[Peter said:] "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." [Acts 10:39-41]
The resurrection does something to our eyes, or rather, to our vision.
In light of the risen life of Jesus, even the most terrible and ugly things in the world are transformed into God's instruments for beauty and goodness.
Here, in these verses we heard this past Sunday (and that we took a summary view of in yesterday's devotion), there's a fantastic case in point. The cross of Jesus, in light of the resurrection, has become a tree.
Seriously, Luke the narrator has made a really powerful (but often overlooked) move in the way he describes the instrument of Jesus' death, and it's something that he alone in the canon of the New Testament was in a position to pull off. That's because Luke is the only one of our four gospel-writers who also penned a second volume--a sequel, of sorts--that gives us a window on the life of the early church. So we get to hear not only the stories of Jesus' life as it led to the cross, but also the early church's reflection on the meaning of that cross. And here's the giveaway for Luke: before the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, he'll talk about Jesus death on "a cross." But afterward, once the Holy Spirit has been given to the community of Jesus to see and understand in a new way, Luke describes it as Jesus being hung "on a tree." Same instrument of torture, honestly--the Romans were pretty willing to use lumber posts or live trees or whatever they could find when they were crucifying people, just like the lynch-mobs in the American South were willing to use gallows as well as live trees to hang Black bodies from for decades in our own history.
But for Luke the narrator of Acts, he tips his hand that he wants us to see the meaning of the cross in a new way--it is no longer merely the tool of death the Empire wields, but it is now the means of life for all people through Jesus' resurrection. As Luke recounts Peter's message here, he is using some faithful imagination: the cross is no longer lifeless lumber, but a living and life-giving tree. The risen life of Jesus does that to us: it colors our vision to see the world differently--through Easter eyes.
You'll see it a number of times throughout the book of Acts: the cross is described as "a tree," and it's always connected immediately with Jesus' resurrection and his mission to save, heal, and accomplish "the time of universal restoration" (Acts 3:21). What the Empire wanted to use to mock, humiliate, and torture Jesus with in a show of Rome's domination and unquestionable power, God had now used to pull the rug out from under the Powers of the Day and brought about a new kind of reign. In light of resurrection, the tools of evil become the instruments of good. The means of dealing out death becomes a source of life. And within this reframing, you get a glimpse of what Luke wants us to understand about how God's reign works. God doesn't trample puny humans into the dirt and intimidate or dominate us into submission, and God doesn't fight the world's empires on the world's terms, with armies and weapons and military might. God takes the most horrible thing we humans could do (killing Jesus) in the most cruel way we could find to do it (crucifying him) and turns it into a means of bringing life. Like so many of the Eastern church fathers and mothers of the early centuries would put it, in Jesus, God used death to destroy death. This is God's utter genius, and God's radically different way of winning the victory--it is a triumph of transformation. God doesn't coerce but rather creates something new with the wreckage we have made. God doesn't seek retribution, but reclamation. God doesn't dust off Friday's cross in order to crucify the ones who put Jesus on it in the first place, but repurposes it for Sunday-best use--fashioning it into a tree that is both alive and life-giving.
It's no wonder, then, that the followers of this risen Jesus are the ones captivated by the prophets' visions of swords beaten into plowshares and spears refashioned into pruning hooks. It's no wonder we tell the stories of cowardly and violent Peter who was transformed by the Spirit's outpouring into the bold and peaceable apostle, or of persecuting Saul transformed and called by a new name, Paul, when the living Jesus got a hold of him. We are a people learning to practice God's new way of seeing--through Easter eyes.
How might the resurrection of Jesus change our vision today? Where other loud voices around us want to dehumanize the people who are different from us or treat others as "animals," we will insist on seeing them as made in the image of God. Where others insist that there are no options but endless war (because you gotta get them before they get us!) we will look for new possibilities where peacemaking is possible. Where fear makes us see everyone else as a threat competing for limited resources, Jesus' resurrection leads us to see all people as neighbors welcomed into God's new thing, where there is abundance and life for all. We are people learning to see the cross as a tree, and with it, all of creation in light of God's intent to redeem, renew, and restore all things.
Now, go out and have a look at the world around you in that light...
Lord Jesus, heal our vision to see the world in light of your life-giving presence that turns a cross into a tree.
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