Acts 10:34-43

Preaching on Easter Sunday may seem like a homiletical home run just waiting to happen. After all, this is the Sunday of Sundays. It’s the time to tell the greatest and most important story ever. If there was ever an opportunity to share good news, if there was ever a Sunday to tell of the goodness and greatness of God’s work in Jesus, if there ever was a time to proclaim joy and celebration because of the love of God, if there was ever a Sunday to testify to hope and freedom and new life, it is on Easter Sunday. These are the very theological themes by which preachers of the gospel live and move and have our being.

Yet, as we prepare this Sunday, perhaps the great opportunity and the great challenge for those who are preaching is to preach a sermon that is both fitting for Easter Sunday and is tied deeply to the biblical passage. Because the day is ripe with the theological fruit we preachers love to share, we may be inclined to use the biblical text as a mere foil for proclaiming a general resurrection story instead of the one a particular text presents.

In her book A Little Handbook for Preachers: Ten practical ways to a better sermon by Sunday, Mary S. Hulst encourages preachers to approach the biblical text with a posture of humility every time we preach. She invites preachers to come to the text with questions. In a word of caution, that I think is particularly fitting for Easter Sunday, she writes,

Asking questions reminds us that we don’t know everything. Some of us have been reading or teaching Scripture for years, and it can be so tempting to turn back to answers we’ve found before, which can leave us bored with the passage because we do not expect the text to say anything we haven’t heard before.[1]

As we approach the text from Acts 10:34-43, the opportunity for us is to come to the text with fresh eyes and full of questions. As we read and study, we are invited to be as surprised by what God has to say as the first witnesses to the resurrection were surprised to see the stone rolled away.

In Acts 10, Peter is surely surprised by the implications of the resurrection story. Because the church today is primarily composed of those Peter would have called gentiles, perhaps the radical implication of Peter’s “understanding that God shows no partiality” is somewhat lost on us. The significance of the cultural, religious, and familial ramifications of God swinging wide the doors of grace to all people through Jesus cannot be underestimated. Peter wrestling with and finally laying hold of this truth is a resurrection moment for Peter. It’s as if Peter came to the story of Jesus like a good preacher asking questions: Because of the resurrection, how far does this grace go and just how wide is God’s mercy? How new is the world because Jesus is raised from the dead? After his experience with Cornelius, Peter makes a bold claim that because Jesus is Lord of all God does not only claim those to whom God is partial (that is, the people of Israel), but God’s claim goes to every nation and every people. Perhaps the opportunity for preachers on this Easter Sunday is to ask again, how wide are these doors opened by Jesus? Who gets to be part of this story of God who we used to think would be left out? Who is acceptable to God that we have believed to be unacceptable?

It is worth noting here the word “acceptable.” Luke uses the word dektos in two other places in his writing, both in chapter 4 of Luke. The first is Luke 4:19 and the second is v. 24 of the same chapter. In Luke 4:19 in the NRSV, dektos is translated as “favor,” and in v. 24 it is translated at “accepted.” You’ll remember that in chapter 4 Jesus is reading from the scroll from Isaiah about the year of the Lord’s favor, which he then says is fulfilled in the people’s hearing. After saying this, he is questioned by the people who are listening, and Jesus says, “no prophet is accepted in a prophet’s home town.” The people did not accept Jesus. Yet Peter is claiming that God is now accepting all because in Jesus’s death and resurrection the year of the Lord’s favor has come.

The connection between the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:19)—or the Jubilee year (c.f. Leviticus 25:1-4, 8-10)—and God accepting people from every nation (Acts 10:35) is critical here. The release and freedom and sharing and pardon that God commands in creating the year of Jubilee is the very thing that Peter has realized is for him and for all people through Jesus. The wonder and joy and surprise of this kind of welcome is overwhelming and all consuming. With this in mind, Peter retells the story of Jesus, emphasizing over and over God’s activity in Jesus life. God is the primary actor because God is affirming and confirming that through Jesus God is bringing God’s jubilee. Peter says, “God anointed… God was with him… but God raised him… chosen by God as witnesses… he is the one ordained by God…” Because God was at work in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Peter has realized that the new has come, and Jesus is Lord of all.

Perhaps when preaching this text from Acts 10, the opportunity for us is to ask more questions about how deep the implications of God’s work in Jesus really are. Perhaps it is ours to share in a resurrection moment like Peter’s where we realize that God’s arms open wider than we imagined and God’s family includes those we only see as unclean. Perhaps the opportunity is for us to share in some of Peter’s surprise at the abundant welcome, the radical opening, the extravagant forgiveness, the overwhelming freedom God gives to those who we would not expect to be acceptable—that God has given even to us. Because God raised Jesus from the dead, Christ is Lord of all: Jesus is for everyone in every nation with no partiality. This is surprising! This is good news! This is the Easter story!

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[1] Mary S. Hulst, A Little Handbook for Preachers: Ten practical ways to a better sermon by Sunday, (Downers Grove, InterVarsity, 2016), 25.