Commentary on Acts 2:14,22-33; 1 Peter 1:17-21

We continue reading from the Acts of the Apostles, and through Pentecost, all weekday and Sunday First Readings will be from Acts.

Today’s reading follows immediately on the account of the Pentecost experience. The result of that experience is Peter, now filled with the Spirit and as leader of the new community, begins proclaiming the message about Jesus Christ as Saviour to the people gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Pentecost.

It is the first of six such kerygmas (from the Greek kerux, meaning a ‘herald’) or proclamations in Acts about Jesus as Risen Lord and Messiah-King. Five of them are attributed to Peter and the final one to Paul (to the Jews at Antioch in Pisidia, Acts 13:16-41). Peter’s address follows a pattern that became common in the early Church:

1. an explanation of what was happening;
2. the proclamation of the death, resurrection and glorification of Jesus the Christ;
3. an exhortation to repentance, a change of life and baptism.

Peter stood before the crowd, flanked by the Eleven (including Matthias, newly chosen to replace Judas as a witness who had been with Jesus “during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us”). Peter spoke, then, not just in his own name, but in the name of the whole apostolic ‘college’. Right from the beginning, his special position in the group is recognised.

And he has ‘good news’ (i.e. gospel, Old English god-spell; Greek, euanggelion) to communicate to them. His words reflect the content of the earliest apostolic preaching. First, he gives witness of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and his being raised to glory.

Second, there are some general details of Christ’s ministry and how it was proclaimed in advance by John the Baptist, inaugurated by teaching and miracles, completed by appearances of the Risen Christ and the giving of the Spirit to his followers.

And third, the story of Jesus is put in the wider context of the Old Testament prophecies, while at the same time looking forward to a Messianic age. Everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, is called to a radical change of life in order to be ready for the Christ’s glorious return (believed then to be in the near future).

Peter, then, reminds them that Jesus had appeared among the people—as many of his hearers were well aware—and performed signs and wonders as the credentials of his real identity. But in the inscrutable plan of God, he was “handed over” (again we have that term which goes like a refrain through the New Testament).

Sad to say, those who handed Jesus over were from among his own people, perhaps including some of those listening to Peter, and they had even delivered him into the hands of the Romans (“those outside the law”) for crucifixion. There must surely have been some uneasy feelings among the crowd when he said that.

But Jesus was liberated from the pain of death, as death had no power over him. Peter sees in words spoken by King David their fulfilment in Jesus, his descendant. He then paraphrases the words spoken of David in Psalm 16:10):

He was not abandoned to Hades [the place of the dead],
nor did his flesh experience corruption.

He sees these words as applying more appropriately to Jesus because David died, was buried and the place of his tomb was known to his hearers. But Jesus did not experience the corruption of death. Instead:

This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.

Today’s Second Reading acknowledges that by his death and resurrection, Jesus died that we might be saved. Peter says:

You know that you were ransomed from the futile conduct inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish.

We, too, are called to be witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection and his living presence among us by the way we live both individually and as a community.