Easter 2008 “The Judge Who Forgives”

Acts 10.34-43

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard it again and again: People saying some version of “I can’t believe how early Easter is this year!” If you’ve read some of the commentary about this early date and why it happens, you know that the last time Easter was this early was 1913, and the next time will be 2160; so for virtually all of us, this is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence! But that does not make it any easier. For me, one difficulty has been how Lent began almost before Christmas was over. For a pastor, that means not much breathing space between our two busiest times of the year, and I must confess it has been draining. Or maybe I’m just getting old!

But the harder thing has been that, spiritually speaking, I just haven’t felt much like Lent, and so not much like Easter. So this week I’ve been having one of those spells when a pastor thinks, “Well, golly, I’ve been preaching on Easter for more than thirty years now. What in the world do I say that’s new?”

And as I looked back through more than thirty years’ worth of Easter sermons, I noticed something peculiar. Easter is one of those rare occasions where one of the appointed lessons for the day is always the same. It’s not the gospel lesson, because of course we have four options there, and so we get a different one each year. But it’s the first lesson, from Acts 10, which recounts a sermon by the apostle Peter in the days shortly after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. It’s always the first lesson on Easter. And in more than thirty years, I’ve never preached on it. So I was drawn to it this week, and I found it to be a very interesting lens through which to view and understand this, the highest of holy days for Christians.

I noticed, first of all, that the word “witnesses” appears a couple of times. Peter says that he and the other disciples are “witnesses to all Jesus did both in Judea and in Jerusalem.” And then he goes on to say that “those who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead” were “chosen by God as witnesses.” That means not just Peter and the rest of the disciples, of course, but all who have encountered the living Lord—which is to say, it’s you and I. After all, we come here week after week, here where we eat and drink with him. So we are the ones called to be witnesses.

Now a witness is someone who testifies to what he or she knows. I had occasion to be called as a witness in a criminal trial a few months ago, and my task was to listen to the attorneys’ questions, and then to say what I knew. It’s a simple enough concept.

But what is it that we know about Jesus? What is it that we have experienced? I want to suggest two things, again drawn from this lesson in Acts.

The first is that we know Jesus to be “the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead.” That’s a concept that’s not really much in vogue these days. The idea of Jesus as judge is a tough sell. After all, a judge is, for most of us, kind of a scary person. When I testified in this case, the judge made me nervous. Maybe you’ve had the same experience even being called for jury duty. There’s something about a judge, wearing that black robe and sitting up there above everyone else, that sobers us up in a big hurry.

In my files I have a collection of artistic representations of Jesus, by many different artists over the course of many centuries. One that has always stuck in my mind is from an 11^th century mosaic in a church in Greece. It shows a scowling and stern Jesus, holding a book in his hand. The caption below it says that here Christ is shown “not . . . as a compassionate Saviour, but rather as a stern judge or potentate . . . ready to judge the quick and the dead.” In this picture, he is not a judge before whom I would like to appear.

And yet that is an aspect of Christ which we cannot ignore. We’ll say the words in just a few moments, as we do every Sunday: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” But what goes through your mind when you say those words? I suppose most of us try not to think about it, because the specter of Christ as Judge is a troubling one.

I’m a fan of the comic strip called “Zits,” an often hysterically funny strip about the trials and tribulations of Jeremy, a fifteen-year-old boy, and his parents. Recently Jeremy got his learner’s permit, allowing him to drive only if an adult is with him in the car. But there’s this girl he likes, and one night he took the car out alone and just drove by her house—sixty times in a row, it turns out! This circling the block attracted the attention of a police officer, who pulled him over and discovered his lack of a driver’s license. Now he’s been summoned to traffic court. He’s getting dressed up, putting on a tie: “Do I look OK?” he asks his mom. “Yes,” she says, “You look OK.” “But do I look OK—OK, or really OK?” “What does really OK mean?” she asks. “Well,” he replies, “do I look not guilty?”

That’s how we all want to look when we appear before the judge. Trouble is, when the judge is Jesus Christ, the one who can see all the secrets of our hearts, we know only too well that no matter how we might dress ourselves up, we are in fact guilty. On Good Friday we sang a hymn with this line: “Who was the guilty? Who laid this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus hath undone thee. ‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.” Difficult words to sing—and probably one reason that Good Friday church attendance is pretty pale compared to Easter. It has, for most people, even for most Christians, become just like all the other fifty-one Fridays in the year. We don’t want to come to church because we’ll have to admit that we’re guilty; we don’t want to confess that we’re captive to sin, and that when we appear before Christ the judge, how we’re dressed doesn’t really matter. We have to plead guilty. And when we are called then to be witnesses that Jesus Christ is the judge of the living and the dead, then we must be witnesses against ourselves. No wonder we are reluctant to do it.

But the apostle Peter doesn’t stop there. He testifies that Jesus is the judge, but in the next breath he says this: “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Forgiveness of sins! That is the heart of it! That is the truth to which we testify! Every human being, the living and the dead, is brought before Christ, the judge—but those who believe in him, those who trust him, are brought only to hear those welcome words: You are forgiven!

Think for a moment about who is preaching this sermon in Acts: It is Simon Peter, the one who boasted that even if everyone else were to abandon Jesus, he would remain faithful—only a few hours later to deny three times that he even knew Jesus, and then to hear that devastating cockcrow. If ever there were a man who dreaded appearing before Christ the judge, it was Peter.

But his guilt, his shame, his despair, his terror at coming before the judge melted away, as Jesus said, I imagine, those same words he says to the women at the tomb: “Do not be afraid, Peter. You are forgiven!” When Peter testifies that Christ is the judge, but that Christ forgives—well, he knows whereof he speaks.

And that is what Jesus says to us this morning—to me and to you! It matters not how we have denied him, how we have betrayed him, how we have deserted him. We’re all in the same boat when it comes to failing our Lord. As the Psalmist puts it, “There is none who does good, no, not one.” We all have to come before the judge and own up to the particular and peculiar ways that we have denied, betrayed, deserted.

But the judge is Christ! And his verdict is “forgiven.” It is as St. Paul says in Romans 8: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Whatever you have done, however or how often you have failed him, his grace and his mercy washes all that away. “No merit of my own I claim, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. . . . Clothed in his righteousness alone, redeemed to stand before the throne”—that is our hope; that is our trust; it is that to which we testify. “All other ground is sinking sand.”

I think it was St. Augustine who said it first: “We Christians are an Easter people.” By that he meant that we who bear the name of Christ, we who eat and drink with Christ, who feast on his Word and on his Body and Blood—we are those who bear witness that we stand before the risen Christ, Christ the judge of the living and the dead, and we hear his gracious words: Do not be afraid. You are forgiven!