Living Words

Acts 14:1-28

by William Klock

 

Acts 14 wraps up St. Paul’s first missionary journey.  He and Barnabas come back, full circle, to Antioch, where they began.  Last Sunday we look at Chapter 13.  They were driven out of Pisidian Antioch—this is in the Galatia region of what we know as southern Turkey—and they travelled to Iconium, about 120-140 kilometres east.  I want to look at all of Chapter 14 today, so we’ll just jump straight into it.  [Page 1096 in the pew Bibles.]  Before I read it, though, notice that none of the problems Paul encounters prompts him to change his strategy.  It’s still “to the Jew first, and then to the Greek.”  Because the good news is only good news to the Geek, because it’s first the good news to the Jew that the God of Israel, in Jesus the Messiah, is keeping his promises.  So:

 

“And it happened in Iconium that they went together into the Jewish synagogue and spoke, with the result that a large crowd, both of Jews and of Greeks, believed.  But the unbelieving Jews stirred up and poisoned the minds of the Gentiles against the brothers.  They stayed there a long time, speaking boldly on behalf of the Lord, who bore them witness to the word of his grace by giving signs and wonders which were done at their hands.”

 

Paul still starts with the synagogue.  In Chapter 13, Luke said that when the Jews rejected Paul, he went to the gentiles.  But that doesn’t mean he stopped preaching to his fellow Jews.  He leaves Pisidian Antioch, he arrives in Iconium, and he again goes to the synagogue to preach.  And—at least more or less—Iconium sounds like a repeat of Pisidian Antioch.  He preaches to the Jews and they believe, but pretty soon a whole crowd is showing up to hear him and a lot of gentiles believe as well.  And then the trouble starts, just as it did before.  Some Jews believed, but others did not and those others stirred up trouble.  Luke says they poisoned the minds of the gentiles against them.  But despite the opposition, Paul and Barnabas stayed a “long time”—we don’t know exactly what that means—but they weren’t driven out of town, their lives apparently weren’t in danger—yet—so they continued to speak boldly about Jesus and, Luke says, bore witness to this “word of his grace” by doing signs and wonders at the hands of Paul and Barnabas.

 

It’s a good reminder about the nature of signs and wonders.  Signs and wonders—miracles—aren’t normal.  That’s the whole point.  It seems to me that most Christians through history have understood this, but a lot of modern Christians seem to have forgotten.  The biblical witness is that signs and wonders are unusual occurrences and that they cluster around those events, those times, those places where the God of Israel is about to act or where he’s doing something new.  They cluster around the Exodus.  Signs to Pharoah to listen up, because the God of Israel is about to act and you don’t want to end up on the wrong end of his justice.  And to show Israel that they have reason to trust that God keeps his promises.  They cluster around Jesus’ ministry—this second, greater Exodus—to say the same thing: The God of Israel is about to act.  On the one hand they announce that new creation is on the cusp of being born and that God keeps his promises.  On the other, they are a warning that judgement is coming.  And as the first Christians carry this good news from Jerusalem, to Judaea, to Samaria, and now to the nations, they’re preaching that the God of Israel has come in Jesus to dwell with men and women; they’re preaching that he is in the process, through Jesus and the Spirit and through his word, to set the world to rights; they’re preaching that the God of Israel is unlike the gods the pagans know.  No one’s every heard this before.  How can it be?  Why should we trust someone proclaiming a new god, let alone a crucified Messiah?  And so God works signs and wonders to show not only that the gospel message is true, but to show that in fact, new creation is being born and that he actually has come to dwell with men and women.  Remember, God is building a temple meant to one day fill the earth.  Paul and Barnabas aren’t just preaching a new religious philosophy or even a new god.  They’re bringing God’s temple with them and where that temple goes, it displaces the gods who were there before and it challenges the principalities and powers of the old, evil age.  So it goes well for “a long time”, despite the opposition.  But the tension grew.  Verse 4: “But the people of the city were divided. Some were with the Jews, and some with the apostles.  But then the Gentiles and Jews, with their rulers, made an attempt to ill-treat them and stone them.  They learned of it, however, and fled to Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and to the surrounding countryside.  There they went on announcing the good news.”

 

Eventually they had to leave, but that doesn’t stop them.  Again, opposition, persecution—even martyrdom—are used by God to keep the gospel moving into the world.  Word and Spirit had done their work in Iconium.  Now they go to Lystra and they preach Jesus there.  Verse 8.  Luke says, “There was a man sitting in Lystra who was unable to use his feet.  He had been lame from his mother’s womb, and had never walked.  He heard Paul speaking. When Paul looked hard at him, and saw that he had faith to be made well, he said with a loud voice, ‘Stand up straight on your feet!’ Up he jumped, and began walking about.”

 

Luke makes a pretty deliberate point of telling us this story so it parallels the story back in Acts 3 of another man, lame from birth, healed by Peter.  In that previous story Peter looked hard at him.  Peter told him to stand up and the man leaps up and walks.  That healing led to a confrontation with the Jewish authorities.  This one leads to a confrontation with the pagans.  But it tells us what Luke is doing.  He wants us to understand that Paul is carrying on the same Jesus-centred mission that Peter was carrying on.  Same Jesus.  Same Spirit.  Same good news.  Same signs of new creation.  But now the gospel’s moving into a completely different world.

 

And the man apparently believes, but the rest of the city misinterprets the sign.  Look at verse 11: “When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted loudly in the Lycaonian language, ‘The gods have come down to us in human form!’  They called Barnabas ‘Zeus,’ and Paul, because he was the main speaker, ‘Hermes.’  The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the city gates.  There was a crowd with him, and he was all ready to offer sacrifice.”

 

So there’s some local colour that explains what’s going on here.  First, archaeological remains and inscriptions tell us that the people of this area paired up Zeus and Hermes.  There’s also a myth from the area that said that at some point in the past Zeus and Hermes had paid a visit to the region, but the people refused to show them hospitality.  In anger, the gods destroyed the whole region with a flood.  (An interesting aside is that because of this myth, some Jews associated Noah’s flood with this same area.)  The end result was that the people of this region weren’t going to make the same mistake twice.  They saw the lame man healed and in Barnabas and Paul they saw Zeus and Hermes back again.  Remember that the gods of the Greeks often visited humans in disguise.

 

And it sounds like because these people were speaking in Lycaonian, Paul and Barnabas didn’t understand what they were up to.  But then the priests come with a parade.  They’ve got oxen to sacrifice.  They’ve got garlands of flowers to throw over the gods.  It’s a big deal.  Oxen were pretty much the most expensive sacrifice you could offer.

 

So what happened?  Well, these people heard the gospel message, they saw the God of Israel act, but they interpreted it within the worldview they already knew.  It’s not the last time this would happen—not even in Acts.  It’s happened a lot as the gospel has gone out to the nations.  In some parts of the world, Jesus and the saints just become new names or new incarnation of old gods.  In other places the gospel gets twisted to fit the patterns of tribal religion.  The Christian minister takes the place of the old witch doctor, the vocabulary becomes Christian, but the old religion is still there underneath.  Even our own culture does this and we end up with heresies like the so-called Prosperity Gospel or we water down Jesus and Christianity and make them do service to our politics or civil religion.

 

It’s not enough to just say, “Believe in Jesus,” because in a lot of places Jesus just becomes another god in the pantheon.  And that’s obviously not the gospel.  If Jesus is just another god, then he’s not Lord.  So, Luke says in verse 14, “when the apostles, Paul and Barnabas, heard of it, they tore their clothes and rushed into the crowd.  ‘Men,’ they shouted, ‘why are you doing these things? We are just ordinary humans, with the same nature as you, and we are bringing you the wonderful message that you should turn away from these foolish things to the living God, the one who made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them.’”

 

Paul backs up.  In the synagogue he preached Israel’s story: Abraham, the Exodus, David, the Prophets, the Messiah, the resurrection.  His fellow Jews knew the story already.  They just needed to understand how Jesus fit into it.  But in Lystra, no one knows anything about that story.  And it’s not their story anyway.  So Paul goes all the way back to the beginning: to the Creator, to creation, to the providence of God, to human idolatry.  He doesn’t start with “Believe in Jesus.”  He starts with, “Turn away from these foolish things.”   I picture him pointing to the oxen, the garlands, and over the wall to the temple of Zeus just outside the city.  “Turn away from these foolish things and turn to the living God—to the one who made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them.”  To the god who made these oxen, these flowers, the stones from which you built your temple and your statue of Zeus inside it.  To the God who made you and me.  To the God who, unlike the idol in your temple, is alive, who speaks, who heals the lame.  Verse 16: “In earlier generations he allowed all the nations to go their own ways, but even then he didn’t leave himself without witness.  He has done you good, giving you rain from heaven and times of fruitfulness, filling your bodies with food and your hearts with gladness.”

 

They don’t know Israel’s story, but they do know their own.  They know the rains that have watered their crops, year after year, generation after generation.  And for all those ages, they attributed it to Zeus.  They brought their prayers, their worship, and their offerings to a statue in the temple; a statue that never once spoke.  A statue that never healed.  I expect that lame man probably asked Zeus more than once—maybe every day—for healing.  And nothing ever happened.  The god’s of the pagans were silent.  That’s precisely why it was such a big deal when Paul and Barnabas did these signs and wonders.  A god was finally doing something—something these pagans had never seen before.  And now Paul tells them: It’s not Zeus or Hermes.  There is a God who lives, who speaks, who acts—the God who causes the rain to fall and who has given you the gift of life.  He’s the God who has sustained you all these generations even while you’ve worshipped idols—because he’s had a plan for you.  He had to work with Israel first, but now the God of Israel—through Jesus the Messiah and the Holy Spirit—has come to you with good news, with new life, with new creation—to welcome you into the story of his people.

 

And in a heartbeat, the story goes from the people shouting, “The gods have come down” to people throwing rocks.  Look at verse 18: “Even by saying this, they only just restrained the crowds from offering them sacrifice.  But some Jews arrived from Antioch and Iconium, and persuaded the crowds to stone Paul.  They dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead.  The disciples gathered around him, however, and he got up and went into the city. The next day he and Barnabas went off to Derbe.”

