You try to do something nice for a guy, try to proclaim the gospel and pronounce healing and forgiveness over him and what do they do?  They bring you to court.  Being only weeks removed from the death of their beloved Jesus, the experience must have been somewhat overwhelming for Peter and John.  After all, this was the very place where the rulers, elders, and chief priests brought Jesus when he stood trial.  In fact, some of the very same people who tried Jesus then were now presiding over their examination.  They must have wondered if their fate would be the same for them as it was for Christ.

The court had only one question for Peter and John, and it was a fully loaded one.  “By what power or by what name did you do this?”  The proceeding didn’t begin with a debate on whether or not the healing was legitimate.  The healing didn’t matter, though the officials didn’t really care to specifically acknowledge it either.  The fact that a man born lame was now walking about of his own accord didn’t faze or move them at all.  What the court really wanted to know was in connection with what or whom were Peter and John able to do such a thing?

Now, different religious parties made up the court of 70 or so men known as the Sanhedrin.  Some in the court were a class of people known as the Sadducees.  They were the ones who instigated the arrest of Peter and John and it was most likely their party who filled most of the Sanhedrin court room in which Peter and John now stood.

The Sadducees were religious in their following of the Law of Moses, but mostly because they believed that material wealth and power came from close adherence to the Law.  Theirs was the prosperity gospel of the day.  If you do this, then you will receive this.

However, while most Jews believed that at the end of time there would be a resurrection of the dead, the Sadducees didn’t.  For them there was no afterlife.  There was just this life and your success in this life was determined solely by your works according to the Law.

Of course, the court knew Peter and John.  They were specifically arrested and brought before them because they were teaching the people and proclaiming that Jesus was raised from the dead; proclaiming that this man whom this court demanded to be crucified, whose body mysteriously and infuriatingly disappeared three days later, was indeed raised from the dead by God!  They knew these men.  They were a threat to the Sadduceean way of life.

Their way of life may seem ridiculous and perhaps foreign to us, but the idea of our own personal prosperity being connected to God’s favor as a result of our works is not as farfetched as it may seem.  Of course, if one follows that logic through, one must say that any disaster that befalls us must be because of a lack of good works or because of a particular offense against God.

I met an older gentleman who once told me that his son tragically died because he was too prideful of his son.  He believed that God took his son from him in order to put his pride in its rightful place.  Living as though our works alone determined God’s attitude toward us for good or for bad is a fearful way to live, yet we are all helplessly drawn to that kind of thought.  The Old Adam within us will always look inward to what we have done and in the end all we can do is hold our works up as a measure to determine what God’s judgment upon us will be.

When the disciples respond to the Sanhedrin court, Peter uses some subtly nuanced words that get a bit lost in our English translation.  But they strike right at the Old Adams standing in judgment over the disciples.

“If we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ.”

When Peter says that the man had been healed, he uses a word that implies more than that.  The word is often used in Acts to refer to salvation in the spiritual sense.  This man has been more than healed.  He has been saved.  Peter goes on to say that this man stands before the court in good health.  The word he uses for that implies “wholeness.”  His physical healing is part of that, but not all of it.

All of it is because of the resurrected Jesus.  “You want to know by what name we did this deed?  You want to know by what power this man stands before you?  By the power and name of Jesus Christ, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.  This man was saved and made whole and stands as a witness to the living power of the living Jesus Christ.”

Peter went on to tell them, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”  Outside of Christ, one cannot find salvation.  There is no other power, no other name through which one can find salvation.  Salvation only comes through Christ.

The Old Adam in all of us who seeks to please and hold back the wrath of God through his own machinations was exposed by Peter’s words.  The work of those who condemned Jesus to death in order to preserve their way of life – a work that our own sinful nature gives us a share in – had been undone by that very death when God raised Jesus from the dead. Our distorted pursuit of power over our own salvation – one that could only lead to fear and anxiety – was suddenly and wonderfully outmatched by the Son of God we saw executed, whom God saw resurrected.

In the healing of the lame beggar the power of the resurrected Christ was given witness.  In Holy Baptism and in Holy Communion, that same power is testified to and in you.  In water, Word, Body and Blood, Christ draws us into his death and resurrection and offer us forgiveness and life.  The Old Adam is put to death and a new creation is brought to life in us through the New Adam, Jesus Christ.

Christ does this for you because you were unable to do it of your own accord.  Salvation only comes through Christ.  Salvation is found nowhere else and in no one else and that includes you and your own works and plans.

In his death and resurrection Christ says to us, “There is life and salvation only in my name and I give life and salvation to you freely and fully.  In my name, in my cross, in my resurrection, I make you whole.  I have saved you from yourself and from your sins.  There is no other way.  I free you therefore to live in the life I have given you and to be witnesses of salvation given in my name.”  Amen.

Waiting around in the upper room must have been awful for the disciples.  But what do you do after the man you’ve followed and dedicated your life to for the last three years is brutally killed.  After the first few hours, reflecting on the whole event must have been agonizing.  As the reality of Jesus’ death overwhelmed them – despair, hopelessness and fear became overwhelming.  Those who were once caught up in the movement of Jesus, the whispered “Messiah,” now found themselves in hiding, licking their wounds of defeat.

For about three years the disciples followed Jesus.  Some of them left their jobs which was easier for some than others.  A few of them left their parents behind.  And all because this man said to them, “Follow me.”  They invested everything they had – reputation, hope, comfort and time – in Jesus.  And with every miracle, every healing, every demon cast out, every sermon, every confrontation with the Pharisees  and every mercy shown to the lowest of the low pulled them deeper and deeper into the mystique of this man they called the Messiah.

