Today’s first reading was taken from the second chapter of the Book of Acts, and represents part of St. Luke’s account of what happened on Pentecost – the day that tongues of fire appeared on the heads of disciples and 3,000 people were converted to Christianity. We’ll hear the entire Pentecost account on Pentecost Sunday some six weeks from today, but for now I’d like to reread just the verses you heard earlier. St. Luke writes: “But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them … ‘Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.’ Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.’ And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this crooked generation.’ So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.”
“You crucified your Savior!” Harsh words – probably the harshest words you will ever hear in your life – but that’s what Peter says to the crowd at the Temple who are wondering what all the fire and wind and commotion of Pentecost are all about. That’s what Peter is telling us this morning, too.
I’m guessing that it makes us feel a bit squirmy hearing it put like that. “This Jesus whom you crucified.” We don’t want to be on the hook for something like that – after all, we love Jesus! We would never want to hurt Him, much less kill Him. That can’t be us. So we hear the words of our text but we let it pass by without letting it touch us fine God-fearing people here at St. Paul Pana. We blame those evil first-century Jews for killing Jesus – who were helped, of course, by those pagan Romans – and we shake our heads and self-righteously tell ourselves that things would have been a lot different if we had lived way back then. We’d never have done anything terrible to Jesus. We’re Lutherans, and Lutherans don’t behave like that.
But how quickly we forget. Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther defied the Roman Catholic Church and refused to blame the Jews for Jesus’ death. Rather, he put the blame squarely where it belongs – on himself, on you, on me. Who killed Jesus? You did! I did! We all did! Admit it – confess it – it’s the Gospel truth. What Peter told the crowds on the first Pentecost is spoken to us this morning: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
This is the paradox of the Gospel, good news and bad news, with the bad news coming before the good. It is more than bad news, really – it is tragic news, but it brings glad tidings of new life. And to the degree that you tone down the bad news and shift the blame onto someone else for Jesus’ death, to the same extent you shift the beauty, the wonder, the forgiveness, the joy and the life of the Gospel onto someone else. When Jesus hung on the cross, He said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He just as well could have said, “Father forgive them, the ones who are hammering the nails and killing me. Forgive my murderers for their sin!”
Unless you are willing to take the rap and include yourself among the hardened sinners who killed Jesus, then you are putting yourself outside of that blessed group of killers whom He justified by His blood. If you will not confess your crime as Peter exhorted the crowd to confess, if you will not admit that God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified, then you simply will not know the power of His forgiveness – because forgiveness of sin is what Peter proclaims to those who crucified Jesus.
And what about the ones who think that they are not guilty of Jesus’ death – those who think that they’re not guilty of any really bad sins? Well, the Gospel does not reach into their hearts and souls because they think that they don’t need it. They are on their own, and when the Last Day comes they’ll find that their own self-righteousness doesn’t count for much. In fact, with God, it doesn’t count for anything.
Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon once wrote a letter to Luther in which he agonized over all kinds of trifling sins that he had committed – unkind words he had spoken to friends, laziness with his work, an uncharitable attitude toward students – the list went on and on and on. Now I don't want to minimize Melanchthon's sins, for every sin is worthy of condemnation and death. But Luther was not impressed by Melanchthon's confession. Instead, he shot back a response in which he advised Melanchthon to go out and commit a real crime – something like robbing a bank or killing someone. Luther told him that then he could quit worrying about trifling little sins and “join us in the company of real and hardened sinners who have had to flee for refuge entirely under the cross of Jesus Christ!”
You, my friends, don’t have to worry about casing any banks this afternoon or murdering someone. You’ve already committed the most serious and horrible crime imaginable. You murdered none other than the Lord of Life. You killed Jesus – killed Him by nailing Him to a cross. It doesn’t get any worse than that. And why do I say that you did it? Well, your fingerprints and your DNA are all over the scene of the crime. The forensic evidence against you is just plain overwhelming. As far as the prosecuting attorney is concerned, it’s a slam-dunk case. Guilty as charged. And the sentence – with no chance of parole or appeal – is death.
The official crime report says that our sins put Jesus on that cross. St. John summed it up pretty well when he wrote: “He” – Jesus, that is – “is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” Propitiation is one of those words we never use in our conversations, but what it means in simplest terms is that Jesus is the means of our forgiveness – he is the sacrifice for our sins that satisfied God once and for all times.
Every day, in more ways large and small that we can ever really imagine, we show ourselves to be sinners. St. Peter and St. Paul are in full agreement on this point: it was sinners – all sinners – who killed Jesus. As Peter said: “Know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Your fingerprints are all over the cross, fingerprints representing each and every sin you have ever committed and every sin you will commit during the remainder of your life. You’ve seen enough crime stories on TV to know that fingerprints don’t lie. You fingerprints of sin were there. Mine were, too.
But that’s a good thing! Because the payback that our Lord gives to His killers is eternal life, forgiveness of all sins, and a place in His kingdom of everlasting bliss and joy. That’s the kind of Lord that our God is. That’s the kind of love he has for those who deserve no love. The love of God does not go out and search for what is pleasing to Him – it creates what is pleasing to Him by the word of the cross.
God tricked us, you see. He put Himself in our likeness, made Himself look just like one of us, knowing that we would kill Him so that by His death He could bring an end to our sin and dying. It was a set-up – the perfect set-up. God set us up for salvation by the death of His Son. And we are all accomplices.
Two thousand years ago our first partners in crime, when they heard this news and saw their fingerprints all over the cross, did not try to make excuses for themselves or pass the buck to someone else. We read in Acts 2:37: “Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’” And Peter answers with some of the most comforting words in the Book of Acts and, indeed, in the entire Bible: “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.’”
Our Lord calls you to Himself. He called you in the waters of your Baptism. He made you His own child – His own heir. By putting the blood of Jesus on our hands, He has washed away all of our sin. He has given life and joy in place of our sin and death. What did we do to deserve such treatment? Nothing – absolutely nothing. It is the free gift of a God who loves us so very much that He would send His Son to die for us – the very people who hammered those nails into His hands and feet.
So take the rap. Admit you did it. Confess your crime. And as you do so, remember – never forget – that God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified, so that in Him you would forever be the sons and daughters of God, holy and righteous in His sight and by His blood.
Note: this sermon was adapted, in part, from materials originally published in “Concordia Pulpit Resources.”
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