Acts 2:14a, 22-32 (NRSV)
14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them,
22 “You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— 23 this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. 24 But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. 25 For David says concerning him,
‘I saw the Lord always before me,
for he is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken;
26 therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced;
moreover my flesh will live in hope.
27 For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,
or let your Holy One experience corruption.
28 You have made known to me the ways of life;
you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’
29 “Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. 30 Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne. 31 Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying,
‘He was not abandoned to Hades,
nor did his flesh experience corruption.’
32 This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.
Acts 2:14-32 is part of a segment that extends to verse 36 having the theme of the message of Peter on Pentecost.
Peter offers his first sermon.[1] The Christology is very elementary. We may describe the speech as an early Christian defense of the gospel. The first aim of the Christian preacher was to show to his fellow citizens that Jesus was the promised Messiah of the Jewish faith. The Crucifixion seemed to have given the lie to the preaching of Jesus concerning the nearness of the rule of God. Until the early church could dispel this impression all preaching of the Christian message was futile. Hence, the defense of the gospel rather than its exposition is the need of the hour. Peter will develop the first creed. He will clearly state what he believes about Jesus and invite others to join him in the journey. The stress is not so much on the content of the gospel as on the evidence of its truth. The supreme argument for the messiahship was the Resurrection. It removed the impression left by a disgraceful death, proved that Jesus was no impostor, and vindicated all his claims. This explains the effort, which this speech so well illustrated, to see the scripture differently than they had before. They now saw certain passages as giving us a hint of the importance of resurrection for faith in the God of Israel. In this part of the sermon, Peter will see some new things in Psalm 16. Once the disciples saw this connection between their recent experience of the crucifixion and resurrection on the one hand a scripture on the other, they became the first to proclaim of what God had done in Jesus of Nazareth. To a Jewish audience no other argument would be necessary. If the early church could show to a Jewish audience that scripture prophesied an event, they would have enough reason for believing in its truth and its divine significance. We believe because of the testimony or witness of these apostles.
These early accounts Luke offers of the church in Jerusalem show that early Christians lived quiet lives of faith in Jerusalem. We detect little trace of Pauline ideas that must have been current in the environment in which Luke wrote. For example, any reference to faith as a necessary condition of sharing in the blessings of the messianic age is noticeably absent. Only once in these early speeches does Peter mention it: in 3:16, where it states that this faith is the reason for the healing of the lame man—a close resemblance to the view of faith characteristic of the Synoptic Gospels. To judge by these early sermons the first preachers contented themselves with the demonstration of the messiahship and did not ask what the messiahship involved for Jesus himself. There is no reason to suppose that at first their idea of messiahship differed greatly from that of their fellow Jews. It was only when the original messianic expectations had somewhat waned that Christians began to fill in or add to the picture with its original Jewish content, probably by drawing on their recollection of Jesus' own words, the full meaning of which they had at the time missed. Only when it dawned upon them that Jesus' work was something more than the founding of a national messianic kingdom did they begin to speculate upon the person of Jesus himself. This explains the complete absence here of any developed Christology.
We now turn to Acts 2:22-32. 22 “You, Peter explaining directly that the responsibility for Jesus' rejection, condemnation and crucifixion rests upon their shoulders. If any group needed to be saved, it was surely this community. Peter both proclaims Jesus as the Messiah and calls those who condemn him to repentance--while offering them the outstretched hand of God's forgiveness and salvation. As the rest of Peter's first speech makes clear, of all people, the Jerusalem Jews should be stunned and ecstatic at this show of divine mercy. Peter further identifies his audience as you that are Israelites, showing his own people rejected Jesus, human beings rejecting Jesus, the stone the builders rejecting becoming the chief cornerstone (I Peter 2:4, 7.). Peter urges his audience to listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— 23 this man, handed over to you according to the definite or determinate plan (ὡρισμένῃ βουλῇ, perfect passive participle, state of completion) and foreknowledge (προγνώσει, occurring only here and I Peter 1:2) of God, the entire phrase being in the instrumental case. God handed Jesus over to them with both purpose and foreknowledge. God had willed the death of Jesus (John 3:16) and the death of Judas (Ac 1:16), but that fact did not absolve Judas from his responsibility and guilt (Lu 22:22). He acted as a free moral agent.[2] Thus, his listeners are free moral agent as well. Speaking directly, Peter says you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law, that is, the Romans. 24 But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.
We can see here that the cross is still an obstacle to faith, to be overcome by stressing the resurrection. The conception of a suffering Messiah was completely strange to contemporary Judaism, and there is little sign that the disciples saw at first in Jesus' death, as did Jesus himself, any positive contribution to the advancement of the kingdom of God. It may have taken some time before early Christians, even before Paul, started to see the truth of what Paul says in I Corinthians 15:3, where he says that he “received” the teaching that "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures."
Peter turns to the Jewish Scripture to interpret what God has done in the resurrection of Jesus. 25 For David in Psalm 16:8-11b says concerning him, ‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken; 26 therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; moreover my flesh will live in hope. 27 For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One experience corruption. 28 You have made known to me the ways of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’ Peter will claim that the Psalm foretells the resurrection of the Messiah. The psalmist lives with the hope that those who die in communion with God will continue to participate in the life of God. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth to which Peter testifies is the fulfillment of that hope, not only for Jesus, but for all persons. 29 “Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. The poet lived with the hope. Jesus is the fulfillment of that hope. 30 Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne. 31 Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying, ‘He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption.’
