This Man God Raised From the Dead

Easter Sunday - Acts 10:34A, 37-43

Peter proceeded to speak and said:

“You know what has happened all over Judea,

beginning in Galilee after the baptism

that John preached,

how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth

with the Holy Spirit and power.

He went about doing good

and healing all those oppressed by the devil,

for God was with him.

We are witnesses of all that he did

both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.

This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible,

not to all the people, but to us,

the witnesses chosen by God in advance,

who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

He commissioned us to preach to the people

and testify that he is the one appointed by God

as judge of the living and the dead.

To him all the prophets bear witness,

that everyone who believes in him

will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! This great Easter proclamation rings out through the entire Book of Acts, and we will spend the seven weeks of the Easter Season reflecting on this divinely inspired history of the early Church penned by our patron, Saint Luke the Evangelist. 

This week’s passage presents Peter’s preaching to the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household immediately prior to their Baptisms. By this point in the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit has already fallen upon the Apostles, and they have been spreading the Gospel. Some Church leaders have been martyred already, and yet thousands have converted to what will soon be called Christianity. Saul of Tarsus launched a full-scale persecution of these Jesus-followers before he met Jesus himself on the road to Damascus and was baptized, becoming Paul the Apostle. The point of this context is to highlight the reality that Peter has likely given this summary of the Gospel countless times by this point, but this is the first time he has given it to a group non-Jews. 

Several characteristics of Peter’s message stand out. He emphasizes Jesus’ ministry, Passion, and bodily Resurrection, such that they “ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” This stubborn insistence of the Apostles that a dead man came back to life–and not just the same kind of life he had before death but to a new way of existing with a human body–is the central and definitive claim of Christianity. Years later, St. Paul put it this way: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). All of Christianity stands or falls with Jesus’ bodily resurrection being, not just a myth or fantastical and wishful thinking, but an incontrovertible fact of history. If he actually did rise from the dead, then he is in fact God in the flesh, his sacrifice on the Cross does in fact have unlimited power to atone for sins (even mine), his Church does in fact speak in his name and continue his presence on earth especially through the liturgy and the sacraments, and he will in fact return to judge the living and the dead. If he did not rise from the dead, then all these statements are simply delusions. 

Cornelius and his household respond to this message with the desire to be baptized into this faith, to join this nearly entirely Jewish community of followers of the God-man. They probably did not know that “to him all the prophets bear witness,” that the things Jesus did were foretold through the Jewish scriptures. Maybe you did not realize that either. May we hear this familiar Easter proclamation in a new, even shocking way, a way that tugs at our hearts as it tugged at theirs. Jesus Christ is risen! And it is worth belonging to his Church even when we might feel like the one non-Jew in a Jewish Church, even when we do not know the whole backstory of the Bible, even when we have failed to live up to the lofty calling of a Christian. Jesus came “that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins.” If you have sins, then Jesus is for you.