The Man at the Gate

God enlightens our ignorance bit by bit, story by story, revelation by revelation.

Easter 3b 2015 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Peter said, “Why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power of piety we had made him walk?”

Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles begins a bit abruptly, including a reference to an “it” and a “him” whom some of us might not recognize. We are fortunate in having a beautiful stained-glass window depicting him and it, right on the southern wall of the sanctuary — take a look at it as you come up to communion because it is hard to see from the nave of the church; it will be on your right as you approach the altar rail. It depicts Peter and John standing before the man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. He is the “him” and the “it” is his miraculous healing through the name of Jesus. To refresh all of our memories, let me read a slightly abridged portion from the Acts of the Apostles just prior to our first reading today, as it sets the scene for what follows.

One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer... and a man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John... he asked them for alms. Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, “Look at us.” And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. And jumping up, he stood and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognized him as the one who used to sit and ask for alms ... and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him....

That’s the “it” and the “him.” Our reading today continues the tale with Peter’s testimony to the crowd that are amazed at all of this; that it is the power of Jesus’ name that has wrought this miracle. He castigates the people and their rulers for having rejected and killed the author of life, and testifies that he and the apostles are witnesses to the resurrection of God’s chosen and righteous one, in whose name and by whose name this man has been healed. And he calls them to repent, even though, he says, they “acted in ignorance.”
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Ignorance is a theme that runs through all of our readings today, including the bit I added from the first part of chapter three of Acts. But before I go any further I want to clear up a possible misunderstanding, and that revolves around the meaning of the word ignorance. Sometimes people will use the word ignorant as a synonym for an insult, for “stupid.” They’ll say, “Oh, you’re ignorant!” But that is not really what ignorant means. To be ignorant is not to know something — not to be incapable of knowing something, but merely not knowing a particular something or some things. Even the smartest people in the world are ignorant, because no one knows everything. In fact, the smartest people in the world know that they don’t know everything, and they are always willing to learn. It is the people who think they know everything that are usually the most untrustworthy. And the other good news is that ignorance can be remedied: as soon as you learn something that you didn’t know before you are no longer ignorant of that fact. Once you have new information, you are no longer, but informed.

So with that cleared up, let’s look at some of the ignorance laid before us in the Scripture passages we read today, beginning with that passage from Acts. In the part that I read, it is the man at the gate who is ignorant. He is not a disciple. Although he’s lived in Jerusalem for a long time — for the Scripture tells of how people would carry him in every day, and set him in the gate to beg for alms, and after his healing they all recognize him (they’re not ignorant about him; they know him very well!) — but he is ignorant of who Peter and John are. He doesn’t know them from Adam. He is ignorant of them — he doesn’t know who these out-of-towners from Galilee are. He’s lived in Jerusalem his whole life; people from Galilee may come and go, but he doesn’t know who they are. All he is interested in is what he can get out of them, and as soon as Peter addresses him, you can well expect that he stretched out his hand for a coin or two. Peter immediately remedies his ignorance, informing him that he and John have no money to give him; and I can well guess he is disappointed! But then Peter surprises him, and says, I’ve got something better than gold: he reveals the name of Jesus, the best bit of information this world has ever known, at which point Peter takes him by the hand to raise him up, healed of his weakness and able not just to walk, but to leap for joy! More than his ignorance is remedied! His heart is filled with the knowledge of God’s healing power, known in his own healed limbs.
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The next ignorance addressed is that to which Peter refers in what follows. He charges the people for having rejected Jesus, even when Pilate was ready to release him, and they chose a murderer to be released instead. But, as Peter continues, they and their rulers acted in ignorance — an ignorance that helped in its own ironic way to fulfill God’s promise that the Messiah had to suffer. However, now that the suffering is over and Christ is raised from the dead, the school of God is back in session: it is time to learn something new, something of which they were ignorant before. It is time for them to put that ignorance behind them, to become informed by the Gospel, and to embrace the truth of the power of Jesus’ name — not just to heal a disabled man, but to restore all of them to the wholeness that God intends for each and every one, through grace by faith.
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The next ignorance described in our readings — this one from the First Epistle of John — is double: The world is ignorant of God and of us as children of God; but we too are not without our limitations, our own ignorance: As John says, “We are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.” There is still more to learn, more revelation to come, more opening of the eyes of our faith. The good news is that our ignorance is not total: “What we do know,” he writes, “is this: when he is revealed we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” We don’t see him yet, but when we do we will be like him. We will learn something wonderful and new. This is the hope of all who seek Jesus, who number themselves among the company of those who have believed in his name, and are washed with his blood, united with him in a death like so that we may be united with him in a rising from the dead like his. At present, as St Paul would also affirm, our knowledge is partial as if seeing dimly in a mirror. But when Christ is revealed we shall know as we are known, fully informed, fully enlightened by the light of the world, the revelation of the Son of God.
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And so it is fitting that the final ignorance with which we are presented today is that of the apostles themselves. They have heard the testimony of Peter and the disciples who had encountered Jesus on the way to Emmaus. And while they are still arguing and trying to understand all of this, Jesus himself appears among them — to their amazement, and in the case of some, disbelief. And Jesus, ever the good teacher, gently instructs them, relieving their ignorance with the good news, reminding them that this is what he had told them beforehand would happen, before they came to Jerusalem in the first place, before the time that he said he would suffer; and, moreover, that all of this was attested in the Scriptures (in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms) — Scriptures they had read their whole lives, Scriptures they knew by heart and yet somehow they had never put two and two together even when those holy promises were being fulfilled before their eyes. Such was the ignorance of the apostles that they needed not only to experience, but to remember, to be reminded that the experience matched the promise. They needed a good teacher to inform them of how the promises of the past become real in the present.