 

At first the people don’t want to hear Paul.  They’re insistent on offering him their sacrifices.  But then these Jews who were angry with Paul in Antioch and Iconium, they show up just in time to incite the crowd to anger.  Luke doesn’t say what they said, but it made the people angry enough that they stoned Paul and left him for dead.  And these new disciples from Lystra go out and find him.  They were probably surprised to discover he was still alive.  I can only imagine how bashed and bruised and bleeding he must have been.  And what does he do?  He goes back into the city.  Yes, the next day he and Barnabas leave for Derbe, but first he goes back into the city where he was just stoned.  And I think now we know what Paul’s going to tell, to preach to these brand new Christians on his return journey—because he will be back.  But first, verse 21:

 

“They preached in Derbe, and made many disciples.  Then they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, and urging them to remain in the faith.  They warned them that getting into God’s kingdom would mean going through considerable suffering.  In every church they appointed elders by laying hands on them.  They fasted, prayed, and commended them to the Lord in whom they had believed.  They went through Pisidia and came to Pamphylia; and when they had spoken the word in Perga they went down to Attalia.  From there they sailed to Antioch, which was where they had been commended to God’s grace for the work which they had accomplished.  Once there, they called the church together, and told them all the things which God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith for the Gentiles.  They stayed there a long time with the disciples.”

 

Derbe is almost anti-climatic.  No riot, no parade, no stoning.  For the first time: success.  They preach the good new about Jesus and made many disciples.  And then they could have just gone straight home to Antioch.  But instead they turn around.  They go straight back to Lystra, where Paul was stoned.  Then they go back to Iconium, where they only barely escaped being stoned.  And then to Pisidian Antioch where the leaders of the city drove them out.  Why would they go back for potentially more punishment?  Because these new churches needed teaching and guidance and godly and discerning leaders.  Paul and Barnabas, says Luke, went back to strengthen the souls of the disciples and to encourage them to continue in the faith.  They went back.  It had been a while.  Paul’s had a chance to recover from his injuries, but he arrives back in these towns and he’s got scars that weren’t there before.  Maybe he’s got visible injuries—broken bones—that were never set properly, missing teeth.  And the Lycaonians remember how they found him, beaten and left for dead.  And the brothers and sisters in Iconium and Pisidian Antioch think, “Yikes!”  And Paul, he says to them that getting into God’s kingdom means considerable suffering.  And he has the scars, the broken bones, the missing teeth to prove it.

 

Brothers and Sisters, to follow Jesus means to follow Jesus.  It means to take up our crosses as we follow him daily.  I expect most of the new Christians in these towns were starting to figure that out.  They had already begun to experience the rejection of friends and family.  People in their cities were getting suspicious of them.  Maybe some of them were starting to question whether they’d made the right decision in turning to Jesus and this good news.  If you’re going to lose your friends or get beat up for it, was it really good news?  And so Paul reminds them: Yes.  A thousand times yes!  Because Jesus is King.  Because his kingdom has come.  Because God’s new creation is breaking into the old.  They’d seen it in the signs and wonders.  God’s grace, God’s life, making the sad things come untrue.  Wiping away the years.  Healing and renewing.  But the old age and its principalities and powers are not just going to surrender.  So if you live as God’s new creation people, his Easter people in the midst of the old age, there will be trouble.  Sometimes ridicule.  Sometimes loss.  Sometimes persecution.  Sometimes even death.  Suffering is the road we walk because we belong to the King whose own road to glory took him to the cross.  They needed to see Paul this way.

 

It’s a good reminder as we read the Gospels and Acts.  They’re full of miracles.  People healed, prison doors cast open, dramatic acts of the Spirit.  And yet nowhere in this is Paul—or anyone else—telling us that if you have enough faith, you will never suffer.  Paul himself was almost killed.  The miracle isn’t that Christians never suffer. The miracle is that through the suffering of Jesus and his people, God’s new creation is being born and his new temple is growing throughout the earth.  Through the weakness of his people, his great glory is being made known.  The people in these churches would forget this and Paul would later write to them.  That’s what the Epistle to the the Galatians is.  And there he reminds them in that he bore on his body the marks of Jesus the Messiah, they had seen it, gasped at it when he visited them in those week or months after being stoned nearly to death.

 

And that’s why, when Paul and Barnabas finally get back to Antioch—the Syrian one where they started—there’s no talk of, “Hey, let us tell you everything we did.”  Luke says they told them all the things God had done and how God had opened a door to faith for the gentiles.  Brothers and Sisters, trust God and be faithful—even it means that we, too, bear the marks of Jesus in our bodies.  Be faithful, because God himself has first been faithful.  Trust him, because he himself as proven himself to be trustworthy.  Do that, and through our witnesses, his glory will fill the earth.

 

So there are, I think, three things we should take away here.  First, Lystra in particular, shows what can happen when people encounter Christian claims without the Christians story.  It becomes easy for them to just absorb Jesus into the story they already know.  I think that’s as true in pagan Canada as it was in pagan Lystra.  Jesus becomes another god in the pantheon, another philosophy on the postmodern smorgasbord, another part of our civil religion.  And that’s why it’s essential we tell people God’s whole story and invite them to inhabit it.

 

Second, don’t mistake opposition for failure.  Lystra ends with Paul under a pile of rocks, nearly dead.  He gets back to Antioch with missing teeth and scars and he enthusiastically announces, “Listen to what God did!”  The old evil age did it’s worst, but when they left those towns there were churches that weren’t there before.  God’s word and God’s Spirit were at work.  His glory being to shine forth in the wide, dark world of the pagans.

 

And, I think, third: There’s a reminder here that we’re called to make disciples, not just to get people to make a decision or to be baptised.  Paul went back to those towns where there was real danger, because he wanted to make sure those new converts were still walking with Jesus in the Spirit.  Because he wanted to exhort them.  Because he wanted to see who stood out as leaders—teachers, shepherds, pastors—so these communities would put down deep roots in the word and in the Spirit and be committed to following Jesus even when things got hard.  That’s the test.  Are we just getting people through the door so we can count noses, or are we building a community of disciples bound together by a commitment to Jesus, ready to stand firm through opposition, and who will truly be God’s model of new creation in the midst of the old.

 

This is what looks like to inhabit God’s story, Brothers and Sisters.  To acknowledge that Jesus is Lord and then, in faith, to submit to everything that follows from that.  To take up our crosses daily and to follow him wherever he may lead.  And to do so with the joy and enthusiasm of Paul, because we know that whatever happens, however it plays out, there is a sure and certain hope at the end: Jesus wins, because he has already won.  Through our witness, in the power of the word and the Spirit, God’s glory will one day cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, and on that day, Jesus will finally set all to rights.  I know I haven’t even mentioned it yet, but that’s what this feast of All Saints is about.  We commemorate all the faithful who have, in faith, entrusted themselves to Jesus the Messiah and now wait in their graves—as I expect we all one day will—for that final renewal of all things, for that day when God will raise us from death as he did Jesus, and with us all of Creation, for that day when he will say, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”  And from that day on, we will live in the glory of his presence that covers the earth, because of the church’s—because or our—faithful witness to his faithfulness.

 

Let’s pray: O Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those inexpressible joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

There’s a meme that makes the social media rounds from time to time.  Jesus is standing on the hillside addressing a crowd of people.  He’s preaching, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”  And a guy from the crowd asks, “But, Jesus, who is my neighbour.”  And Jesus replies, “It’s whoever you were hoping I wouldn’t say is your neighbour.”  If we’re honest, that probably speaks on some level to all of us.  We say those words, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.  On these two commandments hand all the law and the prophets.”  But it’s a struggle to love some people.  I’ve told you before about my first roommate in University.  I didn’t love him.  I couldn’t stand the guy.  He made my life miserable.  Not deliberately.  He didn’t try.  He was just a sinner.  He needed Jesus.  And then he showed up at church one Sunday.  And I was annoyed—even a little angry—that he was there.  I kind of enjoyed hating him.  It was the only way I could get back at him for making me miserable.  If he believed and Jesus forgave him and he started coming to church—yeah—I was going to be more than a little resentful.  He didn’t deserve forgiveness—not, at least, until he got his comeuppance.

 

And the people in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch were, I think, a lot like I was.  They heard Paul preach about Jesus the Messiah and God’s gift of the Spirit to those who believed.  They were excited by the message.  God finally come back, to purify his people, and to once again live with them.  And this time, not in some distant building on a mountaintop they couldn’t go in to, but he was living right in them.  Good news!  Grace!  They were rejoicing and eagre and excited.  But then what happens when the real-world implications of that grace become apparent?  This was good news for everyone, Paul said.  But what happens when they realise that when he said everyone, he really meant literally everyone?  Look at Acts 13:44 [page 1096]: “On the next sabbath, almost the whole city came together to hear the word of the Lord. But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy, and kept contradicting what Paul was saying, speaking abusively.”

 

So word’s got out about what Paul and Barnabas were preaching the last few weeks in the synagogue and this sabbath day, practically the whole town has shown up to the synagogue.  Shlomo and Miriam showed up only to find some Greeks—Greeks!  Greeks, I tell you!—in their usual seat.  And not just in their seat.  There were gentiles spilling out the door and crowding the street outside.  Remember that a synagogue wasn’t like the temple.  Gentiles were allowed into a synagogue.  But this, this was too much.  It was a huge crowd.  I expect Paul and Barnabas eventually decided to go outside—maybe there was a square or a market nearby—so that everyone could hear what they were saying.  And, well, this was just too much and too far.  Yes, the gospel about Jesus and the Spirit was good news for everybody—but not every body.  Certainly not for the pagans!  And so, Luke says, they were filled with jealousy.  Not just jealousy.  The Greek word is zelos—the word we get “zealot” and “zealous” and “zealotry” from.  So they were jealous, but it was more than just what we mean by that.  Consider their background.  These were Jews who had maintained their distinctiveness from paganism and they hadn’t done that without cost.

 

The Greek and then the Romans found that the Jews weren’t like other peoples.  You couldn’t assimilate the Jews.  They had gone off into exile in Babylon, punished by the Lord, for worshipping idols.  They’d learned their lesson.  They would rather die than worship idols or even offer incense to Caesar.  So the Romans had compromised with them.  The Jews didn’t pray to Caesar, but they would pray for him.  But that didn’t mean other people were happy with them.  If some disaster struck the city, people assumed this or that god was angry—and people started pointing fingers at the Jews, because they didn’t worship or honour the gods.  Jews, nevertheless, had through the centuries carved out places for themselves in the pagan world.  But it wasn’t easy.  People were suspicious of them.  There were pogroms.  Living torah in the pagan world was hard and costly.  Jesus and the Spirit were good news.  But now—to their astonishment—Paul and Barnabas are proclaiming the same good news to the gentiles of Pisidian Antioch.

