May 2, 2010, Hillcrest United Methodist Church
Acts 11:1-18, Peter Defends the Conversion of Gentiles
11 Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. 2 So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, 3 saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” 4 Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, 5 “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. 6 As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. 7 I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ 8 But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9 But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ 10 This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. 11 At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. 12 The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. 13 He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; 14 he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ 15 And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. 16 And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ 17 If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” 18 When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.” (Acts 11:1-18, NRSV)
There is a Jewish Rabbi and his wife with whom Barbara and I are friends. She came as a seminary student, took classes and graduated. He served as the Rabbi for a Jewish Synagogue in Houston for some time, but recently he was called to serve a a synagogue in Calgary, Canada., a much larger synagogue with some 700 members.
A few years ago they invited us to their home to share the Passover Seder meal. It was a very good experience. During the meal a door was open, and there was an empty chair. They do that so that when Elijah comes, he can get in and enjoy the meal. Children asked the questions about “Why do we do this?” and they were answered. Barbara has some kosher food recipes, so we asked them ahead of time if we might bring some kosher cookies. But the Rabbi was very clear. “No,” he said. “I will be spending the night cleaning the apartment–that’s where they lived–and getting rid of all the hametz (leaven). So we were happy just to go and enjoy the meal as they prepared it.
But the experience was a reminder for us of the difficulties encountered by Jews in social intercourse with Gentiles–non-Jews. This was a problem for the early Christians. Jews were strict about having contact with Gentiles. They might become ceremonially impure through such contacts, especially through eating with them. Even if the Gentile served only lamb or beef, not pork, the Jewish friend would not know whether it was slaughtered properly, and so was kosher.
Cornelius
As today’s lesson begins, Peter has returned to Jerusalem, where “the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God” (Acts 11:1). In Jerusalem, Peter faces some criticism as “the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’ ” (vv. 2-3). The issue for them was the Jewish food laws (kosher food), a problem for Jews who eat with Gentiles. Peter, we are told, “began to explain it to them, step by step” (v. 4), and in so doing he provides a detailed, but abbreviated, summary of chapter 10. He mentions his vision at Joppa: “I was in the city of Joppa praying,” he says, “and in a trance I saw a vision” (v. 5a). He describes the various animals lowered on the sheet. “There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air” (vv. 5b, 6). He also reports that he “heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat’ ” (v. 7), and his protest, “But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth’ ” (v. 8). When he had protested in this way, the voice repeated the command. “But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane’ ” (v. 9). Peter tells how the vision was repeated three times (v. 10) and reports its coincidence with the arrival of the messengers from Caesarea (v. 11). “The Spirit told me to go with then,” says Peter, “and not to make a distinction between them and us” (v. 12a).
The messengers are from a man named Cornelius.
Cornelius [was] a Roman centurion stationed in Caesarea. The story of his conversion to Christianity is told at length in Acts 10 and the conversion is defended by Peter in Acts 11:1-18. A further allusion to him is made in Acts 15:5-7. The repetition of his story indicates his significance for Acts as the model Gentile convert. Before his conversion, Cornelius was apparently associated with the synagogue as a ‘god-fearer.’ He gave alms and dedicated himself to prayer. While he and his friends listened to Peter present the gospel, the Holy Spirit came upon them. For the writer of Acts, this was divine attestation that Gentiles should be accepted into the Christian community on the same basis (i.e., faith) as Jewish converts. It is significant that, in Acts, it is Peter who opens the door of faith to the Gentiles, but he does so only after having received a vision from God. (Cornelius, from Allan J. McNichol, Harper’s Bible Dictionary, rev. ed., 1996, s.v. Cornelius).
Peter reports that, in response to the Spirit’s direction, “these six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house [i.e., the house of Cornelius]” (v. 12b). According to Christopher R. Matthews, “six replaces ‘some’ in 10:23” (NOAB, 3rd ed., augmented, 2007, on Acts 11:12). Peter says that Cornelius told them his vision. “He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved’ ” (vv. 13-14).
The climax of Peter’s report to the Jerusalem believers comes as he reports the “Gentile Pentecost.” “And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning” (v. 15; cf. 2:4). Peter remembers “the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit’ ” (v. 16), and he accepts this as God’s action, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” (v. 17). His questioners “were silenced,” and acknowledged God’s action, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life” (v. 18). Were they convinced? We learn from Paul that, though Peter ate with Jews at Antioch, he withdrew from such table fellowship when “certain people came from James” (Gal. 2:12). On this later occasion, Peter probably thought he was respecting the scruples of “circumcised believers” from Jerusalem, but Paul scolded him, better, rebuked him, for hypocrisy (Gal. 2:13), for “not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel” (v. 14). But though Luke includes Peter’s critics’ question and its focus on the kosher food laws, for him the significant point is the gift of the baptism with the Holy Spirit given equally to Jewish and Gentile Christian believers (Acts 11:16-17), which Peter repeats again at the Jerusalem Conference (Acts 15:8-9).
On John’s Gospel
All of the first Christians were Jews. We sometimes forget that, I suppose, but of course Jesus was a Jew. He was more than that, surely. He was the son of God, the Word, by whom all things were made, but he came into the world to live as a man and give his life for our redemption. In the introduction to John’s Gospel, we are told: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (Jn. 1:10-11). The older English translation was a little obscure at this point. “He came unto his own,” says the King James Version, “and his own received him not” (Jn. 1:11 AV/KJV). From that, we might think, He came to his own people and they–his own people did not receive him. There is some truth in that, but the first “his own” refers to things, not people. By saying, “he came to what was his own,” the more recent translation makes it clear that Jesus came to where he belonged.