And this is the gentle way in which God continues to enlighten our darkness, to lift our ignorance, to inform our minds and rejoice our hearts. Not suddenly, but bit by bit, story by story, and revelation by revelation. By promise and reminder, by poetry and prose, by repeating the lesson until we understand; by words from on high and hopes uttered in our inmost hearts by the groaning of the Spirit within each of us — so it is that the Good Teacher teaches, and the Great Physician heals.

May we, like the man at the gate, reach out for what we know not, but find that we are grasping the hand of the One who brings us gifts better than we can ask or imagine, even Jesus Christ our Lord.

Ignorance, Doubt and Fear

The disciples' fear, doubt and ignorance is overcome, by the grace of God -- a sermon for Easter 3

SJF • Easter 3b • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Peter said, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer.

It may seem odd in the midst of an Easter season, in spite of today’s weather, that I should be preaching a sermon on the themes of ignorance, fear and doubt. However, that is what we are presented with in today’s Scripture readings. And the irony in all of this, particularly in the part about ignorance, is that the ignorance itself plays a crucial part in the story of salvation, what theologians would call a “happy fault.”

One of the important things to note about ignorance is that it is not the same thing as stupidity. Very smart people can be ignorant; in fact, the smartest people of all are the ones who know when they are ignorant about certain things, and don’t try to pretend they know more than they do. (Someone tell our political candidates, please!) For ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge: not the inability to have knowledge.

The ignorance in question today is the ignorance of those who conspired to bring down Jesus, and to bring him to the cross and his death upon it. In today’s reading from Acts, Peter is beginning to make his case that Jesus is the Messiah — and he will very shortly be on trial before the Council for making that case and thus have the opportunity to make it even more dramatically and eloquently. He has just performed his own first miracle of healing, and the crowds are amazed. And Peter tells them, essentially, “See, Jesus really was the Messiah; he has promised that such things would be done in his name — I did not perform on my own merits but through the power of God that was at work in Christ — this miracle proves it. You and your rulers put him to death but God has raised him to life, and we are eyewitnesses. But I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your rulers.”

Peter is arguing that this ignorance served a purpose, God’s purpose. Jesus himself had prayed from the cross, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!” Peter affirms that they were ignorant and that their ignorance of who Christ really was furthered the work of salvation. Had the rulers and the people accepted Jesus, he would not have suffered death at Roman hands at their instigation. There had to be a kind of “suspension of belief” so that salvation could come: universal salvation, to the whole world — not just the delivery of Israel from Roman rule. Had all the people accepted Jesus, and crowned him as merely an earthly king of Israel, he would not have fulfilled his role as the savior of the whole world, not just for this world, but for the next — not just to defeat the power of Rome as an earthly monarch, but by dying and rising to life again to destroy death itself.

