In the joyful confidence of the Easter message of the vindication of the crucified Jesus, let’s face up to some real difficulties today. Namely this, if you would want to cause offense in today’s world, just recite out loud and assert in public the conclusion of Peter’s sermon this morning, And there is salvation in no one else [than Jesus Christ of Nazareth], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
To be sure, Easter people are not ashamed of the gospel. How could we be? But everything here depends it being the gospel’s offense and on our getting that offense right, not giving offense with an arrogant claim to our religious or cultural superiority. To the contrary, in a social environment where so much is propaganda being spun from every angle, we know that Christ died for all because God wants all to be saved. We want rightly to avoid the hateful appearance of damning to hell sheep not of our fold. We are constrained by a conscientious Christian reservation, concerned that brashly quoting this easily misunderstood word of Peter could be just one more exercise in self-serving propaganda alongside all the others out there. Is our proclamation of the gospel in fact just propaganda? Is evangelism proselytism? I don’t think so and neither should you. But let’s see why. By facing the difficulty, we have occasion to dig deeper for a better understanding of Peter’s claim for no other name and a wiser approach to proclaiming the Easter victory of the Lord Jesus also in today’s world. Our lessons today help us do that.
Some years back the late theologian George Lindbeck proposed a thought experiment. He asked about the ethical conditions in which a claim like Peter’s about no other name could be true or for that matter false, or rather falsified. His point was that the Easter proclamation is not simply an intellectual proposition but also a performance, that is to say an ethical act. For it was God’s ethical act to hand his righteous Son over into the hands of sinners to bear away their sin and the sin of all the world, in this way to find the path forward from the divine judgment of love on lovelessness to the mercy of love for all us unloving ones. This is the divine proclamation of the gospel, both God’s assertion of salvation in Jesus and God’s performance of surpassing love. Just so, we too may speak the Easter word of God. But we can also falsify it. To illustrate this important point about falsifying, Lindbeck asked about a medieval crusader lopping off the head of an infidel with his sword and crying out, “Jesus is Lord!” The question he asked is whether this statement true under those ethical conditions. Or do those conditions of aggression in fanatical religious warfare betray the content of the statement, Jesus is Lord, and thus make it practically false? Because Jesus is emphatically not that kind of Lord?
Lindbeck’s parable parallels the teaching from the First Letter of John which we have heard today: By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. Our joyful Easter faith, so our Gospel lesson today tells, is in the good shepherd [who] lays down his life for the sheep; it is faith in the self-sacrificing, not self-serving love of Jesus that is operative in our corresponding performances of love, taking form in our little echoes of the good Shepherd’s great love in caring for the needy. The proclamation of the saving love of Jesus and the performance of it are a package deal: This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another. One betrays the faith, falsifies faith, even when -- no, especially when-- a statement like there is no other name under heaven, is deployed insensitively, let alone purposely to express one’s own religious superiority, to disrespect or denigrate others as inferiors, let alone to incite hatred instead of love. Rather, we, believers in the divine love named by the name of Jesus are to hate our own lovelessness just as we love all neighbors, even our enemies.
Does this love for others extend to those outside the community of Christian faith? Because it is Jesus, friend of sinners, healer of all in need of a physician, champion of any who are poor in power, Jesus who in final solidarity bore the sin of our entire world on the cross to bear it away to be left behind, buried forever in his tomb, this Jesus, unlike all the rest of us in his self-donating love for lesser and unworthy beings, because it is Jesus who is acclaimed Lord we can truthfully say that there is no other name under heaven given by which we must be saved, where the little pronoun, “we,” includes all and excludes no one from the scope of his saving love.
In this light, let’s take a second look at Peter’s sermon this morning. Peter it is on trial for naming the name of Jesus when he told a crippled beggar that he had neither silver nor gold to give him, but what he did have he would freely share. So, he declared, “In the name of Jesus Christ, stand up and walk!” And the man did. For this naming the name, Jesus, and doing a corresponding act of salvation in its power, Peter is now on trial. Peter is on trial for performing ethically a powerful act of mercy and what is especially disruptive, for giving healing freely as pure gift. These are practices which threaten the lucrative religion business of the temple moneychangers. You see, the Temple establishment in Jerusalem was in theological and political cahoots with the Roman occupiers. They were not interested in something as fantastic in their eyes as “salvation.” Unlike many other Jews of the time, the Sadducees controlling the Temple had no use for the idea of the resurrection and did not look kindly on the little resurrection in their midst in Peter’s healing of a cripple. For them, the only realistic future lay in the physical perpetuation of the temple. If cripples and other broken lives could eke out a meager living by begging in its precincts that was all realistically that could be hoped for. Salvation just was not on the agenda. Indeed proclaiming and enacting God’s healing in Jesus’s name was perceived as a threat, just as the healer named Jesus actually had been, whom they nailed to the tree.
