^st century Scotland is to give witness that there is another Lord; another Lord who lays claim to how we think and act and relate to one another. 

 

And this leads to my final point.  Witnessing to the resurrection inevitably affects how we treat one another.  If the resurrection spells the death of death, then everything that smells of death, everything that has the mark of death upon it must be foreign to us.  The feuds, the rivalries, the jealousies and bitterness that kill a family have no place in God’s family. Instead, we should be characterised by life-giving love for one another.

 

In Acts 4:32-34 we see how a proclamation of the resurrection necessarily leads to practical care for one another. 

All the believers were on in heart and mind.  No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.  With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all.  There were no needy persons among them.

 

Because of the resurrection the first Christians believed in life before death as well as life after death. 

 

Mahatma Ghandi once said to a group of missionaries in India about their work:

“You work so hard at it.  Just remember that the rose never invites anyone to smell it.  If it is fragrant people will walk across the garden and endure the thorns to smell it.” 

 

If our lives are full of the fragrance of the risen Lord Jesus people will be drawn to the message we preach.  We are witnesses through how we live just as much as by what we say. 

 

CONCLUSION

“The Lord is risen”  “He is risen indeed”.

 

Not just words; not just liturgy.  To say those words and mean them is a privilege.  They are our door-way into the kingdom of God; into life where Christ is king.  They introduce us to a privileged life-style where we are free of the guilt and fear that plagues so many others.  They assure us that there is a world beyond this world; a time beyond this time.  They guarantee a home in heaven prepared for us by Jesus.

 

But with that privilege comes responsibility.  The responsibility to live as if we really mean it.  Nothing so confirms the enemies of the gospel and disillusions those seeking the truth than inconsistent Christians.  Irresponsible Christians.

 

For the apostles and the first Christians the resurrection wasn’t something they celebrated once a year.  It’s what fuelled their faith and motivated their mission.  How can it be any different for us?