 

And I have to think that this didn’t really come as a surprise.  Paul’s preaching has been really clear that God is fulfilling his promises to Abraham through Jesus and the Spirit.  And that means that this blessing isn’t just for Israel; it’s for the nations.  And surely at least Barnabas had told them how he had seen the grace of God at work in church in Antioch as he saw Jews and gentiles sharing the Lord’s Supper together.  But now that the gentiles are actually turning up in droves to hear this good news, these Jews are angry—they’re jealous.  “No!  This is our good news.  Not yours!”  They’re jealous, but they’re also burning with that righteous indignation—that zealousness—that had once characterised Paul, that characterised the Pharisees, for example.  They had to defend the honour of God and of his covenant.  So they started opposing, contradicting Paul and Barnabas as the preached.  And not just raising their hands and saying, “Ahem...no...I beg to disagree.”  Luke says that they were abusive in their words.  Luke uses the verb from which we get our word “to blaspheme”.

 

But that doesn’t stop Paul and Barnabas.  Luke says they  “spoke boldly.”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s what the Spirit does.  Don’t be afraid when opposition comes.  Remember that we speak on behalf of the God who gave his son to die for the sins of his enemies.  He’s not going to throw in the towel because some people oppose him.  And remember that it’s out calling.  Jesus is prophet, priest and king and he shares those vocations with us.  It’s our duty as gospel people to bring the life of the kingdom to bear on the world around us, to mediate the grace of God to the nations, and to speak prophetically—not only to the nations, calling them to repentance, but also to the church when it goes astray.  It’s hard.  It often brings opposition and sometimes outright persecution, but that’s what happened to Jesus and, as he said, “A servant isn’t greater than his master.”  God has given us his Spirit for a reason.  And the Spirit made Paul and Barnabas bold and, I think, the Spirit gave them wisdom to know just what to say: Verse 46:

 

“God’s word had to be spoken to you first,” they said. “But since you are rejecting it, and judging yourselves unworthy of the life of the age to come, look! We are turning to the Gentiles!”  And they aren’t saying that in the sense that some people might think, as if the announcement is that God is done with Jews and moving onto the gentiles, as if Israel was Plan A and the gentiles are Plan B.  Not at all.  Paul’s been saying all along: the gospel is good news because it is good news first to the Jews.  Because the gospel—the news about Jesus crucified and risen, the Spirit poured out—the gospel is the fulfilment of God’s promises to his people.  The gospel is the culmination of the whole story of Israel.  The fact that these gentiles have come to hear it is the proof that God’s promise to Abraham, to make himself and his blessings known to the whole world, is being fulfill right before their eyes.  But so are God’s promises of judgement.  The flip side of the gospel is the warning that if you reject this good news, judgement is coming.  God’s going to set the world to rights through Jesus, through the Spirit, through the gospel and if reject it, if you thrust it aside, you’re not going to have a share in it.

 

So Paul reminds them of the words of Isaiah that they surely knew—words that were part of their own identity as a people.  Look at verse 47: “This is what the Lord has commanded to us, you see: ‘I have set you for a light to the nations, so that you might bring salvation to the end of the earth.’”

 

And this is the heart of the passage.  The passage Paul quotes is from Isaiah 49—from one of the songs about the suffering servant.  Right there, it says that Paul already knows that the faithful will suffer, so there’s no abuse these people can throw at him that he isn’t expecting and willing to take.  But more importantly, there’s a kind of double identity in this Isaiah passage.  The Lord says to the servant, “You are my servant, Israel.”  And then he goes on to commission the servant.  And what’s the commission, the job, the vocation? “to restore Jacob, to gather Israel, and then to become a light to the nations.”

 

So the servant on one hand embodies Israel and on the other hand, he does for Israel what Israel has failed to do.  And we see this in Jesus.  Jesus is Israel’s faithful representative.  He’s the one who fulfils her calling and vocation.  And yet Paul saw more than Jesus here.  He says that this is what the Lord has commanded us—to him and Barnabas.  Paul understood himself to be taking up Jesus’ vocation.  Not the dying for sins and rising to life to inaugurate the kingdom part.  Only Jesus could do that.  But now that Jesus has renewed Israel in himself and has begun to fulfil the mission, Paul understood that all those who are in him, are called—or as he put it rather more emphatically: commanded—to carry on the task of the servant.  Because this was Israel’s task all along.  So it’s not that Israel failed so God created a new people called the Church and gave the job to them.  It’s that Israel’s vocation has finally reached its goal in the Messiah, and now everyone united to the Messiah shares in that vocation: to make God and his blessings known to the nations.

 

It should be no surprise.  Think all the way back to the beginning of Acts.  Before he ascended Jesus had said to his disciples, “You will be my witnesses...to the end of the earth” and Now Paul’s quoting Isaiah: “...that you might bring salvation to the end of the earth.”  The wording isn’t an accident and Isaiah tells us why!  The church’s mission to the nations isn’t some new programme Jesus started.  It’s the fulfilment of the ancient vocation of God’s people.

 

And now the real problem comes into focus.  Israel was chosen, but chosen for what?  She wasn’t chosen instead of everyone else.  Brothers and Sisters, she was chosen for everyone else.  Think of God’s calling of Abraham: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”  Think of Israel at Mt. Sinai: “You’re “a kingdom of priests”.  And Isaiah: “a light to the nations”.  The blessings of the gentiles, the image of them in Revelation streaming to the New Jerusalem to give glory to God was always there in the hope of Israel.  When God finally did for Israel what he had promised, the nations would benefit.

 

And that, I think, highlights something really important.  Ever since the Reformation, Christians hear “election” and they get bogged down in the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism and what election means.  And that’s not totally unimportant, but it distracts usfrom what may be even more important about election.  Brothers and Sisters, election is vocation.  God’s gifts are never just something we possess.  God blesses people so they can become his blessing.  That was Israel’s calling and now it’s the calling of the Messiah’s people.

 

And if the Jews of Pisidian Antioch don’t think that’s good news, well, the gentiles certainly do.  Look at verse 48: “When the Gentiles heard this, they rejoiced and glorified the word of the Lord. All those who were marked out for the life of the age to come believed.  And the word of the Lord spread through the whole land.”

 

The very thing that made the Jews angry makes the gentiles glad.  Because they’d just heard that Israel’s God intended for them to be part of this all along.  I think Luke kind of implies here that had Paul gone straight to the market and preached to the gentiles, no one would have listened.  But because the Jews heard and rejoiced—at least initially—it gave credence to Paul’s message.  And then the gentiles showed up en mass to hear it.  They wanted to be part of it.  But if it was Jewish, no doubt they knew it probably wasn’t for them, because the Jews were exclusive about everything.  Maybe they thought they could be like the god-fearers and just sort of get a lesser blessing by hanging onto the Jewish coattails.  And that’s just it.  Zechariah had prophesied that one day God would set Israel to rights, that the nations would see, and that ten men from the nations would be grabbing hold of every Jew and saying, “Take us with you, because we’ve heard that God is with you!”  And that’s exactly what’s happening.  Not the way anyone expected, but that’s exactly what’s happening.  And they’re grabbing hold of Paul and Barnabas in joy and in hope because they’ve learned that God meant for this salvation to be for them all along.  The gentiles are not afterthoughts.  They’re not second-class guests at the feast.  They don’t have to be circumcised.  The God of Israel was thinking about them all the way back when he called Abraham.  He was thinking about them when he called Israel to be a kingdom of priests.  He was thinking of them when he spoke of his servant through Isaiah.  And God was thinking about them when he raised Jesus from death.

 

And Luke writes that “All those who were marked out for the life of the age to come believed.”  Again, it’s not about Calvinism or Arminianism.  I like the way James Dunn puts it: Paul had preached that God chose Israel.  Now Luke’s saying that they’re part of God’s purpose too.  The gentiles aren’t crashing Israel’s party.  Israel exists so that the gentiles would eventually be invited.  And it’s not surprising that the word then spread throughout the region.

 

But…  Verse 50: “But the Jews incited the devout aristocratic women and the leading men of the city. They stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and drove them out of their district. They, however, shook the dust off their feet and went on to Iconium. The disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.”

 

Throwing abuse at Paul and Barnabas doesn’t work, so they take a new tack.  Interestingly enough, women of status are unusually prominent in inscriptions connected with the synagogues in Asia Minor, so archaeology kind of bears this out.  These were probably gentile women who sympathised with Judaism and acted as a bridge between the synagogue community and the Roman elite.  The Jews worked the city’s network of influence and got the city elite to do their dirty work.  Paul and Barnabas were driven out.  And, just as Jesus told his disciples to do, they shook the dust from their feet.  That’s not a “good riddance” thing.  It’s a prophetic act that Jesus told his disciples to do in the cities of Galilee when they were rejected.  They’re saying something like, “We brought you God’s word.  You rejected it.  Judgement is coming and the responsibility for how that plays out here now lies with you.”

 

And so they left for Iconium, about 120-140km away.  But the new disciples left behind, they’re not mourning the loss of Paul and Barnabas; they’re rejoicing and full of the Spirit.  Remember what Luke’s shown us all through Acts.  Persecution, pressure, dispersal—they don’t put a stop to the gospel or to the work of the Spirit.  Just the opposite.  Persecution in Jerusalem became the means God used to spread the good news throughout Judaea and into Samaria.  Now it’s the way God spreads the good new to another city.  And it will go on and on like that all through Acts.  And in every place Paul left or was driven out of or ran away from, there was a new church where there had been no church before.

 

So what’s the take-away from this?  I think, Brothers and Sisters, that the big thing is the reminder that God blessed his people for the sake of the world.  Because we have a tendency—sometimes a really big tendency—to turn election into possession.  Think about it.  God chose Israel.  God gave her his law.  God blessed her with his presence.  God made promises to her.  But it was all part of a vocation that went all the way back to Abraham.  God chose this people so that through them he could rescue and bless the nations.

 

The great tragedy is when that gift for mission becomes an identity to defend against the very people to whom the gift should be given.

 

So consider: Like Israel, we are a chosen people.  God has made us his temple.  God has set us apart.  He’s blessed us with his word, with the sacraments, with his presence through his indwelling Spirit.  But this blessing is more than a possession to guard; it’s our vocation, our calling, our mission.