We have now put our finger on the genuine offense of the gospel of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus. The key insight from a more careful look at our passage today is that not everyone is looking for the salvation of which Peter speaks, not even the crippled man expected it. How many people today do you know who are troubled about, looking for, or concerned with salvation? Not many, I venture, excepting those few poor souls who have been traumatized by ruthless, cruel, fire-and-brimstone propaganda posing as preaching in toxic forms of contemporary Christianity. To be sure, many people are looking for some kind of liberation, or therapy, or even justice but they are not looking for these things from God the creator, so inevitably they fall for propaganda marketing some human project of self-salvation. So here comes the genuine offense of the Peter’s proclamation of no other name: Will you be the sinner for whom Christ died? Will you therefore live your life now banking all on the hope of his resurrection?
When Peter affirms that there is no other name under heaven given by which we must be saved, it is a claim composed of two parts: first, that the name, Jesus, refers to the single shepherd of our human history who laid down his life for the sheep and second, that what he gives us in this way is the salvation of God. These two are proclaimed together by Peter as news, good news, hitherto unheard of news. Unexpected because not everyone is asking for the salvation of God and even fewer are expecting to be given the salvation of God as a gift, let alone a gift performed in a self-sacrificing act of love for those otherwise helpless and unworthy. We understand well what we are saying if we repeat Peter’s claim when, and only when, we know ourselves as those helpless and unworthy who have no claim in ourselves to be better than any others but are ourselves the spiritually crippled, begging for wholeness. Why, if I must be saved by the self-giving love of God in Jesus Christ, who am I to exclude any others?? How, then, can I not like Peter freely share what I have received, the saving love of Jesus?
How then are we today to proclaim this very message of Peter’s, particularly after some rather notorious failures of Christianity in our history to live the love which the faith of Christ names? Lindbeck quite intentionally used the historical example of the Crusades in his little parable; as well he could have mentioned colonial depredations of indigenous populations by later day European Protestants and Catholics alike, and many other failures. The great disasters of the 20th century, Hitler, Hiroshima and Stalin, were all perpetuated from the soil of allegedly Christian civilizations. Christians today bear the heavy burden of these historical failures. To be sure, real enemies of Christianity deploy this shameful history in their own propaganda to discredit Christianity. But we dare not respond in kind, perpetuating arrogance with more lies and half-truths. Rather we are to courageously discern through the fog of anti-Christian propaganda the accusation of God against our own failures to believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another. In just this careful discernment we come to our present challenge. How do we publicly proclaim the gospel of the blessed and inclusive finality of Jesus Christ when it can easily sound like more of the same old Christian triumphalism, i.e. as if the Easter victory of Jesus was our victory, the demonstration of the superiority of our civilization or our religion over competitors, rather than God’s astounding victory for all of us ungodly?
By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Guilt can be paralyzing and troubled consciences don’t have any idea what to do that does not make matters worse. If that guilt blocks arrogant triumphalism, it is the strange fruit but certain work of God. Yet God is greater than his own sharp critique of his own people. Indeed, it is as Christians that we ever need a Savior and receive the salvation of God who is faithful to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness, if only we confess them. We are given a fresh start every time we pass through the death of divine critique to the newness of life of faith operative in love. Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. All who keep his commandments abide in him, and he in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us.
Evangelism? Proclamation of the victory of God in Christ for us all? Here is the key. It is the Good Shepherd who has laid down his life for the sheep who speaks his own good news. It is risen! He who is risen speaks in and through our chastened and humble works of faith active in love, bearing witness to him in word and deed. The mission is his, this charge I have received from my Father, he says. He protects the flock, by saving even from their own sins, even betrayals of his name. And it is he who says I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd. That is the mission of an evangelism that proclaims the victory of God for all in word and deed. So we do not proselytize but leave it to the Holy Spirit to call, gather, unite and enlighten the people of God on earth, harbinger of salvation. Critically clarified, that is sense of the claim that there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.
As we sing, “Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till all the world adore his sacred name.”