Peter proclaimed: “Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
He wasn’t pulling any punches! When he gets his act together he clearly comes out fighting. His is not the “softly, softly” approach to winning friends and influencing people.
We reflected last week on how Peter and the disciples had changed. But what does this week’s episode tell us about the audience he was speaking to (Acts 2:14a, 36-41)? One might expect a lot of pushback, but it appears that there was a willingness to take Peter’s message to heart. And not just for a few, but for many – 3000 is a lot of people to convince in one day. So did those people recognize they had made a bad choice in calling for Jesus to be crucified, did they realize they had been swept up in the emotion of the moment (as they had been on Psalm Sunday), were they ashamed they had let themselves be manipulated by the Pharisees (those thieves and robbers that Jesus warns about)?
Maybe all of the above.
But what about us? How is this relevant to us? We’ve made our choice, we’re already following after Jesus.
Yes, but maybe it’s not that simple. We still make bad choices, get swept along by our emotions, allow ourselves to be manipulated. We’re not immune to these challenges and we have to guard against them constantly. Jesus’ “figure of speech” (as John describes it) of the shepherd and the gateway was directed at the Pharisees, those who would not accept that Jesus was “Lord and Christ” (John 10:1-10).
In this case the sheep are depicted as passive followers, but there are plenty of occasions when Jesus also speaks sharply to the “sheep”. We (those sheep) can find ourselves following the thieves and robbers, being complicit in their actions. We need to be sure we are asking for forgiveness where necessary, accepting that abundance of life that Jesus brings, and ensuring it is shared with others.