 

The church does not exist merely against the world as an enclave of purity and light.  We exist for the sake of the world.  God’s presence dwells in us so that his presence can go out through us to the nations—and to our families, schools, workplaces, and neighbourhoods.  And as the world sees that light.  As the world hears us proclaiming Jesus, crucified and risen.  As the world sees the grace of God alive in this covenant family called the church, one by one, here and there, those marked out for the life of the age to come believe and rejoice—just like those pagans in Pisidian Antioch did.  Just as you once did.  Just as our pagan ancestors once did when the good news reached them.  The light spreads.  Grace overflows.  And the temple grows and expands until that day when the knowledge of the glory of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.

 

And there’s a second lesson here that helps us with the first.  And that’s that our faithfulness and our success are not measured by our control or our influence or our visible success.  Paul and Barnabas were driven out of town, but that was God’s means of taking the gospel further.  The word spread, the disciples rejoiced, and they were filled with the Spirit.  Brothers and Sisters, this is God’s story.  We try to write it ourselves and in our version of the story we have huge churches and Christianity shapes our culture and our people fill all the political offices.  And we’ve been there.  The result was that we forgot who we are and what we’re supposed to be.  We started spreading a different word, we rejoiced in ourselves, and we stopped relying on the Spirit.

 

Brothers and Sisters, our calling is to be faithful in who God has marked us out to be.  We’re to be the working model of his new creation in the midst of the old.  We’re to be the temple, full of the Spirit, where the world meets the living God and gives him glory.  And it’s his word and his Spirit that have the power and the authority.  Trust God.  Be faithful to our calling.  The word and the Spirit are alive in the church.  And the word and the Spirit are alive and active going out into the world to prepare the way for us.  And when, through the church, those two meet, Jesus does his work and God’s glory shines forth.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty God, whose Son Jesus Christ is the light of the nations, and in whom you have fulfilled your promises to Israel: Grant that we, rejoicing in your grace and filled with your Holy Spirit, may faithfully bear his light into the world; that your word may spread and be glorified, and many may be gathered into the life of your kingdom; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

by William Klock

 

Last Sunday, in the first twelve verses of Acts 13, we saw the Spirit and the church at Antioch send out Saul and Barnabas with the gospel.  Barnabas took Saul to his home country of Cyprus.  They began preaching the good news about Jesus in the synagogue in Salamis and from there they went deep into Roman territory at Paphos.  Kind of amazingly, the Roman governor asked to hear their message.  Elymas, the Jewish magician and false prophet tried to get in their way, and was struck blind.  The governor, Sergius Paulus, believed—and not so much, Luke stresses, because he saw his court magician struck blind, but because he was astonished at the teaching, at the message that Saul—now Paul—and Barnabas were proclaiming.  And last week I stressed the—perhaps—counter-intuitive way Paul and Barnabas went preaching the gospel.  They didn’t go straight to the market place to confront the pagans.  They went to the synagogues and preaches to their fellow Jews.  And I said that this is because the good news is first and foremost Israel’s good news, and I said that we’d see this as we now get into the rest of Chapter 13.

 

Luke didn’t get into the specifics of Paul’s and Barnabas’ preaching in Cyprus.  There he introduced us to the pattern of their mission: to the Jew first and then to the Greek.  This week Luke shows us why.  So look at Acts 13:13.  [Page 1095 in the pew Bibles].

 

“Paul and his companions set off from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia.”  Pamphylia is on the southern coast of Turkey, so they’ve taken a ship from Cyprus and sailed north.  “John, however, left them and went back to Jerusalem.”  Luke doesn’t tell us why John Mark left.  Paul described it later as a betrayal and he was upset with him over it.  Maybe he was scared.  Maybe he was homesick.  Whatever the reasons, he abandoned Paul and Barnabas.  And Luke goes on, “But they went on from Perga and arrived in Antioch of Pisidia…”  Pisidian Antioch was inland in the province of Galatia.  And it was very much Roman territory and a city dedicated not just to Rome and Roman culture, but to the cult of Caesar.  But they don’t go to the town square to confront Romans.  Luke says, just as in Cyprus, “they went into the synagogue on the sabbath day and sat down.  After the reading of the law and the prophets, the ruler of the synagogue sent word to them. ‘My brothers,’ he said, ‘if you have any word of exhortation for the people, let us hear it.’”

 

Paul’s reputation as a learned scholar who had studied under Gamaliel probably preceded him.  Barnabas was a Levite.  I suspect that both of them dressed the part.  But good hospitality meant inviting such prestigious guests to speak to the synagogue and, I think, they got more than they bargained for that day.  Verse 16: “So Paul stood up and motioned with his hand for attention.

‘Men of Israel,’ he said, ‘and the god-fearers among you: listen.  The God of this people Israel chose our fathers, and he raised the people up to greatness during their stay in the land of Egypt. Then he led them out from there with his hand lifted high, and for about forty years he put up with them in the desert.  He drove out seven nations from the land of Canaan, and gave them the land as their inheritance for about four hundred and fifty years.  After that, he gave them judges, up until Samuel the prophet.  After that, they asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man from the tribe of Benjamin. He ruled for forty years, and after God had removed him he raised up for them David as king.  He is the one to whom God bore witness when he said, ‘I have found David, son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will accomplish all my purpose.’

 

So Paul stands up in the synagogue rehearses their history. This was the story they all knew well.  It was the story that defined them as a people—specifically as God’s people.  And Paul rushes through it up to David: From the Patriarchs to Egypt to Caanan to Judges to Saul all very quickly.  But notice what Paul puts all the stress on in the story: God chose.  God made Israel great.  God brought them up out of Egypt.  God was patient with them in the wilderness.  God gave them Canaan.  God gave them judges.  God gave them King Saul.  God raised up King David.  What’s Paul doing?  Brothers and Sisters, he telling Israel’s story as a story of grace.  Long before God send his son, he was establishing his pattern of grace.  We often get the mistaken idea that the religion of the Old Testament was a religion of works and that Jews were trying to earn salvation.  And that’s simply not true.  Paul stresses it here: The old covenant was all about God’s grace.  He chose his people, he saved his people, and he sustained his people.  And in that story we not only see God’s grace at work, but we also see his faithfulness revealed.  Brothers and Sisters, God’s grace has a purpose.

 

Verse 23: “‘From this man’s offspring [that’s from David], in accordance with his promise, God has brought a saviour for Israel: Jesus!  Before he appeared, John had announced a baptism of repentance for the whole people of Israel.  As John was finishing his course, he said, ‘What do you suppose I am? I am not the one.  But look: someone is coming after me, and I am not worthy to untie the sandals on his feet.’”

 

So that question again: Why did Paul first have to preach to Israel?  Here it is: Because you can’t announce Israel’s Messiah without first telling Israel that in him, the God of Israel has kept his promises.  Jesus couldn’t be a Canaanite or a Greek or a Roman or a German or an Egyptian or anything else.  Jesus is the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel.  Jesus is the climax of Israel’s story.  Jesus is the great proof of God’s gracious faithfulness.  And so Jesus’ mission begins with setting Israel to rights.  That’s why John called the men and women of Israel out to the wilderness, to pass through the waters of the Jordan in baptism as an act of repentance.  The great exodus of which their exodus from Egypt was just a shadow, the new Passover of which the old was just a shadow, the King of whom even the great King David was only a shadow, had come and John was calling the people to a great reset, a great act of national repentance in preparation for what God was about to do—an act that he’d been preparing his people for since the beginning.

 

Verse 16: “‘My brothers,” Paul continued, “sons of Abraham’s family, and the god-fearers among you: it is to us that the word of this salvation has been sent!  The people who live in Jerusalem, and their rulers, didn’t recognize him, and they fulfilled the words of the prophets which are read to them every sabbath by condemning him.  Even though they found no reason to condemn him to death, they asked Pilate to have him killed.  When they had completed everything that had been written about him in prophecy, they took him down from the cross and put him in a tomb.  But God raised him from the dead, and he was seen for several days by those who had come with him from Galilee to Jerusalem. They are now his witnesses to the people.’

 

Luke noted before that there were gentile god-fearers in the synagogue along with the Jews, but Paul makes a point of it here as he addresses them and says, to us this word of salvation has been sent.  It might be a little subtle, but I expect they picked up on it.  Paul’s including these uncircumcised gentiles in the story.  And then he continues with Jesus: The people in Jerusalem and the rulers of Israel refused to recognise him as the true King.  Men who had read the prophets their whole lives, men who believed the prophets, nevertheless were completely oblivious to the prophets even as they fulfilled them by condemning Jesus to death.

 

And the Jews sitting in this synagogue in Pisidian Antioch listening to Paul, they read those same prophets, they know those same prophets, they believe those same prophets, so there’s a warning in Paul’s preaching here.  It’s entirely possible to know God’s word inside-out, backwards and forwards and still fail to understand the story.  The Jews in Jerusalem rejected Jesus.  They ruled that he was a false Messiah and insisted Pilate crucify him.  And then the great reversal—another one of those “But God…” statements.  If you want to sum up all of human history, it’s “But God…”  Human beings did this, human beings did that, but God…”  They killed Jesus, and then Paul says, “But God raised him from the dead.”

 

The Jewish people rendered a verdict against Jesus.  The Jewish rulers rendered a verdict against Jesus.  Pilate, the Roman governor rendered a verdict against Jesus.  And just as everyone thought it was settled, God rendered his own verdict.  God gets the last word and God’s word is resurrection.  And Paul stresses—because now is the moment when these people in the synagogue are going to have to choose whether they will reject Jesus or whether they will repent and believe the gospel—Paul stresses that there were witnesses to God’s verdict.

 

And then, verse 32, this is what it means.  This is why it’s important: “‘We are here now to bring you the good news which was promised to the fathers, that God has fulfilled this promise to us, their children, by raising Jesus. This corresponds, indeed, to what is written in the second psalm: ‘You are my son; this day I have begotten you.’ That he raised him from the dead, never more to return to corruption, conforms to what was written: ‘I will give you the holy and faithful mercies of David.’  Because, as it says in another place, ‘You will not hand over your Holy One to see “corruption.’  Now David served his own generation, and in the purposes of God he fell asleep and was gathered to his fathers.  He did experience corruption.  But the one God raised up did not experience corruption.

