Saint Luke tells us in chapter five of the Acts of the Apostles that the preaching of the Apostles in the first weeks after Pentecost was convincing great numbers of people that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, and the growing Church aroused the concern and contempt of the Sanhedrin, the supreme council and court of Israel. So the Sanhedrin had the Apostles arrested and imprisoned, but that night an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and led them out with instructions to return to the Temple to continue preaching the Gospel.
So the next morning the Apostles were back teaching at Solomon’s Portico in the Temple’s Outer Court. When the Sanhedrin learned that the Apostles had somehow escaped from prison and were still teaching that Jesus Christ is Lord, they sent the Temple guard to bring Peter and the others to stand trial again. And that is where our first lesson begins today.
“When the captain and the court officers had brought the apostles in and made them stand before the Sanhedrin, the high priest questioned them ‘We gave you strict orders, did we not, to stop teaching in that name? Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and want to bring this man’s blood upon us.’
But Peter and the Apostles said in reply, ‘We must obey God rather than men. The God of our ancestors raised Jesus, though you had him killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as leader and savior to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins. We are witnesses of these things, as is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.’”
Friends, here is the heart of the Gospel: Jesus of Nazareth was killed by crucifixion and then raised to eternal glory by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to grant repentance and forgiveness of sins to the whole human race, beginning with Israel. Peter added that he and the other Apostles were martyrs or witnesses to this saving truth, and then Peter proclaimed to the Sanhedrin that the Risen Christ is both leader and savior, two words with long histories and rich meanings.
The Greek word archegos, translated here as leader, can also mean founder, author, and ruler. This word was used to describe the founder of a city who gave his name to the place, like Philippi named for Philip of Macedon or Alexandria named for Philip’s son, Alexander the Great.
Archegos could also mean a military commander or hero who inspired others to fight and win a victory. And archegos was used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to describe Adam, Noah, and Abraham, the founders of the human race and of God’s chosen People.
In teaching that Jesus is the archegos of Christians, Peter is saying that we bear his name because he is the leader of God’s people and the founder of the New Israel, the Church. Jesus is the victorious hero who conquered sin and death, and he is the author of our faith who literally inspires or breathes life into us by giving us the Holy Spirit who bears witness to the fact of Christ’s Resurrection and the truth of his Gospel.
The second Greek word used by Peter to describe Jesus is soter, translated for us as savior. This word was used as a title in mythology for Greek gods like Zeus and Apollo who protected their devotees from danger. Soter was also a title of the Roman Emperor because he was acclaimed as the deliverer of the people he ruled, and soter could also mean a physician who brought healing to the sick.
In teaching that Jesus is soter or savior, Peter is saying that Christ is the true God, the authentic ruler of Israel and of all creation, the one who delivers us from sin, saves us from the grave, and restores the health of our hearts, minds, and souls unto everlasting life.
Peter used these two words of ancient pedigree and many meanings to describe Christ the Lord to the Sanhedrin, and in so doing Peter relied on what Catholic tradition calls seeds of the Word, meaning glimpses of divine truth planted by the true God in every language and culture to prepare the human race to understand and accept the Good News of salvation in Christ when the Gospel is at last proclaimed.
Jesus of Nazareth is a man like us in all things but sin, but he is also God the Son, the eternal Word by whom all things were made. And in calling Jesus both leader and savior, Peter not only placed Jesus within the human story but he also raised him up as King of kings and Lord of lords, which is precisely what we find in the second lesson today.
“I, John, looked and heard the voices of many angels who surrounded the throne and the living creatures and the elders. They were countless in number, and they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength, honor and glory and blessing.’
“Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, everything in the universe, cry out: ‘To the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor, glory and might, for ever and ever.’ The four living creatures answered ‘Amen,’ and the elders fell down and worshiped.”
This is John’s mystic vision of the cosmic Christ, the Pantocrator, the creator and ruler of the universe, who is worshiped world without end by all creation. And that same worship begins here and now in the Church, where we serve the Lord Jesus, our leader and savior, with our words and with our lives. That is why to be a Christian, to bear Christ’s name, requires that we must seek to know and live the whole counsel of God by surrendering everything we are and everything we have to his everlasting dominion.
We must understand and interpret everything we think and feel, everything we say and do, according to the truth of Jesus Christ and his holy Gospel. This includes our most intimate, hidden, and personal thoughts, desires, and choices. It includes all personal, familial, and professional obligations; all financial decisions and political allegiances. It includes everything we have been, now are, and ever will be.
For Jesus Christ to be our leader and savior, nothing in our lives can be withheld or hidden from him, as though such a thing were possible. If we surrender everything to Christ, then we find our true freedom and personal dignity. If, on the other hand, we fail to surrender everything to Christ, then we find alienation and slavery to sin. But even in such rebellion we also find to our continual wonderment that we still receive mercy, the forgiveness of our sins, and an invitation to ever deeper conversion.
This was the very lesson learned by none other than Peter himself through anguish, grief, shame, and tears. “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” Jesus asked Peter this question on a beach at the Sea of Galilee, quite possibly on the very spot where three years before Simon feel to his knees before Jesus and begged to be released from his vocation as a fisher of men, saying “Leave me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
Peter demonstrated his sinfulness many times over, not least in his threefold denial of Christ in the wee hours of Good Friday. And days after the Resurrection Jesus called to him three times “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter’s love was real, of course, but his courage was greater now after the Resurrection than in the agony before the crucifixion. And Peter was gradually learning where that love would take him: “You will stretch out your hands … and someone will lead you where you do not want to go.”
Saint John tells us that Jesus spoke these words to signify the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God, a death that would take place three decades later on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, at the Mons Vaticanus, the Vatican Hill.
On that hill still lies Simon’s grave and the great basilica which rises above it, a church made of stone to bear witness that Peter is the rock upon whom Christ built his Church, a spiritual house made of living stones. In choosing Simon for this office, the Lord Jesus was also making Peter and those who succeed him as Bishop of Rome to be the pastor of the universal Church, charged by the Savior with feeding his lambs and tending his sheep until the Last Day.
This Wednesday the College of Cardinals will be locked into the Sistine Chapel with a key, con clave, to elect the 266th successor of Saint Peter, and once he is chosen, that new Bishop of Rome will continue the petrine ministry of strengthening Christ’s disciples that we may live in fidelity to the faith delivered once for all to the saints.
Friends, throughout the thirty years of toil between Christ’s Resurrection and Peter’s death in Rome, the Church was strengthened, as she is strengthened today, by the sure knowledge and transcendent joy of what Simon announced to the Sanhedrin that morning in Jerusalem: the Good News that Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord, is the leader and savior of the entire human race in whom alone we have redemption through the forgiveness of our sins. For
Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!
Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!
This is the text of my homily for 4 May 2025, the Third Sunday of Easter.
Fr Jay Scott Newman