Easter 5,
Easter 5, Acts 13: 26-43
About thirty-five years ago while I was training to be a Reader in the Church my tutor Fr. Stevens a very learned and distinguished man and Vicar of a large Parish church in West London, preached the best Easter Day sermon I have every heard and I can still remember it word by word today.
Fr Stevens got up into the pulpit, everyone sat down and he said, “Alleluia, He is risen” then walked out of the pulpit and after a few moments continued with the service.
After the service a few of us students who had join his congregation, questioned Fr. Stevens about his sermon and said to him, “If we had preached a sermon like that you would have had told us off.”
He replied, yes I would have, “But can you follow it?”
You guess it, that was our next sermon for him.
To day I find that I have to follow a far greater man’s sermon, St Paul.
The substance of what St Paul and the other Apostles preached to the Jews, was to show them how the Good News of Jesus Christ, exactly agreed with their Old Testament teachings.
The sermon Paul preached would have been in a synagogue, at which he was probably a stranger, and so would have waited for his opportunity during the service to do so.
At the right point in the service Paul would have stood up, as one prepared and determined to speak.
So when the invitation was given to him by the rulers of the synagogue, St Paul took it and preached to the Jews about Jesus Christ
This reading from Acts is part of the only full-length report of a sermon that we posses by St Paul.
This sermon of St Paul that is recorded by St Luke in the Acts of Apostles is to show that those who preached the gospel to the Gentiles did at first used their utmost endeavors to preach to the Jews.
That Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah and the fulfillment of their prophecies. .
The main elements of St Paul’s sermon are precisely the same as St Peters sermon which is recorded in the second chapter of The Acts of the Apostles.
This sermon of St Paul covers five main points
1) Paul insists that the coming of Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of history
2) That man did not recognize God’s fulfilment when He came in the person of Jesus Christ.
3) That God could not be defeated and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the proof of the un-defeatable purpose and power of God
4) The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of prophecy in the Old Testament.
5) That no man could ever fulfil the law completely and therefore any thinking man was always conscious of failure, inadequacy and inevitable guilt.
St. Paul tells the Jews that the coming of Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of their history.
He goes on to outlines the national history of the Jews to show them that it is fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
And that history is no purposeless process but does have a purpose.
Some people at the time of Paul believed that history went in cycles, and that at the end of every cycle the world was destroyed in a vast destructive disturbance, after which a new cycle starts.
History to them simply kept on repeating itself.
While others believed that history is a record of the sins, the mistakes and the follies of men.
But the Christian view of history is characteristically optimistic.
Also that history does not stand still but is always going somewhere and according to God’s purpose.
St Paul states the fact that people did not recognize God’s fulfilment, when God came in to this world in the person of Jesus Christ.
A person, by taking their own way and not Gods way and refusing Gods help, can in the end afflict themselves with a blindness; a blindness to Jesus Christ and God which they are unable to see.
Misuse of freewill which God gives us, ends not in liberty as people might hope, but in total ruin.
It was the blindness of men two thousand years ago that rejected and crucified Jesus Christ, but God could not be defeated and was not defeated.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the proof of the un-defeatable purpose and power of God, as only God could have over come death.
There is a story about a small child on a stormy night when a gale was blowing very hard, said to his father, “God must have lost grip of His winds to-night.”
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the proof that God never loses grip and that in the end, His purpose and His will, will reign supreme.
St Paul goes on to use a purely Jewish argument in his sermon.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy and promises which had been made in the past.
Which had obviously not been fulfilled up to the time of Jesus Christ, but which are now fulfilled in Jesus Christ according to the prophecies which are written in the Old Testament.
History in the Old Testament or now is neither circular nor aimless it is a forward-looking process it looks to that which for the purpose of God must come.
The coming and the message of Jesus Christ is good news to those who had lived their lives according to the Law.
No person could ever fulfil the law completely and therefore any thinking person was always conscious of failure, inadequacy and inevitable guilt.
But in Jesus Christ and in His life and death, men find that liberating and that forgiving power which sets them free from the condemnation which should have been theirs, and which therefore restores real friendship and fellowship between God and man.
But that which is meant for good news and which was designed as good news is in fact bad news to some people.
It simply makes worse the condemnation of those who in their blindness have seen it and who have neglected it and disobeyed its summons to belief in and acceptance of Jesus Christ.
There is an excuse for the person who has never heard of Jesus Christ, but there is no excuse for the person who has heard and seen the splendour of God through Jesus Christ, and who has rejected it.
That great gift of the love of God, which we can see and do receive from Jesus Christ, and we can see this great love all through history as we can still see it today.
While I was living with some monks last month one of them preached a sermon on history and Jesus Christ, I will leave you with the theme of that sermon and the last words of it, History is Mystery and Mystery is History.
History is the Mystery of Jesus Christ; Mystery of Jesus Christ is History.