3rd Sunday of Easter “What’s Better than a Miracle?”
April 14, 2024 Acts 3:11-21
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Dear brothers & sisters in Christ,
Today it’s Easter once again. We may not have a big ham in the oven to feed our visiting family, and the fresh blooms on the lilies are wilting & brown, but our Gospel lesson tells us of another Easter Sunday appearance of the Risen Lord Jesus. In Luke 24, it is evening of Easter Sunday, Jesus has walked & talked with the Emmaus disciples, who ran back to Jerusalem to share their experience with the disciples. And suddenly Jesus was standing among them offering them His peace.
He first proves that He is alive again by showing the nail scars in His hands & feet,
& by eating a piece of fish; He is real & alive in the flesh. He then tells them the significance of His bodily resurrection over death: it is now the basis of them proclaiming repentance & forgiveness of sins in His name to absolutely all ‘nations.’ —that means all people, young & old, Jew & Gentile, every tribe & language. And finally Jesus commissions those disciples
as witnesses being sent out; altho they must wait a few days for His Pentecost promise of the ‘power from on high’, which would be the Holy Spirit.
If we would want to outline & summarize what the whole Book of Acts is about,
we would pick it up right there, from the last chapter of Luke, and say it is about just two things: The risen Lord commissions His eyewitnesses to be proclaimers to all people of His repentance & forgiveness, AND then those eyewitnesses are empowered by the HSp to do that proclaiming in various ways & in many places.
Now, I say ‘in various ways’, because in the Book of Acts, God sometimes empowered those apostles to perform miracles. These were ‘signs’ to prove that they had been commissioned by the same Jesus who had walked among them doing the same kinds of miracles. These miracles were signs that the same Jesus was alive & now working thru His believers, His NT church, with the same saving good news of repentance & forgiveness in the name of the very Son of God. For people to hear the apostles preach, and to believe that Gospel of God’s Risen Savior Jesus, meant receiving the same eternal salvation & life as if Jesus himself was proclaiming it.
This brings us to our text today from Acts 3. Peter & John were going up to the temple and they stop in front of a poor beggar, a 40 yr old man who has been lame from birth, and was carried every day & laid at the temple gate to beg for help. When Peter & John stop in front of him, he looks up to Peter expecting alms. Instead, Peter says that rather well-known statement: ‘I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!’ At that, Peter takes the man’s hand, pulled him to his feet, which were now strong. The man began to walk, leap, & praise God. And the people around were amazed at what had happened.
This was the first miracle by the apostles, and it sets off a series of events that take us to the end of Acts chpt.4, including some preaching times, like what we heard from Peter in Solomon’s Portico, and also that Peter & John are arrested & interrogated before the High Priest & the Council to answer for all the hullabaloo in the temple. Peter uses this opportunity to say some other memorable words: ‘let it be known to all of you, & to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead = by Him this crippled man is standing before you healed.’
Oh yes, and that more famous bible verse, Acts 4:12, ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.’
At this time, Peter & John are let off with a warning & charged to stop speaking in the name of that Jesus. To which Peter replies: ‘we can’t help but speak of what we have seen & heard.’ In his lifetime, Jesus healed many crippled people; a rather small thing for God to do.
And now this one miracle thru Peter leads to many opportunities to proclaim the saving good news: that Jesus’ death & resurrection has given -to all people- everything we need for repentance, forgiveness of sin, & the hope & peace of eternal life.
And that’s where we come in to our reading for the day from Acts 3. A lame man has been healed in Jesus’ name, and Peter explains to the crowd what this sign means. And so this is where we come to that question I used as our theme for the day:
‘What’s Better than a Miracle?’
Ask that question, & I wonder if most people would say: ‘nothing.’ Genuine miracles are a big deal; nothing is better than a miracle. To which we might respond: ok, but what kind of miracle are we talking about?
When Peter & John healed that crippled man in the temple, everybody came running. And who wouldn’t want to see it? An immediate, visible, physical healing is an amazing thing. The man’s life was immediately altered & improved, physically & emotionally.
And yet, when Peter delivers God’s Word to the ears of the people, another amazing thing happens. The holy God offered forgiveness to those poor miserable sinners who had killed Jesus! Yes, that forgiveness IS better than a miracle.
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Who was Jesus? It was a miracle that He was God-in-the-flesh; it’s even better that
He still IS the 2nd person of the Trinity, the only one of the three that could descend to us,
and become one of us, to save us from sin, death & hell. And in his ministry, what did he do? In miraculous ways, He helped people: He healed their diseases, He cast out their demons, He raised their dead; but even better than those things, His voice turned sinners toward Him, and He forgave their sins. Even with the worst of tax collectors, prostitutes & sinners, He called them to himself, and held out to them the mercy of God that gives new life.