 

Brothers and Sisters, this is the good news: The God of Israel has done what he promised.  I ran across this gem written by Tom Wright in his Acts for Everyone, “It is fatally easy for the church to tell the story of Jesus while simply ignoring the entire story of Israel. That is the way to produce a shallow, sub-biblical and ultimately dangerous theology.”  If you ignore or strip out the story, the good news ceases to be the good news.  Paul quotes from Psalm 2, Isaiah 55, and Psalm 16 and he doesn’t just throw these passages out as prooftexts.  They are the story.  They’re what make the good news truly good news.  He quotes from Psalm 2, “You are my son…”  Psalm 2 is one of the royal psalms.  It’s about King David.  The king represented the people and if Israel was God’s beloved son, then so was the king.  In fact, the king became the embodiments of that beloved sonship.  And Paul is now telling these fellow Jews—and the gentiles in their midst—that when he raised Jesus from the dead, he publicly vindicated Jesus as the Messiah and, not only that, he enthroned him as the promised, eternal Davidic King.  I suspect Paul makes an especial point of Jesus as the King here, because this was Pisidian Antioch, also called Colonia Caesarea—Caesar’s colony.  It was a city devoted to Caesar—temples, monuments, the name.  It was all about King Caesar and the Pax Romana he brought.  And in that city Paul announces that the God of Israel raised David’s son from death and installed him as creation’s true King.  God’s promises to David are now being fulfilled in Jesus.  Good news.

 

And then Isaiah 55:3.  “I will give you the holy and faithful mercies of David.”  We can’t unpack all of Isaiah 53-55 this morning, but this is where God promised that one day new life would break out all through creation on the basis of the work of the suffering servant (Isaiah 53) and that he would come and renew his covenant (Isaiah 54).  “Ho, everyone who is thirsty!” shouts Isaiah, “Come to the waters!  Come and drink!  It’s all free!  And it’s for everyone!”  And Paul reminds them of this prophecy—one they surely knew well—to say that these mercies of David are being thrown open, not just to Israel, but to any gentiles who will repent and believe this good news as well.  Because God has been faithful to his promises in and through Jesus, this good news can go out to the entire world.  And in that, the promise of Isaiah 55 is being fulfilled: God’s word is going out into the world to renew and heal and transform—to set all of creation to rights.  Good news.

 

And just in case they’re thinking “No, this Jesus can’t fulfil the prophesies about David, because the Messiah isn’t supposed to die,” Paul reminds them of Psalm 16, “You will not hand over your holy one to corruption.”  And he argues very simply: David served God’s purpose, David died, David was buried, David decayed to dust.  So David cannot be the ultimate fulfilment of the promise.  The greater David has come.  Jesus the Messiah, whom God raised from the dead.  And if Jesus is King, that’s not just some interesting historical fact or theological truth to affirm and file away.  So Paul—I imagine him being pretty animated at this point—he goes on in verse 38:

 

“So let it be known to you therefore, my brothers and sisters, that forgiveness of sins is announced through him, and that everything from which you were unable to be set right by the law of Moses, by him everyone who believes is set right.  Beware, then, lest what the prophets foretold comes true of you: ‘Look out, you scoffers—be amazed, and disappear!  I am doing something in your days, a work which you wouldn’t believe even if someone were to explain it to you.’”

 

This is the great announcement: “Let it be known to you therefore…”  And as they say, when you see the word “therefor”, ask what it’s there for.  Jesus is David’s promised son.  God raised him from the dead.  In him the scriptures, Israel’s story, have been fulfilled.  Therefore, forgiveness is announced through him.  Again, “forgiveness of sins is announced through him, and that everything from which you were unable to be set right by the law of Moses, by him everyone who believes is set right—or we could translate it “set free” or even “justified” or “acquitted”.  Good news.

 

To be clear, what Paul is not saying is that Judaism is a religion of works and Jesus has now, in contrast, established a covenant of grace.  Paul has made it clear that God has been working through grace all along through Israel’s story.  The God who gave the torah is the same God who chose Israel, delivered Israel, gave Israel the promise land, sustained her in it, gave her kings, and promised her David’s son.  Torah was a gift of grace that created a holy people fit for God’s greater gift of grace: his presence.  So what Paul is saying here is that the law of Moses was God’s good gift, but it could only take Israel so far.  It could expose sin, restrain sin, order the life of Israel, and provide a means of forgiveness.  But it could never ultimately solve the problem of sin.  It could not raise the dead.  It could not bring Israel’s story all the way to the promised goal.  It could not create the renewed people through whom Abraham’s blessing would finally go out to the nations.  Because the law was written on tablets of stone.  What the people ultimately needed was the law written on their hearts.  And God has finally done that in Jesus—and in the Spirit, although Paul doesn’t carry the argument quite that far here.

 

Paul says, “Everyone who believes…”  He’s been addressing sons of Abraham, and he’s been addressing the gentile god-fearers in their midst, and now everyone is set to rights in the Messiah.  And this was the astounding thing that Barnabas saw back in Acts 11 when he first went to Antioch and reported back that he saw there the grace of God.  How could uncircumcised gentiles sit at the same table with Jewish believers?  Why would Barnabas look at that and say, “I see the grace of God?”  It’s because the boundary of God’s renewed people is no longer circumcision, no longer torah, but Jesus the Messiah.  Everyone who believes the good news about him is set to rights through him—is made pure and washed clean by his blood to be a dwelling place for God himself in the Holy Spirit.  And in that, God in the Messiah has accomplished the very thing he so gracious promised he would do through Abraham: he would make his name known to the nations and take his blessings to them.

 

But the flip side of this good news is a warning: Paul warns them with the words of Habakkuk 1:5, “Look out, you scoffers—be amazed, and disappear!  I am doing something in your days, a work which you wouldn’t believe even if someone were to explain it to you.”  Habakkuk had warned Judah about the work—the judgement—he was about to accomplish through their conquest by Babylon.  Now Paul applies that same warning to them: The Jewish people and rulers in Jerusalem spent their lives hearing the prophets every sabbath, they knew them inside-out, and yet when God sent Jesus to fulfil them, they refused to recognise or to acknowledge what God was doing.  And Paul’s now saying to these people: Don’t do the same thing.  Don’t be the next people in whom a prophetic warning is fulfilled!

 

And remember, Paul’s speaking from experience.  He was as immersed in those scriptures as anyone ever was.  He was as zealous for Israel’s God as anyone was.  And he still found himself standing in God’s way.  Last Sunday Elymas became a mirror of Paul’s old self.  This Sunday Paul’s warning the synagogue and basically saying, “I know what it is to think that you’re defending God, when you’re actually resisting what he’s doing.  Don’t do what I did!

 

And the people, they seem to have recognised that Paul preached with authority—not unlike Jesus himself—and they heeded his warning.  Luke finishes in verse 42: “As Paul and Barnabas were leaving, they begged them to come back the next sabbath and tell them more about these things.  Many of the Jews and devout proselytes followed them once the synagogue was dismissed. They [that’s Paul and Barnabas] spoke to them some more, and urged them to remain in God’s grace.”

 

They urged them to remain in God’s grace.  Brothers and Sisters, what is grace?  I hope that after hearing Paul’s preaching here we can see that it’s not just God blessing people who don’t deserve it.  That’s kind of the dictionary definition of grace: God’s unmerited favour.  And that’s not wrong, but it doesn’t go far enough.  Paul stresses here that there’s more to it than that.  God’s grace is his covenant faithfulness overflowing.  Not just blessings in general, but the blessings of his covenant overflowing to Jew and gentile alike because his Messiah has dealt with our sin.  This is what Barnabas saw in Antioch as Jews and gentiles became one family in Jesus.  It’s what Paul’s now preaching in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch.

 

God chose, God rescued, God promised, God gave King David, and God gave King Jesus the saviour.  And when sinful, rebellious men and women rejected and crucified him, God raised him from the dead.  And in that, God sets everyone to rights who repents and believes this good news.  That’s the word of salvation and that’s why Paul first went to his fellow Jews.  Because the good news is the fulfilment of God’s promises to his people.  Because God has kept his promises to Israel in Jesus, the promise he made to Abraham can now reach its intended goal: blessing for the nations.  And when we come in faith to this God who is unlike any other, perhaps at first simply out of amazement and to give him glory, he welcomes us to be part of this new people centred in the Messiah.  Brothers and Sisters, this is grace.  The realisation of the covenant faithfulness of the God of Israel.  As Paul says here: Remain in it.  Live in this wonderful thing God has done.  Trust the King whom God has raised from the dead.  Finally, become the people God is creating by his grace: a single people, purified by the blood of Jesus, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and a witness to the nations of God’s amazing grace.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty God, who fulfilled your promises to Israel by raising Jesus the Messiah from the dead, and through him proclaims forgiveness to all who believe: Grant us grace to receive the word of this salvation and to continue steadfastly in your grace; that, set right by your mercy and made one people in your Son, we may bear faithful witness to your faithfulness before the nations; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

by William Klock

 

I read The Hobbit when I was in Fourth Grade, which was probably the perfect time to read it.  Still a pretty little kid, reading about the fantastic adventure of the little hobbit, Bilbo Baggins.  And it seemed like such a big adventure and such a long journey.  Gandalf the wizard pushes Bilbo out the door of his oh-so-comfortable hobbit hole on a grand adventure to another land, to defeat a dragon, and to recover a king’s treasure.  And when I was done I went on to read The Lord of the Rings and it made Bilbo’s grand adventure seem like a trip down the block.  It was truly epic.  And it was in the first chapters of The Lord of the Rings that you realise The Hobbit was just the prelude.  It introduced the One Ring, but having introduced it, there was now a far, far bigger story to tell and far, far greater adventure to have.

 

And I’ve been thinking that Acts feels a lot like that when we get to Chapter 13.  Up this point the church has been on this grand gospel-Holy Spirit adventure as the good news about Jesus has gone out from Jerusalem to Judaea and Samaria and even to a handful of gentiles in the area.  God’s new creation is being born.  And everything we’ve read is pretty astounding.  God is at work in his people.  And at the end of Chapter 12, Herod the king—the devil’s last attempt to recork the gospel bottle—God strikes him down.  And Luke says the word of God grew and multiplied.