That second part, “his own people did not accept him,” (Jn. 1:11), is really sad. We might think it means the Jews. His own people–the Jews–did not accept him. In large measure, of course, that is true. But many did. I think that the Apostle John, writing later when he worked among mainly Gentile Christian believers, had in mind all of humankind. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him” (Jn. 1:10).
On Matthew’s Gospel
In Matthew’s Gospel, it is reported that when Jesus sent the twelve disciples out to “proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt. 10:7), he restricted their mission to Jews only. “Go nowhere among the Gentiles,” he says, “and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt. 10:5-6). Many have noted that Matthew’s Gospel is the most Jewish of our Gospels. He talks about the Kingdom of Heaven rather than the Kingdom of God, respecting Jewish scruples about the overuse of God’s name. They took the Third Commandment seriously. “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain” (Exod. 20:7). It’s better, they decided, not to say God’s name at all, rather than to risk breaking the commandment by mistake.
Matthew presents Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (chaps. 5-7) in a manner that reminds us of Moses, receiving God’s law at Mt. Sinai, and proclaiming it. Jesus presents several ways in which his requirements do not nullify Moses’ laws, but go beyond them, or at least go beyond the current Jewish understanding of them.
In another part of Matthew’s Gospel, he seems to suggest that a Jewish Scribe, if converted, will be come one of the best Christians. After a series of parables in Matthew, chapter 13, he asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” And they answered, “Yes.” (Mt. 13:51). Then Jesus said something rather amazing, or at least we might think so. He said, “Therefore every scribe,”–meaning every Jewish scribe, of course–“every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Mt. 13:52). In other words, there are things that a Jewish scribe would understand, that would make him a better Christian. We might think of the moral requirements of the Ten Commandments, for example, or the meaning of such terms as “Messiah”–the king of Israel–or the prophet like Moses who is to come.
Matthew’s Concern for Gentiles
But though according to Matthew, Jesus limited the mission to Jews only, that was for a particular time and place. In the closing of his Gospel he reports Jesus Great Commission, to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19-20a). The word translated “nations” here is often translated “Gentiles.”
At the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, he includes four non-Jewish women in the genealogy of Jesus, Tamar, the Canaanite daughter-in-law of Judah (Gen. 38), Rahab the Canaanite who assisted Joshua’s spies at Jericho (Josh. 2), Ruth the Moabite who returned to Bethlehem with Naomi, and Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite. The Wise Men, the Magi, of the Christmas story in Matthew are also Gentiles whose welcoming of Jesus, the Messiah stands in sharp contrast to Herod’s murderous rejection of any so-called newborn king of Israel. Matthew and his stories about Jesus undoubtedly reflect eyewitness tradition as understood within a largely Jewish Christian community, whose Jewish neighbors perhaps met on the Sabbath in a synagogue across or down the street from their household church meeting place.
Transition in Acts
Luke, a Gentile Christian and the author of the Gospel that bears his name, wrote the Book of Acts to show how the early church carried out Jesus commission when he told the disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Paul perhaps thought of Spain as the “ends of the earth.” But if we consider Luke’s two volume set, Luke-Acts, we can trace the Gospel of Jesus from villages like Bethlehem and Nazareth to Jerusalem and on through Judea and Samaria, through the Greco-Roman world to the capital, Rome itself, where the story of Acts ends with Paul under house arrest but able to meet with people and share the gospel.
For this to happen, the early Christians under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, had to overcome the cultural barriers between Jews and Gentiles so that Gentiles could be included within the Christian community. How this happened is an important theme within the Book of Acts. The persecution of Jerusalem Christians, led in part by Saul of Tarsus (Acts 8), caused Christians to move out. Philip preached in Samaria, and his work was confirmed by the visit of Peter and John (Acts. 8:9-25). Then, led by the Holy Spirit, Philip meets and converts the Ethiopian eunuch, “a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury” (Acts 8:27). Ethiopian Christians will refer to that encounter (Acts 8:26-40) as the beginning of their church.
The conversion of Saul (Acts, chapter 9) is important for the theme of the spread of the Gospel to Gentiles, but the work of Peter was vital in preparing the way for the Pauline mission. Last week we talked about Peter’s work on Lydda and Joppa, where, merely for Peter to be a house guest of Simon the tanner was a step in the direction of welcoming the “ritually unclean” into Christian fellowship–As a tanner, Simon would work with dead animals and become ceremonially unclean.
Paul’s First Missionary Journey and the Jerusalem Conference
After Paul and Barnabas were sent out from the Christian Church in Antioch of Syria and Gentiles were converted, questions were raised about this from Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. A church council was convened, at which the question was raised and discussed. Peter’s testimony about the conversion of Cornelius and his household was a key to the decision that was made. Gentile Christian believers would be required to respect certain Jewish scruples. They were required “to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood” (Acts 15:20), but not to be circumcised in order to become Christian believers. At this conference Peter bears witness to his experience with Cornelius:
My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. 8 And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; 9 and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. 10 Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? 11 On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will. (Acts 15:7b-11)
I believe that the essential description of the experience of receiving the Holy Spirit is, as Peter described it, “cleansing their hearts by faith” (v. 9).