The Resurrection is Not a Solution to the Problem of Death

Why Peter's gospel preaching always ends with an exhortation to repent

Third Sunday of Eastertide — Acts 3.12-19

In Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, Peter and John have just healed a crippled panhandler begging at the entrance to Solomon’s portico at the temple in Jerusalem. Peter, fresh off his inaugural sermon, addresses the astounded onlookers, and this preached word follows the concise, pointed pattern of his preaching at Pentecost. “The God of Abraham…,” Peter proclaims, “glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and you denied in the presence of Pilate…you killed the Author of Life, whom God raised from the dead.” As in the case of his initial Spirit-led sermon, Peter’s gospel promise comes with a correlative command, “Repent therefore and turn back from your sins.”

Like so much of our vocabulary of faith, repentance (metanoia) has unraveled into a pejorative term with suffocating moralistic overtones.

The term itself, however, refers not to our actions but to our attitudes, not to our bodies but to our minds.

As Robert Farrar Capon says, unpacking the dialectic between forgiveness and repentance:

He forgave you before you repented. That’s crucial. See, that is why it is so outrageous. The gospel is really vulgar, crass and immoral because it says God forgives the world before it repents. In the gospel, repent is always repent and believe. It means turn yourself around from not trusting the forgiveness and trust it. That’s it. It doesn’t mean that you earn it by repenting. You had it before.

Thus, to repent is to reorient wholly your perception of God.

Of course, God’s history with his Israel attests rather unequivocally that the worship of the true God rather than the barren deities will produce a lived difference just as worship of the Not God both is sin and begets sins.

Peter’s gospeling in the Book of Acts is notable for the way in which the command to repent reliably follows the promise that Jesus lives with death behind him.

So long as hearers understand repentance to refer chiefly to external behaviors, Peter’s preaching can sound as if the apostle is taking away with one hand the gift he’s given with the other hand. Having enlivened us with proclamation— it can sound to us— Peter lays upon us still more exhortation. He gifts us the gospel only to give us more law.

God’s done his part, raising Jesus from the dead.

Now it’s up to us— like Private Ryan— to do our part and earn it.

No.

Such an interpretation of Peter’s preaching fails to perceive Calvary as something other than the turning of the ages and does not posit the word of the cross as the sheer apocalyptic novum that the apostle Paul in particular proclaimed.

Straighten up and fly right is religion.

Get your act together is not revelation.

Rather, Peter’s sermons remind us in the season of Eastertide that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is neither merely an item in the history of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim nor is it a glad tiding of your future, “You will live with death behind you.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes this very point in Discipleship when he insists that the resurrection is not a solution to the problem of death.

The resurrection is revelation.

Easter is more than the vindication of the Son by his Father. Easter is the unveiling of the true God. The resurrection is God’s self-unveiling.

• Peter’s Eastertide sermons are not merely recommendations for us of penitent, pious living.

• They are reminders to us that the resurrection requires a wholesale reconfiguration of all our previously held convictions.

As the self-disclosure of the true God, the raising of Jesus is nothing less now than the criterion against which all our other beliefs must now be judged.