 

But now with Chapter 13, Luke starts to make it clear that this was just the prologue.  The real gospel adventure is about to begin—the one that will take his people to the ends of the earth.  And it begins in Antioch—the crossroads of the eastern part of the Roman Empire.  But like The Lord of the Rings begins in a comfortable little hobbit hole, the great adventure of Acts begins in church.  Look at Acts 13 [page 1095 in the pew Bibles]:

 

“In the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Symeon called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen from the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.  As they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”  So they fasted and prayed; and then they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

 

Remember how Barnabas, when he went to check on what the apostles had heard was happening in Antioch, Barnabas declared that he saw the grace of God at work.  That was his response to seeing Jewish and gentile believers living together, worshipping and praying together, taking care of each other, and probably most of all: gathering at one table to share the Lord’s Supper.  Jews and gentiles didn’t do that, but in Jesus God’s new creation was taking shape right there in Antioch.  And now Luke shows us a more detailed picture of this grace in the leadership of the church there.  There’s Barnabas, a Levite from Cyprus; Simeon Niger, well he’s got a Jewish first name and a Latin cognomen which might imply he was black; Lucius of Cyrene in North Africa; Manaen, who has somehow connection with the court of Herod, but is now teaching and prophesying in the church; and finally Saul, a Benjaminite.  This group of men foreshadows what’s going to happen in the rest of Acts—not all that unlike the way all those Jews from around the empire did back in Acts 2 at Pentecost.

 

And these men were worshipping and fasting.  Brothers and Sisters, you want to see the church grow?  You want to see mission happen?  Be faithful in the basics.  Worship and fast.  If the contemporary church were more faithful in both, if we actually invested in worship that glorifies God instead of so much experience-oriented worshiptainment, if we fasted and prayed more, I think we would see not only a healthier church, but we’d also see a greater impact of the gospel, of our witness in the world around us.

 

Maybe we’d hear the Holy Spirit speak as he spoke to the church in Antioch.  “Set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”  Notice: Saul and Barnabas are not being called for the first time.  Jesus had called Saul on the road to Damascus.  The church isn’t giving him this vocation.  The Spirit has done that already.  The Spirit calls the church to formally recognise that calling.  Much as the people of Israel laid hands on the Levites to recognise their calling by God to be their priests, now the church lays hands on Saul and Barnabas as a way of recognising their calling and to commission them.  And notice, it’s the Spirit who sends them, not the church.  The job of the church is to release them for the mission the Spirit gave.  Sometimes we get this upside-down in the church.  We develop models of ministry where the church does the calling and the bishops give the empowerment, but in the New Testament it’s the other way round: God calls and the church discerns.  The Spirit sends and the church releases.

 

And in Antioch it meant that the church releases two of its most important leaders.  Saul and Barnabas are not extra staff members that the Antioch church could do without.  They’re probably the church’s two main teachers.  Saul’s been there a while and Barnabas went there to sort of represent the apostles.  Listening to the Spirit on this is going to cost them something.  I think of Bp. Grote, who established a network of churches around Houston.  Any time any of them started getting up to around a hundred people, he’d pull twenty or thirty people out to start a new church.  One church in particular seemed to be the one that had that happen over and over and I remember their rector—who knew it was all well and good—but after a while lamented: Why is it always my church?  But Brothers and Sisters, here’s the thing: God is fulfilling his promise to take Abraham’s blessing to the nations and the attitude of the church should never be, “We can’t afford to lose those people”.  Remember, this is God’s church, not ours.  Our attitude should always be that we’re available for whatever God needs us to do.  We’ll trust him to fill the gaps, whether that’s people or resources or money or whatever.

 

Too often we think we have a mission and we ask God to bless it.  It’s really the other way round: God has a mission, empowered by the gospel and the Spirit, and we’re called into it.  The other mistake we often make is knowing our calling, but then waiting on too many specifics from God before we follow it.  Look at verses 4-6:

 

“So being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia. From there they set sail to Cyprus, and when they arrived in Salamis they announced God’s word in the Jewish synagogues. John was with them as their assistant.  They went through the whole of the island, all the way to Paphos”

 

The Spirit told them what to do.  Where to go?  They went where it made sense.  They set sail for Cyprus, because that’s where Barnabas was from.  They knew there were already believers who ended up there after being scattered by the Jewish authorities in the aftermath of Stephen’s stoning.  The Spirit sent them out.  Practical matters, human relationships, their own judgement told them where to go.  The two aren’t mutually exclusive or contradictory.  In fact, we see both the Spirit and human wisdom working hand in hand all through the New Testament.  Sometimes the Spirit also tells us where to go or how to do what he calls us to, but if he doesn’t, we can miss his calling—we can become disobedient—sitting around waiting for him to reveal the specifics.

 

So Saul and Barnabas arrive in Salamis and notice what they do: The don’t start preaching to gentiles in the market; they immediately proclaim the word of God in the synagogues—to the Jews.  Saul might be called to be the apostle to the gentiles, but that doesn’t mean he stops preaching to his own people.  And there’s a really important reason for that.  It’ll come out pretty explicitly in the later part of Acts 13 next week, but it’s embodied in Saul’s statement in Romans 1: “to the Jews first and also to the Greek”.  Brothers and Sisters, the good news is first and foremost Israel’s good news.  The God of Israel has fulfilled his promises to his people, promises going all the way back to Abraham, in Jesus the Messiah.  And he’s done that so that Abraham’s blessing can now go out to the nations.  The good news is a revelation of God’s faithfulness and through that his glory.  When we see the nations streaming to the God of Israel in John’s vision in Revelation, it is first and foremost because in the God of Israel they see—for the first time—a God who is worthy of their praise, their worship, and their loyalty—a God who has kept his promises to his own people and through that has both welcomed the nations and given them a reason to come to him in faith.  So Saul knew that when his own people hear the good news about Jesus and believe, their belief becomes a witness to the gentiles that the God of Israel keeps his promises.  So Saul and Barnabas began in the heart of the Jewish community on Cyprus, then took the road around the south side all the way to Paphos in the west—into the heart of the gentile community.  Paphos was the Roman administrative centre of the island.  Look at verses 6-8:

 

“There they found a magician, a Jewish false prophet named Bar-Jesus.  He was with the governor, Sergius Paulus, who was an intelligent man.  He [that’s Sergius Paulus] called Barnabas and Saul and asked to hear the word of God.  The magician Elymas (that’s the translation of his name) was opposing them, and doing his best to turn the governor away from the faith.”

 

We might expect the Roman governor to be another Pontius Pilate or maybe another Herod—someone who will immediately and violently oppose the gospel.  But Luke says Sergius Paulus was genuinely interested.  The problem, very ironically, is this Jewish magician who has the governor’s ear.  Luke describes him as magos and false prophet.  A magus was usually someone who claimed to interpret dreams or was an astrologer or otherwise had access to arcane or occult knowledge—which goes right along with the idea that he was also a false prophet.  A prominent Roman might include someone like this in his entourage.  That Sergius Paulus was interested in hearing out Saul and Barnabas says he was probably one of those Romans who was into arcane religious and occult stuff.  If he heard that the gods—or a God—had spoken, he wanted to know what was said.  If the stars were sending a message, he wanted someone around who could tell him what it was.  And Bar Jesus—or Elymas, his Greek name—has claimed to speak for the God of Israel, so Sergius Paulus is interested in these two Jewish missionaries with “good news”.  But Elymas puts himself between the governor and the good news.

 

So this isn’t a showdown between something like “rational Christianity” and “superstition”.  This is a contest over who truly speaks for God.  Verse 9:

 

“But Saul, also named Paul, looked intently at him, filled with the Holy Spirit.  “You’re full of trickery and every kind of villainy!” he said. “You’re a son of the devil! You’re an enemy of everything that’s right!  When are you going to stop twisting the paths that God has made straight?  Now see here: the Lord’s hand will be upon you, and you will be blind for a while; you won’t even be able to see the sun!”  At once mist and darkness fell on him, and he went about looking for someone to lead him by the hand.”

 

This is suddenly the point where Luke decides to tell us that from now on Saul is going to go by Paul.  Why here?  I’m not sure.  I don’t think anyone is.  But it seems clear that Saul has had this other Greek name, Paul, all along.  That wasn’t uncommon.  And in Paul’s case it probably makes sense for a Jew who came from the Greek-speaking world.  Saul was a good Jewish name.  Saul was the first King of Israel, remember, and a Benjaminte like Saul.  But in Greek you’d say Saulos and in classical Greek, saulos described an effeminate sort of walking or dancing and even though no one used the word anymore in the First Century, people were still familiar with it.  One of those unfortunate times when a perfectly good name in one language happens to be the same as a problematic word in another.  But why the change here?  I think probably because up to this point Luke wants us to understand just how thoroughly Jewish Saul was, but this is the point at which Saul, for the first time, really brings the gospel to the gentile world.  So from here on out, as the apostle to the gentiles fulfils his calling, Luke’s going to call him Paul.

 

But more importantly, getting back to the action of the story, Luke says that being filled with the Holy Spirit—empowered, emboldened by God—Paul confronts Elymas.  The Spirit didn’t call Paul here for nothing and he’s going to make sure Paul finished his mission.  The Spirit of truth confronts a false prophet full of lies.  This man called “Bar Jesus—son of Jesus or Joshua turns out to be a “son of the devil”.  Paul calls him out as an “enemy of everything that’s right” and he asks, “When are you going to stop twisting the paths that God has made straight?”  Paul calls out Elymas as doing exactly the opposite of what John the Baptist and what Jesus’ disciples have been doing.  They’ve been making the way straight for the gospel, for the news that in Jesus the God of Israel has come back to dwell with his people.  Elymas, however, by whispering lies into the ear of the governor and trying to turn him away from the gospel, he’s making crooked what God has been making straight.  Salvation for the nations is supposed to come from the Jews, but this particular Jew is twisting and forsaking his calling.

 

That’s not the place you want to be.  The God of Israel has been making a straight road for the good news of forgiveness, redemption, resurrection, new creation to go out to the nations and Elymas has planted himself firmly in the middle of that road and tried to setup a road block.  And the God of Israel confronts him much as he did Paul when he was on the road to Damascus.  Elymas is struck blind.  And Luke makes an obvious and deliberate point of tell us about this in a way that parallels Paul’s experience.  Paul opposed Jesus and the God of Israel.  Elymas opposes Jesus and the God of Israel.  Paul tried to keep people from believing in and following Jesus.  Elymas is trying to keep Sergius Paulus from believing and following Jesus.  Paul was blinded.  Elymas is blinded.  Paul was led by the hand.  Elymas now goes stumbling around looking for someone to lead him by the hand.  Paul used to be like Elymas.  Now Paul is like Jesus.  And so Paul isn’t here thundering judgement against some wicked gentile.  Paul’s really looking at his former self.  And he knows what it means to think that you’re serving God when what you’re really doing is unwittingly putting yourself in God’s way.  Paul knows what it’s like to be blinded by God.  And Paul also knows that just because God has struck you blind doesn’t mean you’ll be stuck in the dark forever.  God’s judgement is real, but so is his grace.

