The God Who Outalsts

The God Who Outlasts--April 16, 2018

"[Peter said to the crowd in Jerusalem,] 'The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. And by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you'...." [Acts 3:12-16]

You could say that God's greatest power is the ability to outlast and to exhaust the worst of humanity (and the best—look how much evil is done with good intentions!). God's surprisingly determined faithfulness is what sends Jesus, risks Jesus' rejection and death, overcomes it in the resurrection, brings healing to those who are still broken and hurting, and then withstands the skeptical looks from this crowd. It is the goodness of God that keeps coming back, even though, at every turn, that goodness has been met with rejection. The faithfulness of God doesn't shrink away from the possibility of death.  No, God goes right on through it, and comes out the other side, so that God can continue to be faithful... even to the ones who had only recently been shouting, "Crucify!"

All of this is to say that God's faithfulness is given shape in enemy-love; that is, Peter tells a story of a God who does not merely wait for us to come back to him like a faithful dog waiting at the back door of the house, but who active goes out and seeks those who have participated in rejecting him. Peter tells this crowd that they are complicit in Jesus' death—they are accomplices, and they cannot merely pass the blame or pass the buck to the government for getting rid of Jesus. They are—and we are—enemies of God, who stand in a long line of people who have rejected God's goodness and grace. And if God just did the "common sense" thing to do, God would have left us behind a long time ago. But to hear Peter tell it, this same God whose vision for a new world keeps being rejected, and this same God whose Chosen One, Jesus, was put to death, this God has not given up on blessing the world and mending the very lives that had conspired against him.  God raises Jesus, not in order to wash hands of us and walk away, but precisely to enter back into the fray of our hardened hearts and messy lives, and to keep on being faithful.

That is not to say that we don't have to be honest about how hard our hearts have become, and how much of the mess we have made in our own lives, and how messy we have made the lives of others.  There is no choice not to face it.  Easter doesn't mean that our sin gets covered up with cellophane grass--it means that God has brought it out in the open, nailed it to the cross, and come back to be with us nevertheless.

That's why Peter's speech here is a somber one. It won't let us look away from all the times and all the ways we have slammed the door in God's face and said, "No, I think I'd prefer to do things my way, thank you very much." Peter's speech doesn't let us forget that we are complicit in Jesus' death, and we cannot push the blame off onto any other lone group—we can't blame "the Jews" as had been done for so long in the church's history, and we can't blame "the Romans" as though we would have had the courage to liberate Jesus if we'd have been there, and we cannot blame the random cruelties of fate. We are a part of this mess, and we have dirty hands.  We have no choice but to name it when we would much prefer to brush all of our histories of rejection under the rug.

But in truth, that is only half of what this scene from Acts is all about. Because it is also about the God whom Peter speaks of—this God who keeps seeking us out even after our repeated rejections. We cannot help but see our failures, but we are also invited to see the God whose love simply outlasts and outlives and exhausts our failures and rejection and animosity, and who keeps coming back to find us. We are met with this love that will not let us go—ever.   Jesus is risen from the dead precisely as a witness to us that God's love will outlast all the worst we can do--even the worst we can do to God.

Today, it may be that the task in front of us is two-fold: first, I am called to dare being honest about all the ways I reject God's goodness and all the blessed opportunities to live in God's new way of things that I pass by. And then second, seeing that God refuses to let that be the last word, I am dared to jump into God's love in a way that makes it possible for me to love others without waiting on them to love me first or deserve it. God's faithful love is a love for enemies as well as strangers and friends—and that is the love into which I am pulled today. We get to be a part of Jesus' movement to keep reaching out to a world that keeps rejecting God, knowing that in the end, there is a divine trump card of outlasting faithfulness to be played.

Good Lord, today let us see ourselves truthfully and hopefully. Break down again the walls we have built to keep you out—keep besieging us, Lord, with the love that will not let us go.