Did Jesus do anything that deserved death? No. Not in the least. Even Pontius Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent, and planned to release Him. So what happened? The leaders were jealous, and resented Jesus’ rebukes to their pride, their foolish errors, and their blatant hypocrisy. Remember when Jesus told Pilate that ‘everyone on the side of truth listens to Him’? The Jewish leaders closed their ears to the truth-in-the-flesh. They saw Jesus as a menace to their positions & power, so he had to go. And what about the other people Peter is preaching to that day? Well, it may be a little simplified to say it this way, but on Palm Sunday they shouted ‘hosanna’ to their hope-for hero, the Son of David. But but just a few days later, they were easily stirred up into choosing a murderer to be released to them, and screaming at Jesus, ‘Crucify him!’ (Mk 15:13) To some He was a threat, to others He was a fraud. It didn’t matter if they realized it or not, the result was the same. As Peter told them,
‘You killed the Author of life.’
Can you imagine being part of that crowd, hearing that, & realizing that it was true? And not just in a spiritual sense, as we have to admit that -our sins too- sent Jesus to the cross. But the sinful actions of this crowd sent the visible physical Jesus to that Roman cross on that original Good Friday. Can you imagine a worse sin than that?
Adam & Eve disobeyed & chose a piece of fruit; they hid from God, & were evicted from the Garden to experience thorns, pain & -eventually (like 930 yrs later!)- death.
But even all that doesn’t seem as bad as sending the Son of God to his crucifixion. So, I say, if anybody deserved hell, it was those very people Peter was talking to. But instead of delivering God’s deserved curse, what does Peter say? “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out.” Wiped out, unreadable in the record book, erased, never to be seen or referred to again. That’s forgiveness: gone for good!
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Forgiveness for their sin, or for any sin, is possible for one reason only: because of the kind of God that God is. God’s forgiving actions began at the first sin. Adam & Eve get credit for the first sin; but all the rest of us followed right along after; and who can measure the amount, the weight & depth of man’s wickedness in these 6,000 years? But here is Peter proclaiming the truth Jesus commissioned him to preach: God’s mercy & love toward sinners is greater than even the sin of this crowd == the sin of killing God’s Son. Yes, that also means that His mercy and love are greater than our sin.
God has fulfilled what He promised beginning with Adam & Eve: He would redeem us sinners by keeping His promise to send His Son, whose death would be gruesome but His resurrection would be glorious. Jesus was the great sin-bearer ==for our sin, and the great death-dier ==for our death & hell, and the great resurrection-riser ==for our new life.
For whatever sin you think is the worst one ever, remember that God, thru Peter, held out forgiveness even to those who crucified Jesus. Jesus’ death & resurrection is enough to have blotted out all sin.
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At times you & I sit and ponder our lives, our sins, and we can doubt that there is enough forgiveness to go around, and it will run out before it gets to us. Of course we haven’t murdered someone; but there was that time when we had a hand in killing someone’s reputation, & they never really got it back. Or turn it around: a person ruined our reputation, and we never fully got our good reputation back, & we can’t bring ourselves to offer to them forgiveness. In reality, it’s not even my forgiveness. Think of that: Jesus died to forgive them, but I don’t want to give Jesus’ forgiveness to them.
What do we even call that? I’m not saying it’s easy to forgive; some sins seem too big to forgive. Sometimes we think that in forgiveness we will then ‘forget’ our sin. But those are two different things for us. God is able to blot out & ‘remember sin no more.’ We can’t do that as well; but remembering doesn’t mean that sin isn’t forgiven. Some sins are embarrassing, & we get over them; some sins change our lives, & we will never forget because we live with those consequences every day. Some sins we have allowed to develop into deep-seated habits, they follow us everywhere, they haunt us. How hard those are to change. So, we might wonder: is God’s forgiveness able to handle those sins?
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We could ask Peter, and his answer =from the Risen Lord Jesus himself= would be for us the same as it was for that tough crowd in Jerusalem that day == who would remember their whole lives that they killed the Son of God. Yes, He is able; God forgives. There is no sin too big, too deep, too secret, too embarrassing, too life-affecting to forgive, even if we can never forget it. God forgave David, an adulterer & murderer. He forgave Paul, who spent years persecuting Christians. He forgave Peter, who openly denied his Lord three times to save his own skin. The Lord called all of them to repentance, that in turning away from their sin, that times of refreshing & relief would come to them.
Yes, our sins caused Jesus to go the cross & die; but He didn’t stay dead. Their sin back then sent Jesus to the cross to die, & they killed the author of life. But He didn’t stay dead. The resurrection didn’t ‘excuse’ their sin, or overlook their accountability; but =better= the resurrection has proven their full & free forgiveness of sin, and has verified that our sins are blotted out. That means that =with Easter confidence= we can look forward to that time when Jesus Christ will be restoring all things, and that includes restoring each one of us.
So, what is better than the healing miracle of a 40 yr old man who was crippled from birth? That’s easy to answer now. It’s the miracle that every sin, in the history of the world, has been blotted out by the Holy & Righteous One, whom the God of Abraham sent, who was crucified, and then raised from the dead, whom heaven has received, and who is returning to restore all things. A visible physical miracle is amazing; forgiveness & eternal life is better.
Amen