 

I suspect Paul, seeing his past self in Elymas, sincerely hoped—even prayed—that Elymas might see the light because of the blindness God put on him.  Because Paul knew as well as anyone that the same Jesus who confronts his enemies is also the Jesus who can turn those enemies into apostles.  Because Paul knew that the same God who will surely judge the wicked and one day wipe them from creation when he sets all to rights, is also the God who gave his own son as a sacrifice for the sins of the wicked.  The God of Israel is a god who loves and seeks the lost and who rejoices when his enemies, through the blood of Jesus, become his beloved sons and daughters.  And that’s a powerful word.  Luke doesn’t tell us what became of Elymas, but look at verse 12:

 

“When the governor saw what had happened, he believed, since he was astonished at the teaching of the Lord.”

 

He believed.  And he wasn’t astonished at Paul’s power.  He wasn’t astonished at the miracle as his court magician suddenly becomes blind.  That simply got the false prophet out of the way.  No, what Luke says is that Sergius Paulus was astonished at the teaching—the didache—of the Lord.  Again, think of this pagan Roman governor who has surrounded himself with an entourage that includes a Jewish prophet. A false prophet, but still someone who claimed to speak for a foreign god.  We might in today’s language, call Sergius Paulus a seeker.  In that time a lot of Romans were drawn to exotic foreign gods and religions.  The governor may have been bored with the Roman pantheon—with gods who were unknowable.  He was looking for something—anything—that would connect him with the divine.  Mystery religions, the occult, whatever.  And now Paul preaches the good news of a God who—unlike any god this Roman had ever heard of—humbled himself to take on our flesh and to die on a cross for our sins.  He heard a message of a God who makes promises and keeps them.  He heard a message of a God who is not only faithful, but who is full love and grace and mercy.  He heard of a God who has submitted himself to the great humility of the cross, all in order to purify his people so that he can live with them.  No other god would do that.  There was and never has been another story, another gospel that even comes close to resembling our good news.  This was astounding in the Roman world.  And Sergius Paulus was astonished.  And he believed.  What “believed” means, Luke doesn’t elaborate.  If Sergius Paulus actually became a Christian it’s odd that Luke says nothing of his baptism.  Maybe that came sometime later after Paul and Barnabas were gone.  But he believed.  At the very least, this Roman governor became a friend of the gospel.

 

Acts 12 showed us the gospel surviving opposition.  Acts 13 shows us the gospel going on the offensive.  Herod tried to put the cork in the bottle and God struck him down.  Now the gospel’s being poured out well beyond Judaea.  And the gospel is spreading, not through violence, conquest, coercion, political manipulation, or magic, but as the Spirit sends gospel witnesses to announce to the nations what the God of Israel has done in Jesus the Messiah.  And it’s truly good news beyond anything anyone in that world could have imagined.

 

And here’s the thing to really take note of in conclusion.  Brothers and Sisters, God uses his people to fulfil his purpose.  He used Israel to take his blessings to the nations and now he’s using his church to further that blessing.  But the success of this mission does not lie with us.  It lies with God.  Paul himself is a witness to the fact that none of is naturally even on God’s side.  We are gospel ministers because the same grace that we proclaim has first conquered us.  And so when the gospel task seems overwhelming, remember that our confidence is never in our own plans or abilities, it’s not in our eloquence, cleverness, discernment, or courage.  God can and will certainly use those things.  But ultimately our confidence is in him.  The Spirit calls.  The Spirit sends.  The Spirit fills.  And the word goes forward in power.  Even the people who stand in the way today, by God’s grace, can become the people carrying it to the world tomorrow.  And in that we see God’s glory—and so will the world.

 

Let’s pray: O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

The book of Acts isn’t just a collection of stories that happened long ago.  It begins long ago, but it’s the story of the church as it carries on the mission and ministry of Jesus and the Spirit.  And Brothers and Sisters, that makes it very much our story.  It makes it the story that should shape who we are, what we do, how we respond to events around us.  It’s that last one—how we respond to events around us—that seems particularly important to me as we come to Acts 12 today.  We’ve seen the early church persecuted, but how does she respond?  Do those brother and sisters panic?  No.  They pray.  And they trust the Lord.  Even when they didn’t fully understand.  They trusted the Lord.

 

Remember that Jesus, before he ascended, told his disciples that they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem and Judaea, then in Samaria, and eventually to the ends of the whole earth.  For eleven chapters Luke has shown us this promise unfolding and all along the way he’s also shown us the authorities trying to stop it.  First the priestly authorities. Arrests, threats, and imprisonments.  And the church continued to grow.  Then Saul, the zealous Pharisee, came after the church, breathing threats.  He was going to crush Jesus’ people.  And God did something amazing.  He didn’t defeat Saul; he sent Jesus to meet him on the road to Damascus.  And suddenly Paul believed.  He became an apostle.  The devil, the powers, the principalities of this wicked age had done their worst to stop the gospel and the Spirit and despite their efforts, the message about Jesus has filled Jerusalem, Judaea, and Samaria.  It’s even begun to make inroads into the gentile community.  It’s poised to go out to the ends of the earth.  And so the enemy has one last chance to stop this movement before it’s completely out of the bottle: King Herod.

 

Back in Acts 4, after Peter and John had been released from prison, the disciples had gathered together to talk about what happened, but mostly to pray.  And what strikes me there is how well they knew the story they were living in.  They saw their nation raging against them and they prayed Psalm 2: “Why did the nations fly into a rage…The kings of the earth arose…against the Lord and against his anointed Messiah.”  I wonder if, as they were praying the Psalm the could hear or they could picture the Lord, on his throne, laughing at these raging nations who think they can stop his Messiah.  They prayed Psalm 2 back then and now they see that prayer answered as the King of the Jews—the earthly, corrupt, human one—flies into a rage at Jesus, the real King, and his people.  And Luke kind of asks here: What happens when earthly kings set themselves up against the true Lord of creation?  And how should the Lord’s people respond?  So look at 12:1-5 [Page 1094]:

 

“Around that time, King Herod laid violent hands on some people in the church.  He killed James the brother of John with the sword.  When he saw that it pleased the Judaeans, he proceeded to arrest Peter, too. (This was around the time of the Festival of Unleavened Bread.)  So, when he had seized him, he put him in prison, and gave four squads of soldiers the job of guarding him, with the intention of bringing him out to the people after Passover.  So Peter was kept in prison.  But the church prayed earnestly to God on his behalf.”

 

This is Herod Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the Great, and he’s pretty much just as obsessed with holding onto his throne as is his grandfather was—you know, the guy who had all the baby boys in Bethlehem kills because he heard the King of the Jews had been born there.  So he’s watched as this Jesus movement has grown throughout his kingdom.  He’s listened as they openly proclaimed that Jesus is the King of the Jews.  And even though they weren’t fomenting rebellion or anything close to it, he saw a threat to his position.  And so, says Luke very bluntly, he killed James with a sword.  James the son of Zebedee.  In Mark 10, Jesus had asked him if he and his brother, John, were prepared to drink his cup.  And now Herod kills James with a sword.

 

And he saw it pleased his people, so then he goes after Peter.  He thought that if he could take out the leaders of this movement, he could kill the whole thing off.  But there’s something chillingly political about it all.  Something that feels very contemporary in that way.  He killed James.  I didn’t stop the gospel.  But he went up in the polls, so now he schemes to kill Peter.

 

And Luke tells us twice that this happened around Passover—the feast where Israel remembered God’s deliverance of them from a tyrant.  Luke paints this almost as a mini exodus.  No Jewish reader could hear “Passover”, “king”, “prison”, and “deliverance from his hand” and not have the exodus humming in the back of their minds.  So he arrests Peter.  And he puts him behind iron bars and surrounds him with sixteen soliders.

 

And just as they’d prayed before, the church prays again.  And it’s worth pausing here.  I know, I’m getting a little ahead of the story, but we all know the outcome.  Peter is delivered.  But why not James?  I’m sure the church was praying just as hard when James was arrested.  Imagine being James’ mother and asking, “Why did God deliver Peter and not my son?”  Luke doesn’t give us an answer, but it’s a powerful reminder that prayer doesn’t control providence.  This is where we need to remember that we inhabit the story God is writing.  We don’t write our own stories.  I think we sometimes get the pious idea that we can use prayer to do that—to write our own stories—to get God to do what we want.  We probably wouldn’t say it out loud quite that way, but I know we often think of prayer that way.  And so we need the reminder—the one in Luke’s unspoken words here—that that’s not what prayer is.  That’s not how it works.  God is writing the story and he’s a better story teller than we are, because he—unlike us—he is perfectly wise and perfectly good and perfectly just.  Brothers and Sisters, prayer, instead, is a show of trust.  It’s how we entrust ourselves to the goodness of God—even when things don’t look good from our limited perspective.  Now, continuing with verse 6: “On the night when Herod was intending to bring Peter out, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains.  There were guards on the doors, watching the prison.  Suddenly an angel of the Lord stood there, and a light shone in the cell.  The angel struck Peter on the side and woke him up.  “Get up quickly!” he said.  The chains fell off his hands.  Then the angel spoke again.  “Get dressed and put on your sandals,” he said.  So Peter did.  “Put on your cloak and follow me,” said the angel.”

 

“So he went out, following the angel. He didn’t think all this business with the angel was really happening.  He thought he was seeing a vision.  They went through the first set of guards; then the second; and then they came to the iron gate that led into the city.  It opened all by itself.  They went out and walked along a street.  Suddenly the angel left him.  Then Peter came to his senses.

“Now I know it’s true!” he said.  “The Lord sent his angel and snatched me out of the hand of Herod.  He rescued me from all the things the Judaeans were intending to do.”