In some sense God must have willed that the people and their rulers would not accept Jesus as Messiah, as had been prophesied, in order that his saving death could be accomplished — much as God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart in the days prior to the Exodus in order that God’s glory might be shown in the power of deliverance, when he brought his people out of Egypt with great signs and wonders.

And I called this a happy fault to echo that older and first happy fault of the fall of Adam and Eve. As the old English Christmas carol says, “had not that apple taken been” — had humanity never fallen — the Son of Man would not have had need to become incarnate as one of us to save us from that fall and raise us up again.

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In our Gospel passage, however, we turn to the darker side of ignorance: the ignorance that leads to doubt and fear. Jesus is standing there before his disciples and they still do not accept him as raised from the dead. They think he is a ghost! I suppose their fear is understandable — I would be rather unsettled to see someone I knew had died come walking into the room, particularly through closed doors. But they’ve just been told by the two who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus that they have seen him, and that Simon has seen him too.

Yet some of them still, even with him standing there, and in their startled terror, disbelieve. Even after showing them his hands and feet, the wounds of the nails still visible, they are still disbelieving, though in a somewhat happier way — I guess like someone who finds it hard to believe she has won the Lotto and keeps looking back and forth between the winning numbers on the screen and the same numbers on her lottery ticket. It is hard to believe that something so amazing has happened.

But am I the only one here who detects a little bit of exasperation in Jesus saying, “Have you got anything to eat?” In any case, Jesus then lays out the whole story before them — in much the same way Peter would later do with the people and their rulers — though perhaps a bit more like a very patient teacher with a somewhat slow-on-the-uptake class. He dispels their ignorance by opening their minds to the Scriptures.

And suddenly, for them, the veil is parted. Suddenly it all makes sense. This is what the prophets were talking about when they said the Messiah would suffer. All those bible stories we heard as children, all those psalms we sang in the synagogue, all the sermons we listened to with care, and for that matter the sermons we slept through — this is what it all was about. It has happened, finally, actually happened, for real, in our lifetimes, and in our own neighborhood.

It is this realization, coupled with the descent of the Holy Spirit (which we will hear more about on Pentecost) that empowered the disciples to change the world. Some skeptical modern doubters say that Jesus did not rise from the dead
and that the disciples just made it all up. If that were true then the disciples would have to be the greatest con-men in the history of the world. To “sell” such a con, and risk their lives to do so, would take massive amounts of self-confidence and ample supplies of that Jewish virtue chutzpah, if not the Greek vice hubris. But do the disciples show any evidence of chutzpah or hubris prior to the appearance of the risen Lord? Don’t they do just the opposite: don’t they cower in fear and doubt — even when he appears to them! To think that these fearful, doubtful, weak-willed men concocted a plan to fool the world, and had the gall to carry it out — well, that defies belief. If I doubt anything, that is the most doubtful thing of all — that the disciples made it all up.

No, ignorant doubters and those who live in fear do not act with such conviction and power — power enough just prior to our reading from Acts today to heal a man unable to walk, and in the portion read today to confront a crowd of doubtful, ignorant people with the “good news” that they are all ignorant murderers — but have the chance to be redeemed, by turning to the one whom in their ignorance they handed over.

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There is a powerful lesson for us in all of this: not just not to be too sure of ourselves when we don’t know what we are doing, but to have confidence in him when we do what he commanded us to do. We are not eyewitnesses, but we have the charge to continue the testimony that they so powerfully delivered to us. It began in Jerusalem and it spread to the four corners of the world, and it is spreading still — to new ears and hearts and minds — the saving Gospel that enlightens all ignorance with the grace and majesty of the presence of God with us, still among us, powerful to heal and strong to save. To him be ascribed all might, majesty, power and dominion, henceforth and for ever more.

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