CT - Catholic Telegraph

The Spirit is foreign to no one

Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), Acts of the Apostles 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48

One of the most difficult and divisive questions that the early church had to face was whether it was necessary to be a Jew in order to be a follower of Christ. It wasn’t so much a matter of whether those who were born Gentiles could become members of the community of Christian faith, but whether Gentiles who wanted to become members had to agree to observe the Jewish requirement of being circumcised and to follow Jewish dietary laws.

The Holy Spirit led the church to the resolution of this question, and Luke, the author of Acts, records the steps through which the Spirit led the young Christian community. The church’s liturgy brings these steps to our attention in the first readings of the Sixth Sunday of Easter.

In Year A, we hear about the first approaches in the evangelization of the Samaritans. Samaritans claimed to be Jewish, but the Jews considered them to be outside the pale. Preaching to the Samaritans, therefore, was going beyond the limits of conventional Judaism. In Year C we have Paul and Barnabas giving an account of their missionary activity among the gentiles to the church leadership in Jerusalem. The reading for Year B falls chronologically between the other two. It is concerned with the reception into the church of the Roman Cornelius, a gentile, together with his household.

The Cornelius narrative was important to Luke — so important that he tells it twice, once in chapter 10, again in chapter 11. Our reading is an abridgement of chapter 10. Before our reading begins, Cornelius, a gentile, though well disposed to the Jews, had had a vision in which an angel had ordered him to send for Peter. Peter, meanwhile, had had a vision whose import was that Jewish dietary requirements need no longer be observed. No food (and by implication, no human being) was any longer profane or unclean. As Peter’s vision ended, the emissaries from Cornelius arrived and invited Peter to come back to Cornelius’ house with them. Peter agrees.

At the beginning of our reading, Peter has arrived at Cornelius’ house, and Cornelius prostrates himself before Peter. He obviously expected some kind of heavenly being. Peter refuses to accept this kind of honor.

In the full text of the narrative, Peter now shares his vision with Cornelius, and Cornelius tells Peter his own experience.

Now Peter begins a long evangelizing sermon, of which our reading gives only the theological core. "In every nation, whoever fears God and acts uprightly is acceptable to him." No groups or classes were to be excluded a priori.

The Lectionary reading omits the rest of Peter’s sermon and brings us to the climax of the narrative. The Holy Spirit comes upon the whole group assembled there. It was clear that God was pouring His gifts out on these gentiles even as He had poured them out on the Jewish apostles at Pentecost. They were, thus, obviously fit for baptism, and Peter orders that they be baptized immediately.

Peter would go back to Jerusalem and have to tell the story all over again in order to convince the Christian community that he had acted properly in allowing these gentiles to be baptized.

It’s difficult for us to realize what a breakthrough the baptism of Cornelius and his household must have been. For centuries, the Jews had looked on themselves as a specially chosen people, and they were. Now this small group of Jesus’ disciples had experienced Jesus’ death and resurrection. They had received the Holy Spirit as Jesus had promised. They must have looked on themselves as a specially blessed group of Jewish people.

The idea that the salvation brought by Christ Jesus might be directed to outsiders as well as Jews seems not to have occurred to them at first. In fact, it took a direct intervention of the Spirit on more than one occasion followed by decades of in-house controversy for the early Jewish Christians to understand that God was exercising His generosity to all His human creatures without exception.

Today we see the breadth of God’s generosity not just in the acceptance of gentiles into the church but also in the church’s catholicity. Every race and people is welcome. The Spirit is foreign no none.

For reflection and discussion

How have I been surprised by the generosity of God in my life?

How is the presence of the Spirit manifested in the church of today?