Pondering the Word

Continuing the story – Easter to Pentecost

by Phil Waite

The background on my computer screen is a picture of Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. I took this picture just before a game early in the season, as the Cubs were finishing their warm-ups. The scene unfolds from the upper deck behind home plate down the two foul lines to the bleachers, to and through the urban neighborhood beyond, and finally to Lake Michigan in the far distance. What is beyond Lake Michigan cannot be seen in the picture, but it can be imagined. For a baseball fan, the moment is ripe with wonder, question, possibility, and hope.

The dramatic geometry of a baseball field in spring reminds me of the Easter season and the book of Acts. We are tempted to understand Easter as a conclusion, as the end of a story, the Jesus story in particular. Reading Acts at Easter reminds us that Easter is not the end, but a new chapter in a continuing story. Indeed, Luke wrote Acts as the second part of the story he tells.

With Peter’s accusation comes not judgment, but forgiveness.

The power of the book of Acts, for me, lies in its openness. We look at Easter through the prism of two thousand years of theology and interpretation. Luke and the early disciples are struggling to make sense of the resurrection, wrestling with its implications for their lives. We see people without a plan, without an agenda, making no effort to package and market their story, all that they have seen and heard. The plot is driven not by apostolic volition, but by the joyful impulse of the resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit. It is decidedly open-ended.

At the core of the joyful impulse of the resurrection, and flowing out of the power of the Holy Spirit, is forgiveness. Peter sets the tone in his Pentecost sermon, when he accuses his audience of crucifying God’s anointed. The accusation is made repeatedly in chapters 2–4, and is paired with the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. You killed him, God raised him: this is the core message coming from the primitive church in the book of Acts. It is as sobering an accusation as could be made, that they had committed a heinous crime beyond all heinous crimes—the murder of the most innocent man ever to walk the earth. And God raised him from the dead.

Easter is not the end, but a new chapter in a continuing story.

In most stories we encounter, this is where payback comes. But not in this story! The word that accompanies Peter’s accusation is not one of judgment, but of forgiveness. The resurrection itself is an act of forgiveness, God’s good overcoming the human capacity for evil. Even the brutal martyrdom of Stephen contains this message of forgiveness.

This is our story. This is our message. These texts from Acts call us back to the fertile soil of the resurrection. They cut through two thousand years of efforts to tame and sanitize the gospel. And they “cut to the heart,” as Luke puts it (2:37). They open for us anew a world of wonder, question, possibility, and hope. What might our merciful God do in our own lives, in our own churches, in our own times through the forgiveness that is the core of the resurrection and flows from the power of the Holy Spirit?

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Phil Waite is pastor of First Mennonite Church of Christian in Moundridge, Kansas.