Peter is ready to make his bold profession: 32 This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. He has no doubt that the glimpses of the hope of resurrection and life with God we find in the Old Testament find fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth.
The first sermon of Peter focuses upon the power of the Word of God to interpret their experience of Jesus of Nazareth, especially in his crucifixion and resurrection. If anything defines Christianity, it is here. God raised Jesus from the dead. This means you can walk with him, learn from him, and be his disciple. As many have done, so can you. we keep learning what it means to be a disciple, to be a student of Jesus, to walk with him throughout our lives.
We can see significance of the resurrection of Jesus in that if God raised Jesus, this for a Jew can only mean that God has confirmed the pre-Easter activity of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is reason enough for maintaining the unity of Jesus with God. Decisive for confidence in the facticity of the resurrection of Jesus as the Christian message proclaims it are the primitive Christian testimonies to the appearances of the risen Lord to the disciples, along with the discovery of the empty tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem. We as modern people cannot accept such testimony blindly based on authority. Rather, we might do so only after whether the testimony holds it up by testing other reported facts. In this context, the oldest New Testament witness to the resurrection and ascension of Jesus form a single event, which is the point here in verses 30-32. This suggests that the account of the appearance of the risen Lord “from heaven” to Paul in Galatians 1:6 is an indication of what is behind the Gospel stories of the appearances as well.[3]
Everybody has a creed, a sense of the basic beliefs out of which we live our lives. In the Christian tradition, the creed connects our present affirmation of faith with something larger than simply our recent era. People who claim to have no creed operate with a creed. Those who urge the church to set aside ancient creeds and believe whatever the recent generation says affirm a “modernist” creed.[4]
The word “creed” is Latin, credo, I believe. Many religions do not have them. Some Christian denominations do not have them. Some people think of them as getting in the way. The root of forming creeds is Judaism found in Deuteronomy 6:4: (“Hear O Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might.”) We know this affirmation as the Shema in Judaism. It means “Hear.” What is important about this statement is that it describes a common belief about God and a personal response, so the creed here is both communal (our God) and personal (love the Lord, your God).
Though Christian confessional statements bear a remarkable resemblance to the original Shema, there is one obvious alteration. The earliest Christians altered their story of God’s way in the world considering their personal experience of the appearance of Jesus Christ and his empty tomb. The Christian creed focuses on Jesus. What we believe about him causes us to follow him, to learn from him, to be his disciples.
Creeds are important not just because they articulate our personal experience of the risen Christ, but they also serve to unite the church. When so much else divides the global church and the local church, the story held in common by all Christians and expressed in the creed, brings us together. Christians can and do disagree on any number of issues that are rocking the world, but still maintain unity through a common confession of faith.
The creeds also protect believers from the tendency toward radical individualism or simply inventing our own faith. Nothing we created would contain God. The creed does not contain God. Yet, they do point the way. Experienced in this way, creeds, like stories, open a new world of faithful exploration. Once we accept the truthfulness of what they are expressing, that can shape our lives in the way one worship song describes so personally.
“And I believe that what I believe
Is what makes me what I am
I did not make it, no it is making me
It is the very truth of God and not
the invention of any man.”
- Rich Mullins
Finally, a creed is that to which I give my heart. The task for us all is to take the creed — words on paper — and allow those words to become a living, breathing reality in our experience. Our faith, embodied by the creeds, is a way to say “I love you.”[5]
One contemporary creed, written in 1960 by the Masai people in Africa, fully expresses the language of love. It bears the obvious marks of its own culture, yet speaks of the faith held in common by all:
We believe that God made good his
promise by sending his Son, Jesus Christ,
a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe,
born poor in a little village,
who left his home and was always
on safari doing good,
curing people by the power of God,
teaching about God and man,
showing that the meaning of religion
is love.
He was rejected by his people,
tortured and nailed hands and feet
to a cross, and died.
He was buried in the grave,
but the hyenas did not touch him,
and on the third day, he rose from
that grave.
He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
With its striking folk images, the Masai Creed confesses the faith in a particular and very personal language of love. Clearly, it does not speak the same thing as the Apostles’ Creed, but it does say the same thing.
This text invites to consider that to which we give our hearts.
[1] Historically, many scholars (Ludemann and many others) think the construction of the speech has its source in Luke. Historically, one can be reasonably certain that the Christians quietly and devoutly led their lives of faith in Jerusalem. Here is how some scholars break out the historically reliable material in this passage.
{14 Then Peter, (the leader of the church in Jerusalem in that first year after the death of Jesus), stood up with the Eleven ... (from Joel as a proof text:) 21 And all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. ... (from a Christological view of Ps 110:) 34 The Lord declared to my Lord, take your seat at my right hand, 35 till I have made your enemies your footstool.}
[3] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume I, 352-55; Volume II, 354, Jesus: God and Man, 67-68, 92.
[4] Inspired by David Bennett, “The creeds: Why do we need creeds?” Ancient and Future Catholics Web Site, ancient-future.net. Retrieved October 15, 2004.
[5] Inspired by William Sloane Coffin, Credo and Jaroslav Pelikan.
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