We were in Jerusalem, in about 40 AD or thereabouts – very thereabouts, I suspect. And it was all very well, we thought, to be a follower of the new way, the way of Jesus, who was called the Christ – but hang on a minute, some of the believers aren’t Jewish! Surely they must be Jews first and Christians, as they are beginning to be called, afterwards? The followers of Jesus are a subset of Judaism no? Not a religion in their own right?
Well, that was the thinking. But then there was Peter, arguably the leader of this new cult, who had only been and gone and baptised some Gentiles without first converting them to Judaism, hadn’t he? What had he been thinking?
And, as we heard in our first reading today, they confronted him. And Peter explains what had happened. He had been staying with Simon the Tanner in Joppa, and had gone up on the roof to pray – or perhaps have a nap, who knows – and he had a vision or a dream of a great sheet full of the sort of animals he wouldn’t have dreamt of eating – pigs, shellfish, insects, and so on. I’ve never watched “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here,” but I gather the contestants on that have something called a bush tucker trial, which presumably involves eating things they wouldn’t normally think of as food – insects and so on. Well, this was Peter’s bush tucker trial, if you like, and he was told, in his dream, to choose something and eat it…. So, Peter explains, he refused, he doesn’t eat unclean food, but in his dream he was told not to call anything unclean that God had created. Three times. And then the envoys from Cornelius arrived and Peter realised that this was the Holy Spirit at work to persuade him to go and visit Cornelius.
If you read the original account, earlier in Acts, he is more than a little condescending and obviously thinks himself rather better than these mere Gentiles. He realises, he said, “that it is true that God treats everyone on the same basis. Those who fear him and do what is right are acceptable to him, no matter what race they belong to.”
Yeah, big of him! All the same, for Peter this was a huge concession. And just as he begins to tell them about Jesus, and, if Luke’s report is accurate, gives an excellent summary of the Good News: How God sent Jesus to heal and to overcome the devil, and how he was put to death, but raised – and Peter stresses that he witnessed that, and that he ate and drank with Jesus after he was raised – almost before he finished giving that summary, the Holy Spirit falls on Cornelius and his household, and they begin to praise God and to speak in tongues. So, as Peter so rightly says to the Jewish believers in Jerusalem, “who was I, then, to try to stop God!”
And the Jewish believers realised – or began to realise, is probably more accurate – that the Good News was also for the Gentiles, not just the Jews!
Peter, being Peter, is on record as having had trouble really hauling this in – Paul says in his letter to the Galatians that at one stage he had to remind him that he totally could eat with Gentile believers. But you can’t really blame him – he had been taught, from earliest childhood, to thank God each day that he wasn’t a Gentile, a slave or a woman. And then suddenly all this is turned upside down – it’s never easy to really shake off your early training, is it?
Paul, who was better educated than Peter, doesn’t seem to have had nearly as much trouble shaking off his early prejudices, and is on record as having written that “there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free people, between men and women; you are all one in union with Christ Jesus.”
“You are all one in union with Christ Jesus.”
Isn’t it a pity we don’t believe him! Oh, we say we do, we pay lip service to it, and I expect most of us consciously try to live that way. But you only have to look at the headlines to see how little we believe it! Look at what has been happening in America these past few weeks, where it looks as though some states will be allowed to have control over women’s fertility, and not allow women to have any say in their own bodies. There are so many issues there we’d be here all morning if I were to go into them, but I will just say that while I know most of us, me included, would really rather people didn’t have abortions, let’s be realistic – there are always going to be times when it is the least worst option, and there are always going to be women who are desperate not to have the baby they have conceived. And it’s not our place to judge these women, but I’m sure we would all rather they could have safe, hygienic abortions and not put their lives at risk.
Look at what is happening in Northern Ireland, where the two tribes – basically represented by Sinn Féin and the DUP, although the divide is deeper than that – simply cannot work together to form a government. This has happened in other countries, too – Belgium, for instance, was without a government for some years because its two tribes couldn’t work together. It’s not that many years since there were dreadful massacres in Rwanda because the two tribes there couldn’t find a way of living together.
Arguably one of the worst is the way governments in Europe, including our own, have been falling over themselves to provide safe havens for Ukrainian refugees. Now, it’s right and proper that they should, and it’s gratifying that so many people have been willing and able to open their homes – but why only Ukrainians? What’s wrong with Afghan refugees, may I ask? Or Syrian ones, come to that? Or from various African countries facing famine or war?
Yes, we all know the answer to that, don’t we? Race and religion! But it goes to show the unthinking prejudices we all have, the way we “other” people who are different to us in some way. Of course, we are always going to associate mostly with people who are more like us – we have more in common with people who come from the same sort of background, went to the same sort of school, enjoy the same sort of hobbies. Christian folk may well prefer the company of other Christians. That’s okay. What’s not okay is when we consider people who aren’t like us as other, as different and strange, as less than we are – or perhaps, if they are celebrities, as greater than we are.
Remember Shakespeare’s Shylock? Shylock was Jewish, and because of that was treated as less than human by his contemporaries. Which he, not unnaturally, resented: “I am a Jew.” he said. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”
Shylock felt himself Othered. People didn’t consider him quite human because he was Jewish. Rather like the first Jewish believers didn’t consider the Gentiles quite human, and couldn’t understand why they should be accepted into the fellowship.
I remember when, as quite a small girl, I was invited to lunch in the holidays with a schoolfriend, whose family were Catholic, and my mother being terribly anxious lest I comment on the food, as it was a Friday and we would undoubtedly be served fish. Quite why she thought I would, when I liked fish, I can’t imagine – and anyway, by then Vatican II had happened, and fish wasn’t served. But it turned these people into Others, strange people who ate fish on Fridays because they had to, not because they wanted to. And I know that in Northern Ireland the Protestants are taught to regard the Catholics as Other, and vice versa. This is, of course, one reason why they sometimes have trouble working together, never mind their very deep political differences.
But “We are all one in union with Christ Jesus.” And if that is too difficult for us, let’s remind ourselves of what Jesus said in our Gospel reading today: “And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my disciples.”
“We are all one in union with Christ Jesus.”
One definition of love I rather like is “That condition where the happiness of the beloved is more important than your own.”
“That condition where the happiness of the beloved is more important than your own.” That sounds very much how God loves us, and it is of course, how God expects us to love others. “Love is patient and kind; it is not jealous or conceited or proud; love is not ill-mannered or selfish or irritable; love does not keep a record of wrongs; love is not happy with evil, but is happy with the truth.”
But, of course, we can’t do that in our own strength. If we try, we are just setting ourselves up for failure, and we’ll find ourselves othering those who are least like us, no matter how hard we try not to. They don’t do things like we do. But if we truly allow God to fill us with the Holy Spirit, to grow us and change us and continue to make us into the person we were created to be, then gradually, among other changes, we will learn to see everybody else, no matter their race, colour or creed, no matter how differently they do things, as just like us, as people for whom Christ died, as people with whom “We are one in union with Christ Jesus”.
I know it’s not too easy to “let go and let God”, as they say; we are all too apt to take ourselves back again and end up with the old selfish ways. But God is always there waiting for us to realise – or nudging us, so that we do realise – and bringing us back to be cleansed, healed and made whole again. Thanks be to God! God is good! (all the time! All the time! God is good).
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