"Then Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name'." [Acts 10:34-43]
The resurrection is for everybody. That includes people far off who had no interest in or awareness of Jesus or the God he represents, and it includes his own people who rejected him and put him to death. Talk about a God who doesn't hold grudges.
These words, which many of us heard this past Easter Sunday, come from the mouth of Simon Peter, whom we noted yesterday received his own declaration of forgiveness and welcome from the angelic messenger at the empty tomb. Despite his own denial of Jesus, the risen Jesus made a point of including Peter in the invitation to a resurrection reunion. And now, some time later in the book of Acts, the same Peter realizes that God's ability to set aside the past didn't stop with him. Now, as he comes to understand that God's gospel welcome includes both Gentiles and Jewish people like himself, it dawns on Peter that God has put away the past enmity that deemed Gentiles as unacceptable and unworthy... and also that God is not holding the crucifixion against the crowds who cried out for Jesus' death, either.
The very same townspeople in Jerusalem who had been swept up in the moment to call for Barabbas to be released and Jesus to be killed are the very same ones that Peter and the rest of the apostles offered grace to after Jesus' resurrection and invited to trust in God's forgiveness. God had clearly set a policy of not holding their sins against them--just as Jesus had prayed in his dying moments. And then as the news spread beyond the reach of Judea and Jewish communities, Peter understood that the old animosity against Gentiles had been set aside now, too. There was no one beyond the reach of God's invitation, no one whose past was being held against them, and no one against whom God was holding a grudge. That's just how God loves--the past is set aside, and God does not keep record of our wrongs any longer.
So much of human history is marred by our refusal to do the same. So many of our conflicts, wars, and simmering hatreds are handed down from one generation to another with the unquestioned premise of, "They are our enemies because they've always been our enemies." So many atrocities have been committed, and so much blood has been shed, all justified [feebly] with the assumption that "THOSE PEOPLE are always wrong, always worthy of our hatred, and always on the wrong side." In my lifetime alone, that has included the "troubles" between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, the Rwandan genocides between Hutus and Tutsis, seemingly unending clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, a wave of bigotry-fueled violence against people of Asian ancestry in the midst of COVID, and a host of other long-simmering forms of racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and ingrained hostility. And of course, plenty of other variations on that same terrible theme have played out in generations past, from Jim Crow segregation, Japanese internment camps, and the willful extermination of Native peoples in this country's history to countless other wars, genocides, and pogroms across the globe. We seem to be unable to escape the impulse to fixate on some other group and declare them our eternal enemy, even if it has been so long we have forgotten what started the fight in the first place... or even if we have erased from our history books that we were the ones who fired the first shot. God, however, makes possible a break from the old unending cycles of vengeance. God makes possible a new kind of life together, where the old animosities no longer drive us to repeat the violence or hatred of our forebears.
For us on this day, it's worth taking a close and honest look at where we have been carrying around old animosities--whether personal grudges or the patterns of hatred and bigotry that have been implicitly taught to us without even realizing it--and to put them aside as God has. If God has chosen not to hold grudges against either the crowds of Jerusalem who had called for Jesus' death nor the Gentiles who had been hostile to the Jewish people for centuries before that, then we have no grounds for nursing our old pet hatreds. God's kind of love doesn't keep those old records--it is time for us to let go of ours as well.
Lord Jesus, free us from the weight of old animosities we've been lugging around for too long without realizing it. And give us the honesty to see where we've been clinging to that kind of hostility so that we can let it go.
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