First Thoughts on Year B First Reading Acts Passages from the Lectionary
Easter 6
William Loader
Easter 6: 5 May Acts 10:44-48
These
few verses play a key role in Luke's depiction of the story of the
early church. It spread beyond just Jews to Gentiles. He describes
their experience as matching what happened with the Jewish hearers on
the Day of Pentecost. Non Jews are depicted as receiving the Spirit in
the same way as Jews. This is their Pentecost. There can be no
discrimination. In Acts 15 he will show that nearly all believers
agreed that gentiles could be welcomed into God's people. In Luke's
account this all happens because of two visions, one which Peter saw
and one which Cornelius a gentile soldier, a Roman centurion, saw.
People who listened to Acts would almost certainly have also listened
to Luke's gospel. There they would have read about a centurion whose
slave Jesus healed but without entering the entering the gentile
centurion's house (7:1-10). That soldier knew that for some more
conservative Jews entering the house of a Gentile was forbidden and
certainly this was so of sitting down and sharing a meal with them. He
tells Jesus directly: "I am not worthy that you come to my house". That
problem did not go away. Paul tells of an incident in Antioch in Syria
when he and Barnabas together with Peter had been in the habit of
sharing meals with Gentile believers. People who came from Jesus'
brother James, who by that time was in charge of the church in
Jerusalem, objected to the practice, so Peter and even Paul's close
companion, Barnabas, withdrew, leaving Paul alone to defend his
position (Gal 2:11-14). Paul insisted that such discriminatory
behaviour had to stop because God loved and welcome non-Jews on the
same basis as Jews.
So, when a few decades later, Luke seeks to give a picture of the early
church, which by his time included many Gentiles, he wove together a
story which at least in part reflected the issues. For in Acts 10 he
shows Peter being shown that just as animals are all God's creatures,
so all people are God's, so he should be making no distinctions. In
Luke's story that prepares him for the approach from Cornelius, who
also had a vision, telling him to make contact with Peter. Contact is
made and Peter is soon speaking to Cornelius and his friends, having
been shown in his vision to abandon his hesitations about entering the
Gentile's home. Following the methods of historians of the time, Luke
then gives us a brief version of what he thought Peter would have said.
It makes it clear from the start that God does not discriminate. He
then has him summarise the message about Jesus in much the same terms
as Luke had used in his story of Jesus in the gospel. Accordingly Jesus
went about doing good and setting people free from the powers that
oppressed them, was killed, but then vindicated by God who raised him
from the dead. Typically for Luke, nothing is said about Jesus dying
for sins. The focus lies elsewhere: on the way of Jesus and on the fact
that he would be the world's judge.
That brings us to our short passage, which describes the response. It
assumes that they believe Peter, but emphasises that now the Spirit
comes also to these non-Jews who are then welcomed into God's people by
baptism. Luke had turned the Day of Pentecost into a symbolic occasion
where the Spirit came like a wind, as it had come like a dove on Jesus
at the beginning. Now the Spirit came on the Gentiles. Behind both
events there is likely to have been some special occasions which Luke
has now made into turning points for his story. Other writers, like the
author of the fourth gospel, speak of the Spirit being breathed on the
discples on the day of resurrection, but placing it at the harvest
festival, the feast Pentecost, was symbolically appropriate, even if 50
days later. The expansion to the Gentiles may also have been more
complax and Peter's role more ambivalent. Paul shows him wavering.
Matthew has Jesus instruct his disciples to go to all nations barely a
few days after his resurrection (28:18-20). Luke himself indicates that
it also happened incidentally when Gentiles who attended synagogues
heard about Jesus from Jewish believers expelled from Jerusalem to
places like Damascus and Antioch.
This all means that we have to be a little hesitant about taking Luke's
"history" at face value. It is so symbolically laden. On the other
hand, the story highlights key issues of abiding significance. If it
was debatable whether Jews should not eat with gentiles, at least on a
regukar basis, it was clear from the beginning that gentiles who joined
God's people should be circumcised, as God made clear to Abraham in
Genesis 17. When most the early church's leaders resolved to drop that
requirement (as they did in Acts 15), one of the first of many
arguments about the Bible erupted. The fundamentalist-oriented
believers insisted on upholding what they saw as God's infallible
command and accused the others of watering down scripture's demands.
They, in turn, argued that the love and compassion shown in Christ
ought to be the measure and whatever did not cohere with it, whether in
scripture or not, should be set aside. Paul battled such Christians all
his life. The New Testament authors reflect a range of approaches, from
the more radical stance of Paul, who declares the Christian no longer
to be under the biblical law, and even more radically, the author
John's gospel, to the more conservative Matthew and Luke, who insists
all biblical laws must be kept with the sole exception of those set
aside by divine intervention, as in the vision he has Peter see.
Compassion had to win. It had always won in Jesus' ministry and in his
disputes about what mattered most in scripture and its laws.
Behind this passage is not only the celebration that gentiles equally
matter to God, but the deeper reality that in the name of this God no
discrimination against other human beings based on race, ethinicity,
gender, sexual orientation, age, or sinfulness has a place. In a
secular world where most nations give at least lip service to human
rights for all, people in the church sometimes lag behind and at worst
perpetuate the very thing which Jesus lived and died to undermine, but
that struggle in Christianity began already in its first decades.
Gospel: Easter 6: 5
May John 15:9-17
Epistle: Easter 6: 5 May
1 John 5:1-6
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