Monday of the Fourth Week of Easter

Lectionary: 279

So when Peter went up to Jerusalem the circumcised believers confronted him, saying,

‘You entered the house of uncircumcised people and ate with them.”

Peter began and explained it to them step by step....

When they heard this,

they stopped objecting and glorified God, saying,

“God has then granted life-giving repentance to the Gentiles too.”

The Gentiles' eager readiness to hear the Gospel of the Messiah and walk in his Way astounded the Jewish disciples of Jesus. If they were surprised by his Resurrection, they were equally unprepared to begin eating, drinking, and worshiping the Lord with the people they'd always regarded as suspicious outsiders. However, they were prepared to listen to the Holy Spirit and to Peter, their most respected leader. 

Those who follow the Church's weekday lectionary might not notice that Saint Luke repeats the tenth chapter story of Peter's vision almost word for word in the eleventh chapter. We need to hear this twice; it's that important.

 

Jewish Christians had to be reminded of the Creator's plan to be known and worshiped as the friend of Abraham and the Father of Jesus by every nation. Gentile Christians should be reminded they were grafted onto the vine; if they are saved it's because God regards them as children of Abraham. 

Readers of the New Testament are intensely familiar with the Christian polemic against Phariseeism. They should also notice how often Jesus and Saint Paul appealed to the original tradition of Abraham. Where the Pharisees justified their peculiar ways by the Law of Moses, Christians sought to live as children of Abraham. They too would be friends of God; they would be guided by the intensely personal demands of a provident, merciful, and jealous God. 

Saint Paul especially railed against every attempt to have it both way, to be a Christian disciple and a Pharisaic Jew: 

...if you have yourselves circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you. Once again I declare to every man who has himself circumcised that he is bound to observe the entire law. You are separated from Christ, you who are trying to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we await the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. (Galatians 5:2-6)

Before the first century was over, Christianity and Judaism had parted ways, apparently never to be reunited. But, because both claim the paternity of Abraham and find their purpose, identity, and destiny as the Patriarch's children, their separation has always been fraught. The New Testament documents Jewish hostility to the upstart Christian movement; history reveals their continuing theological challenges to Christian doctrines; as well as the hostile and occasionally murderous response of self-identified Christians. 

Many on both sides of the issue believe the tension is not only irreconcilable; it is genetic, like the instinctive conflict of the mongoose and the cobra. 

Twenty centuries on, the Roman Catholic Church set out to repent and atone for its part in the tragic story. The decree of the Second Vatican Council concerning Jews and other non-Christians, Nostra Aetate, issued in October 1965, says,

As the sacred synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham's stock.

Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God's saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ --  Abraham's sons according to faith -- are included in the same Patriarch's call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people's exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles. Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles. making both one in Himself.

The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.  

The first Christian missionaries, sent by the Lord to all the nations, appealed first to their fellow Jews and then welcomed the gentiles who "overheard" their proclamation. The four gospels demonstrate how necessary it was to initiate the gentiles into the Hebrew scriptures, history, and tradition even as they assured Jewish converts that Jesus could not be understood without a deep knowledge of their ancient religion. 

If Jesus were not a Jew he could not save us. If he were stripped of his Jewish identity by the miracle of the Resurrection, as some have posited with the heresy of monophysitism, he could not save us. 

We are saved because we are children of Abraham, the friend of God.