And that title is what they put their hope in, that Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed one of God chosen to bring everlasting glory back to Israel in a very real and political sense.  Of course this meant that the common belief was that the Messiah would live and reign forever over the reestablished kingdom of Israel.  Evil and corruption would cease.  The Lord’s favor would be proclaimed.  It was said that the Messiah couldn’t and wouldn’t die, but would live forever.  All their hopes for a better life and a better nation were attached to this one man.  It all hinged on Jesus.

But Jesus died.  And after he died the disciples were suddenly left leaderless and alone.  They were left wondering, “What now?  Where do we go from here?” What do you do when every facet of your existence was devoted to following a man who is now dead?  Not only dead, but crushed; executed by those very people whom the Messiah was to overthrow and reform.  One might expect there to have been a sense of embarrassment and shame amongst the disciples for having invested so much into a failed cause.

So what should the disciples have done after Jesus was crucified?  After having seen the things they saw – where could they go from there?  In terms of grabbing on to something of worth and value, how could they possibly do better or find better than Jesus?  How does one go back to life as it was, how does one return to the status quo after all hope has been deflated?

In 1804 Meriwether Lewis with his partner, William Clark, traveled through the unexplored wilderness of America.  They began in St. Louis, Missouri and trekked through the virgin wilds of the Great Plains and unexploited countryside of what is now Montana crossing the Rocky Mountains before making it to the northern Pacific coast… and then they made the journey back!  The whole trip covered 8,000 miles and took two years.

To think of spending two years away from civilization is almost impossible for us nowadays.  Some scholars believe that Lewis was so struck by the beauty and wonder of the untamed wilderness and the immense trials of the journey that he could not adjust to living in civilized life again.  It was so much so, that Lewis committed suicide only a few years after the great expedition.  He simply could not return to the status quo and no longer understood the world around him.

While the disciples followed Jesus, they believed themselves to be on a journey to a new future, a new golden age.  But when Jesus was crucified, the journey came to an abrupt halt.  It was as though the disciples essentially had gone nowhere.  The world around them was the same as it always had been.  People were still oppressed, corrupt and lost.  Evil still reigned and sin, humanity’s ancient and incurable disease continued to hold the world captive.

But then, the unexpected happened.  Jesus appeared before them.  And still being distraught over the death of Jesus, they subconsciously tried to keep Jesus framed within the status quo by believing him to be merely a ghost.  The possibility of Jesus being raised from the dead, in the flesh didn’t enter into the equation.  After all, according to the status quo, the dead stay dead.

But the good news for you, me and the disciples is that the status is no longer quo.  In what we can imagine to be somewhat of a humorous scene, Jesus asks the disciples why they are so frightened and why they continue to doubt that it is truly he who stands before them.  “Look at my hands and feet,” he exclaimed.  “Touch me and see!  Ghosts don’t have skin and bones like I do.”  The disciples’ disbelief originally born out of fear now began to turn to a disbelief born out of joy.  What they were seeing wasn’t possible, but they liked it.

But Christ did make it possible and in an effort to drive the point home that he was physically standing there before him, he sat down and ate some fish – obviously.  In my Monty Pythonesque mind I imagine this playing out as an awkward scene where Jesus is sitting at the table hungrily eating the fish, though he is purposely taking his time in order to savor the dumbfounded look on his gawking disciples.

But when Jesus was finished, he told them what it was all about.  “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you — that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”  The phrase, “must be fulfilled,” sounds insignificant, but it picks up on an important theme that runs throughout Luke.

When the women went to the tomb to see Jesus, the angels reminded them of something Christ had said earlier, “that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”  Earlier, at the Last Supper Jesus told his disciples “that this Scripture from Isaiah – ‘he was numbered with the transgressors’ – must be fulfilled in me.” This theme of necessity and divine plan goes on and on and each time it emphasizes that it was necessary, it was ordained that Christ must suffer and die and be raised from the dead.  But the disciples never got it until now when, as verse 45 tells us, Christ “opened their minds to understand the scriptures.”

All this time the disciples, even though they were following Jesus, were hoping in and trying to grab onto in the wrong thing.  We all do this, all the time.  We look at the world around us, we look at the sin that pervades our entire being and try to do something or grasp onto something or someone hoping to make a change and get out of the mire of this world and life of sin.

But the only way out, the only way to gain freedom is for Christ to grab us and reveal himself to us. It wasn’t until Jesus revealed himself to the disciples and opened up their minds that they finally got it and understood what it was all about.  Only then did they comprehend the necessity of Christ’s death and bodily resurrection as the only cure for the disease of our depravity.

Jesus spelled it out for them.  “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations.”

No amount of striving or work we do would ever be able to free us from our captivity to sin, let alone the world’s captivity.  Rather it is through Christ’s suffering, through his death, and through his resurrection; it is through the absolutely necessary work Christ was called to do that we are set free.  The new reality established by Christ’s resurrection, the new status quo, is the only hope for an utterly fallen and depraved world.

Christ proclaimed the forgiveness of sins to his disciples in his name and we are given the same forgiveness.  This morning Christ says you, “I love you and I did this for you.  I came for the singular purpose of suffering and dying for you so that you may have forgiveness of sins and live.  It was necessary and it was worth it.  In my resurrection I claim victory over death for you.  There are no ‘ifs’, there are no ‘buts’, there is only me given for you.  I claim you and I make known myself to you so that you may have life.”