The Cursed Tree - Reflections on Acts 5:27-32, Easter 2, Year C
by John C. Holbert on Monday, March 17, 2025
As is always the case with the collectors of the lectionary, after Easter, the first reading is invariably from the Acts of the Apostles. This makes sense, of course, since Easter marks the beginning of the rise of the Christian community, and no other New Testament writing offers a better narrative of that rise than Luke’s second volume. Filled with imaginative and powerful tales of the earliest movements of the new Christian communities and their important leaders—Peter, James, and Paul most prominently—the book of Acts offers to us a rich series of semi-historical accounts of the fast-growing communities of Christians. The resurrection of Jesus inaugurated the Christian church, which now includes some 2.2 billion worldwide members.
And among those early tales we find the initial trials of the first Christian missionaries by the Jews of the time, who had to reckon with these early “Christians,” that is, those who claimed that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth was not only the long-expected Messiah of Judaism but also represented a fulfillment of Judaism’s Torah. Many Jews, not surprisingly, found these claims absurd, if not anathema to their long-held beliefs and practices. Acts 5 presents one of those confrontations between the new Christians and Jews who were far from convinced by what the Christians were saying in public. Acts 5 presents the second trial of Peter, as leader of the apostles, for refusing to “stop teaching in this name,” that is the name of Jesus (Acts 5:28).
The chief priest of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish legal tribunal, has charged Peter and his band to stop their preaching, and when we remember more exactly of what that preaching consists, we ought not be surprised by their anger. Here is what they say exactly according to Luke’s account. “Look! You have filled Jerusalem with your teaching. And you are fixed on bringing down on us this man’s blood” (Acts 5:28). Here we find an echo of one of the New Testament’s most odious phrases, Matt.27:25, where Pilate hands Jesus over to the Jewish crowds, after declaring himself “innocent of this man’s blood,” and hears them say “His blood be on us and on our children,” a sentence that has served for centuries as the touchstone for Jewish hatred of Jesus, and has led to the deaths of countless Jews who were then called “Christ killers.” More directly, the comment about blood is reminiscent of Luke’s earlier statement by Jesus, when confronting some Jews of his own time: “this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah” (Luke 11:50-51). Now there is an astonishing statement indeed—Jews are responsible for ALL blood spilled since the time of Abel’s murder by Cain. The Sanhedrin accuses Peter of the same charge, namely bringing down on their heads the blood of Jesus.
Of course, Peter’s preaching has invariably included this very claim from his long sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2), right up to his sermons that have led him to be tried by the Sanhedrin. Peter’s reply to the charge concerning blood is direct: “It is necessary to obey God rather than humans” (Acts 5:29), a sentence that has fueled much of the Christian missionary enterprise down the ages. And Peter goes on to make his continual and clear assertion concerning Jewish culpability in the horrendous death of Jesus. “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you killed by hanging him on the tree” (Acts 5:30). The Greek here for “killed” is quite distinctive, being a much more severe form of “lay hands on,” and is found only here and in Acts 26:21, where Paul tells King Agrippa that he, too, was seized by the Jews in the temple who tried to kill him, using the same verb. Peter then adds the famous phrase “by hanging him on a tree.” The word translated “tree” may also mean “wood” and can refer to the “clubs” used by those who arrested Jesus in Luke 22:52 or also of the “stocks” into which Paul was placed in Acts 16:24.
But its more important use is as a reference to the cross (Acts 10:39; 13:29; Gal 3:13, among others). Most especially its usage derives from the curse passage in Deut. 21:23 where it says, “cursed be everyone who hangs upon a tree,” found in a set of miscellaneous commands, urging any who hangs someone on a tree for punishment must take the punished one down on the same day, “because anyone who hangs on a tree is under God’s curse” (the Hebrew text reads). Peter, as he always does, accuses the Jews of hanging Jesus on the tree of the cross.
Yet, Peter adds to his dangerous accusation of the Jews that “God has exalted him (Jesus) to God’s right hand as leader and savior to give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel” (Acts 5:31). The irony is that the Jews’ murder of Jesus has led directly to God’s offer to the Jews, through the death of Jesus, of the forgiveness of their sins. And there is the profound Christian paradox: Jesus’s death at the hands of the Jews has instituted the forgiveness of their sins by God along with the sins of the entire world. This atonement theory of the death of Jesus has led to no end of difficult and contentious argument over the many centuries since it was first suggested. But that is a discussion for another day.
I have more than once in my commentaries on the Acts of the Apostles pointed to the undeniable fact that the sermons of Peter, as given to us by the gospel writer Luke, are laced with profound and furious anti-Judaism, an anti-Judaism that we moderns must both recognize and resist. Jesus’ death came primarily at the hands of the Roman authorities, and though certain Jewish religious authorities played their role, not all Jews should in any way be blamed. We 21st-century preachers must make that plain, lest we add to the anti-Semitic horrors that continue to plague our Christian church and our world today.