Thursday of Week 5 of Easter – First Reading
Commentary on Acts 15:7-21
Today we have the second and final part of the “Council of Jerusalem”. The issue has been discussed in depth and we now are given the conclusions of the assembly. We will see the implementation of these conclusions in tomorrow’s reading.
The Council of Jerusalem can be said to be divided into three parts:
- the speech of Peter, head of the apostles;
- the statement of James, the leader of the Jerusalem church;
- an ‘encyclical’ letter (the first of many!) sent to the churches, which we will see tomorrow.
First, Peter speaks up. This is significant. One would have expected Paul to do so. But Paul has had his say and presented his case. Peter now speaks, primarily as leader of the apostolic college but, also because of his personal experience in this sensitive issue.
It is now for him to make the final decision. He has special credentials for doing so as leader of the apostles, the inner core of the Church’s leadership. But he was also the one to whom God had explicitly revealed that the Christian community should be opened to the Gentiles, and that many of the ritual obligations of the Jews, such as those involving unclean foods, were no longer relevant. This happened when he had the vision about all the different kinds of animals (see chap 10:9). And it was Peter who had played a leading role in the baptism into the community of Cornelius, the first gentile Christian.
Peter now tells the assembly how God had chosen him to be the instrument for bringing Christ’s message to the Gentiles and how they had received the gift of the Spirit, just as the first Christians did. The receiving of the Holy Spirit was always taken as the irrefutable proof of being accepted by God. That was seen clearly in the case of Cornelius and his household. Peter says:
God, who knows the human heart, testified to them [the Gentiles] by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us.
Then, says Peter, isn’t it only provoking God’s anger to place:
…on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear?
The ‘yoke’ here is the Mosaic law. Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians:
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. (Gal 5:1)
Paul has to say this because many Jewish converts were going back to full observance of the Mosaic law.
All that is needed is to “be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus”. Again from Galatians:
…we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through the faith of Jesus Christ…no one will be justified by the works of the law. (Gal 2:15-16)
This ‘faith’ is not just an intellectual acceptance, but a total commitment of the self to the Way of Christ.
The Jewish way is not, says Peter, a specially privileged one, and circumcision, by itself, means nothing. Of course, for many Jews, circumcision represented their total dedication to God.
The assembly then fell silent after this presentation. Was that because they were overwhelmed by what Peter had said, or was it that there had been some loud disagreement from legalists while he spoke? In any case, Barnabas and Paul, on their part, confirmed all that Peter had said by describing their wonderful experience of evangelising the Gentiles and seeing God working so evidently among them (note that here Barnabas’ name comes before Paul’s, perhaps because he had more status in the Jerusalem community).
We now come to the second part of the Council’s discussions. James, the leader of the Jerusalem community and a relative of Jesus himself, speaks. He clearly represents the Jewish members of the Christian community and so, like Peter, but in a different way, his words carry special weight. He will contradict the demands of some of his fellow-Jews in the community.
He endorses the words of Peter, confirming them with a passage from the prophet Amos:
I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David…so that all other peoples may seek the Lord… (Amos 9:11-12)
The text is quoted according to the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, and the argument partly depends on variants peculiar to that version. It probably comes from Greek-speaking believers, although here it is ascribed to the leader of the Hebrew Christians.
In view of this statement that God wishes all to belong to him, James goes on to say that no unnecessary burdens should be put on Gentiles who wish to convert.
He does make a few exceptions, however, and says that a letter should be sent out to this effect. Although they are not bound by the Mosaic law in general – and especially circumcision – he lists four things Gentile Christians should avoid. These are:
1. Pollution from idols
2. Unlawful marriage
3. Meat of strangled animals
4. Blood
The first point forbids the eating of food which had been offered to idols because it might imply some ambivalence about fidelity to one’s Christian beliefs. However, Paul, in writing to the Romans, says this does not bother him personally, as he does not believe in those idols anyway. However, he would not eat such food if he was in the presence of a more scrupulous person who might misunderstand his action.
The second prohibition is given is because many Gentiles – like many people today – took sexual activity rather lightly. Temple worship, too, sometimes involved intimacy with temple prostitutes, male and female. Apart from the immorality involved, this could be a source of scandal.
The third and fourth conditions are presented because Jews only eat the meat of animals from which the blood has been drained and, as we see in the Gospel, contact with blood was seen as a form of religious contamination. This seems to contradict what has been said earlier, but it should really be seen as a plea at this stage in the church’s life to respect the sensitivities of the more traditional Jewish converts. It is a matter of compromise in non-essentials. For us, this would be like agreeing to eat fish on Fridays when with Catholics who cannot bring themselves to change their old ways. Or perhaps like not insisting that people take Communion in the hand.
Again, we can learn from this discussion. On the one hand, we have to be careful not to impose on people practices which are not central to our faith and, at the same time, to be willing to bend in areas which are not essential. This is a principle of mutual tolerance which should be observed by both conservatives and progressives alike in the church, and St Paul has many wise things to say about it (see especially his Letter to the Romans, chap 14).