When Church and Non-Churched Meet audio (6MB)
Acts 21:17-25
Well, we’ve skipped over the rest of Paul’s journey from Troas to Caesarea Philippi and now, finally we come with Paul to Jerusalem. He’s been planning this visit for a long time and finally he gets there, despite the warnings of those on the way who are worried about what the Jews might do to him. [By the way have you noticed the parallels between Luke’s account of Paul’s journey to Jerusalem and his subsequent trials and Luke’s account of Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem and his subsequent trials? You might like to think about that in your small groups, particularly looking at the various trials both Jesus and Paul went through.]
I wonder have you thought about how Paul expected things to go here. Everywhere he’s been through Asia and Greece he’s experienced opposition from the Jews and now here he is in their home town. He must expect opposition here even more than elsewhere; but what about from within the church itself?
Well we read in v17 that they were welcomed warmly upon their arrival. But as you read on you realise that all isn’t as smooth below the surface as it is on top.
Hence Paul’s visit the very next day to James and the elders of the Church in Jerusalem. James is James the brother of Jesus, not James the Apostle and by now he’s clearly the leader of the Church in Jerusalem. Peter and John have left, Peter to Jerusalem and John ultimately to Ephesus. And as we read on we discover there’s a bit of tension in the air.
Do you understand what the tension is about? It’s not unlike a meeting of synod. There are the traditionalists who think that there’s only one way to be Anglican and the non-conformists, often younger, who think that to be Anglican doesn’t require a strict holding to the traditions, provided you maintain a faithfulness to Cranmer’s theology and to the Scriptures. So it is here, the Jerusalem Christians want to hold to all their Jewish traditions and culture while Paul’s happy to see Gentiles exercise faith in Christ without needing those external trappings of religion.
And you can perhaps sense a certain defensiveness in the way they present what’s been happening in their respective ministries. Yet at the same time there’s a genuine expression of appreciation and conciliation on the part of both James and Paul.
We read: “19After greeting them, he related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. 20When they heard it, they praised God.”
If you want to know whether someone’s approach to ministry is a good one, look at their results. Jesus said by their fruits you will know them. And there’s no doubt about the fruit of Paul’s ministry.
We saw last week how Paul had brought with him a good sized team, representative of the churches throughout the regions where he’d been preaching the gospel. You can imagine the scene, Paul’s team sitting or standing around the edges of the room on one side and the, probably, large group of Jerusalem elders sitting on the other side of the room with Paul and James in the middle. Paul tells them everything that’s been going on, the way the gospel has been received by Gentile pagans throughout the Empire; the way they’re persevering in the face of severe persecution; and of course their desire to support their Christian sisters and brothers in Jerusalem financially.
One would hope that part of the warm welcome to Paul would have been related to this generous gift of financial support. I guess there was a danger that the Christians there might have thought this was a bit paternalistic, implying they weren’t able to look after themselves; but Paul was obviously able to make it clear that far from being paternalistic, this gift was a sign of the solidarity the Gentile Christians felt with their Jewish brothers and sisters. It was also a sign of the indebtedness they felt for being able to share in the Jewish heritage of the Messiah. Paul expresses this well in Romans 15:27: “27They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things.”
So as Paul explains all that’s happened, James and the other elders rejoice. By the way, note how Paul expresses this success: “He related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.” You see these successes have been God’s not Paul’s. He doesn’t desire the glory. He just wants them to see the way God has been working through him among the Gentiles.
Then it’s James’ turn to report. Again the way he says it may indicate some level of defensiveness: “You see, brother, how many thousands of believers there are among the Jews.” While Paul has been evangelising the Gentiles, they’ve been working equally hard and successfully among the Jews, so there are now thousands of Christians there in Jerusalem.
But therein lies a problem. You see these guys are all devout Jews. We may not realise how serious this is in our modern Gentile world but in the first century, for these people, Christianity was the worship of the promised Messiah. There was no thought in their minds at this stage that the coming of the Messiah would change their cultural or religious identity. In fact the coming of the Messiah cements their identity. All of God’s promises to his people are now at their fulfilment. Even if the means of that fulfilment was different from what they expected, he was still a Jewish Messiah. And so they were very worried about this innovation of Paul’s: of taking the gospel to Gentiles and allowing them to continue to live as Gentiles.
So James goes on: “they are all zealous for the law. 21They have been told about you that you teach all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, and that you tell them not to circumcise their children or observe the customs.”
You see, Paul had realised early on that Jesus’ dying on the cross changed everything. If you read Gal 2 and 3 (one of his earliest letters), you’ll see how Paul argues that Jesus’ death on the cross brings an end to the usefulness of the law. We no longer need the law to help us towards salvation. Obedience has been replaced by faith. And so his conclusion at the end of that long discourse on law versus faith is that “28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)”
That’s his theological position. But notice what happens now. James asks “22What’s to be done?” He has a suggestion. He wants Paul to join in the rite of purification with four young men who are about to take a Nazirite vow. The Nazirite vow involved cutting the hair then for a month not cutting it again and not drinking wine as a sign of their devotion. At the end of the month the hair was again cut and was ritually burnt as a symbol of self-offering to God.
Paul joining them may also have been connected with him needing to be purified after spending so long in the midst of Gentiles.
James isn’t saying that Paul’s theology is wrong. He and the elders have already acknowledged that, back in Acts 11 and again in Acts15 and in fact James here repeats the instructions they’d given in Acts 15 about avoiding food offered to idols and blood, etc. So his suggestion isn’t an attempt to subvert Paul’s theology. Rather he wants him to ease the concerns of the Jewish Christians that their cultural heritage is under threat from him. And so Paul agrees. He goes through with the purification without complaint.
So why is he compliant here when in Galatians he tells us how he stood up to Peter in public because by not eating with Gentiles he was compromising the gospel: “14But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?" (Galatians 2:14)
I think there are probably a couple of reasons why he’s compliant here.
First these were all Jewish Christians so the issue for them wasn’t that Jewish observance undermines the gospel. In fact in that context to dismiss the law would make the proclamation of the gospel all the more difficult.
Secondly I think there are some issues that are strongly immersed in the culture where it takes a long time for the implications of the gospel to filter through, to infiltrate to the point where the culture is ready for change. So if you think about that triple conclusion of Gal 3:28, the change in attitude to Gentiles was already beginning to filter through, outside Jerusalem at least, but the existence of slaves didn’t become an issue in the church until the 18th century. Similarly with the views on the place of women: that’s taken even longer, interestingly, partly due to the influence of William Wilberforce who thought that women needed to build a safe haven in the home to provide succour to their husbands who were out in the world fighting the good fight against the forces of evil in the world.
I think we’re still struggling with that view of the place of women – clearly not in this Parish I’m happy to say, but certainly elsewhere in the Diocese. Your incumbency committee will have the task of working through that one when they come to look for their next vicar.
But let’s finish by thinking about Paul’s graciousness in agreeing to this request. Part of the implication of the gospel is that if Christ could give up all of his rights in order to bring us salvation, we need to be willing to give up our rights when the need arises for the sake of the gospel. Grace is a free gift we receive from God, but it’s also a free gift that we can give to others, even if they don’t deserve any more than we deserve God’s grace. Just as the Gentile Christians owed a debt of gratitude for sharing in the spiritual blessings of the Jews, so we owe a debt of grace to others who need God’s grace just as much as we do. I’ll leave you with the question of what you’re willing to give up in order to share grace with someone who hasn’t yet experienced it.