 

Herod wasn’t messing around.  He had Peter guarded as well as he possible could have.  And suddenly an angel shows up.  And he strikes Peter.  Keep that in mind, because it’s not the only time God is going to strike someone in this story.  But here, I suspect Luke intended this to be funny, the angel strikes Peter to wake him and starts giving him commands: “Get up! Get dressed!  Hey, don’t forget to put your shoes on!  Sheesh, and your coat!”  It’s like trying to wake up your kindergartener and get him out the door to the bus.  And the soldiers, they do nothing.  It’s almost like Daniel in the lions’ den.  The great iron gate opens at the angel’s command.  And the whole time Peter thinks he’s having another vision—like the one he had on that rooftop in Joppa.  It’s not until he’s finally outside, walking down the street, and the angel disappears, and he’s still there outside the prison that Peter finally realises it wasn’t a vision.  It really happened and he’s free.  Herod thought he had Peter safely in his hand, but Herod didn’t account for God.  And then Rhoda.  Look at verse 12:

 

“Once he had realized this, he went to the house of Mary, John Mark’s mother.  Lots of people were gathered there, praying.  Peter knocked at the door in the outer gate, and a maid called Rhoda came to answer it.  When she heard Peter’s voice, she was so excited she didn’t open the gate. Instead, she ran back in and told them that Peter was standing outside the gate. “You’re out of your mind!” they said to her.  But she insisted that it really was true.

“It must be his angel!” they said.”

 

Again, I think Luke intends for this to be funny.  The iron gate of the prison opens for Peter, but the maid won’t open the door of Mary’s house and leaves him outside—which is not a good place for a fugitive to be.  It strikes me that maybe one of Luke’s points here is that these aren’t spiritual superheroes.  They’re just ordinary Christians like us.  They were praying for Peter, but when they hear he’s outside, they don’t believe the report.  Consider that they tell the girl it’s Peter’s “angel”—I won’t take the lid off that can of worms this morning—but it sounds like they’re thinking he’s dead—executed like James.  In which case, they were praying for him not so much to be released, but to be steadfast to the end.  I suspect it was a bit of both, but mostly the latter.  They didn’t know what would happen.  They knew they couldn’t write the story themselves.  So they prayed.  They entrust Peter and the whole situation to the God they knew is faithful.  Kings may rage against the Messiah and his people, but as Psalm 2 says, they knew the Lord sits in heaven and laughs.  His Messiah will sit on his holy hill.

 

Verse 16:  “Meanwhile Peter carried on knocking.  They opened the door and saw him, and were astonished.  He made a sign with his hand for them to be quiet.  Then he told them how the Lord had led him out of the prison.  “Tell this to James, and to the other brothers [and sisters],” he said.  Then he left and went somewhere else.  When morning came, there was quite a commotion among the guards as to what had become of Peter.  Herod looked for him but couldn’t find him.  He interrogated the guards and ordered them to be put to death.  Then he left Judaea and went down to Caesarea, and stayed there.”

 

So they finally open the door for Peter and tells them what happened.  It’s not safe for him in Jerusalem, so he takes off.  Luke doesn’t elaborate on that at this point, but it is how he sort of segues things.  From now on, James—not James the son of Zebedee whom Herod killed, but James the brother of Jesus—James is going to be the leader of the church in Jerusalem.  Peter now exits the stage and that’s important.  Acts is not an apostolic biography.  Luke doesn’t even tell us where Peter went.  Because what Acts is actually about it what Jesus is doing through his church.  This is the continuation of Luke’s gospel.  In the gospel Luke reports everything that Jesus began to do and to say.  In Acts he tells us how it all continues.  Yes, Jesus works through his people, but it’s Jesus who’s at the centre of the story.

 

And then morning comes and Herod can’t find Peter and he’s furious—furious enough that he kills Peter’s guards.  Sixteen men.  Luke makes a point of showing us this early king in his raging.  He really is the local embodiment in Judaea of the principalities and powers that stand against Jesus and the gospel.  He is the local embodiment of everything that’s wrong with this fallen world and the systems of the old evil age.  Herod thinks he’s writing his own story.

 

All the evidence should have told him that he was not.  Peter got away.  And, Luke doesn’t tell us what it was, but something that the people in Tyre and Sidon did made Herod angry too.  You’d think that would be a warning that he’s not as in-control of things as he thinks, but apparently not.  That’s something we’d all be wise to heed.  Luke goes on with the third act of this story in verse 20: “Now Herod was angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon.  They all came together to meet him, and they persuaded Blastus, who was in charge of the king’s bedchamber, to seek a reconciliation. (They were, you see, dependent on the king’s country for their food.)  So a day was set, and Herod dressed himself in his royal robes and took his seat on the official platform to make a public address to them.  The people began to shout, “The voice of a god, not of a mortal!”

 

The Jewish historian, Josephus, tells us about this same event.  Herod appeared in Caesarea in a spectacular silver gown meant to catch the morning sunlight.  I doubt anyone there actually thought Herod was a God, but they were dependent on him for their food and he was angry, so they flattered him.  They saw him gleaming on the platform and they hailed him as divine.  Herod—who claimed to be King of the Jews—should have know better than to accept such blasphemous acclaim.  But he took it anyway.  He basked in the glory—glory that should have been reserved only for the living God.  And Luke goes on:

 

“Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him, because he didn’t give God the glory.  He was eaten by worms and expired.  But God’s word grew and multiplied.  Barnabas and Saul had by now accomplished their ministry in Jerusalem, and they came back to Antioch, bringing John Mark with them.”

 

In medical terms, what happened to Herod isn’t clear.  Josephus says that when the crowd hailed him as divine, Herod was suddenly struck by a pain in his belly.  His servants carried him home where he was in agony for five days before dying.  Luke states it very simply and connects it directly with the action of God.  Both Luke and Josephus are clear: this was divine punishment.  Luke’s diagnosis is spiritual: Herod stole glory that rightly belonged to God and God struck him down.  That word “struck” bookends the whole story.  God “struck” Peter in prison to wake him up and to rescue him.  Here God strikes Herod and he dies.  And I think Luke tells the story the way he does to deliberately echo Ezekiel 27 and 28.  In that prophecy, the Lord proclaims coming judgement on Tyre and Sidon and specifically declares to the king of Tyre that he will be struck down by pestilence.  Why?  Because God had established his city and given him prosperity and greatness, but instead of giving glory to God, he claimed to be a god himself.  “Will you still say, ‘I am a god,’ in the presence of those who kill you, though you are but a man, and no god.”  Luke shapes the whole scene around Ezekiel’s prophecy to the King of Tyre.  More importantly, Ezekiel’s is another example of a raging king who falls under God’s judgement.

 

In contrast to Herod, Jesus shows us what true kingship looks like.  Herod uses his royal power to crush and to dominate, to threaten whole regions and cities, and on top of it all, he steals God’s glory.  Herod is what’s wrong with fallen creation.  In contrast, as Acts unfolds, we see Jesus first as the King who gives his own life for the sake of his people.  His path to his throne is not through violence or domination, but through humility and sacrifice—even a death he didn’t deserve.  And for that, God exalted him to his throne.  Herod exalts himself.  Jesus, though he died, now lives.  Herod is food for worms.  And so the church proclaims that Jesus is Lord.

 

Brothers and Sisters, the church still proclaims that Jesus is Lord—or at least it’s supposed to and it should.  Sometimes the church has an obligation to speak truth to power more specifically—to confront specific evils.  But still, the church confronts the rulers and powers of this age head on every time we announce that Jesus is Lord.  It may at times seem futile.  It may at times seem dangerous to confront the principalities and powers of the old age.  But what Luke shows us throughout Acts is that God’s verdict about Jesus outranks theirs.  Acts shows us the church speaking truth to power and all these rulers and authorities who think they stand as judges over us end up finding themselves judged by the resurrection and coming of Jesus.  Acts 12 does this without even a speech by Peter or James.  Herod puts the church on trial and by the end of the chapter Herod is himself on trial and ends up worm food.  God’s verdict stands.  That first Easter morning he vindicated Jesus as Messiah and he will continue to vindicate his church on the same grounds—because we are, by faith and baptism, in and one with his Messiah.

 

And in the end Luke says, But God’s word grew and multiplied. James is dead.  Peter is gone.  But the word of God grew and multiplied.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus never promised that we would escape persecution or even martyrdom.  Just the opposite.  He promised that we would drink the same cup he drank.  Stephen was murdered. James was murdered.  Jesus himself was crucified.  Our victory lies in the fact that not even death can overturn the verdict that God announced when he raised Jesus from the grave.  Neither persecution, nor prison, nor being thrown to lions can stop the thing that God is doing.

 

Luke echoes both Gensis and Isaiah here.  Through Jesus and the Spirit, the church—the new humanity—is doing what humanity failed to do.  We are fulfilling God’s blessing-command given all the way back at the beginning to be fruitful and to multiply.  But Luke also echoes Isaiah 40 and the prophet’s promise that the “word of our God shall stand forever.

 

Barnabas and Saul finish their work in Jerusalem and return to Antioch.  The mother church in Jerusalem plans her first actual mission to the nations, to Jews and gentiles and they do so strategically—at one of the great crossroads of the ancient world.  Up to his point they’ve been trying to catch up to God as he takes his gospel to the world.  And now, finally, they understand what he’s doing.  Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, the ends of the earth.  This time they won’t be dragged along.  Now they’re choosing to be part of the action—to be the people they now understand that God has made them and the mission he’s given them.  And imagine how huge that mission must have seemed.  I get overwhelmed just thinking of reaching our neighbourhood with the gospel.  They were preparing to take the gospel to a dark and hostile world, to challenge gods and kings, even to die in the process.  But they knew God’s promise and they understood that Jesus is truly Lord.  There’s no promise that James will always be rescued.  What the lordship of Jesus does tell us is that Herod will never have the last word.  And Brothers and Sisters, that’s the story we need to inhabit.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty God and Father, the nations rage, the peoples plot in vain, and the kings of the earth plot against your Messiah.  Give us the grace in the midst of them to trust in you and to be faithful stewards of your good news no matter the threats against us.  Remind us always that you sit on your throne and laugh, because you have, already, set your King on your holy mountain.  In his name we pray.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

When God tells you something and he tells you that something three times in short order, it’s probably pretty important.  That’s exactly what happens in Acts 10 and 11.  Remember what happened.  Peter had a vision, and in that vision a big sheet or sail came down full of all sorts of animals.  There were clean animals and unclean animals.  And the Lord spoke and told him to kill and eat.  And Peter was taken aback.  Eat what is unclean?  No way, Lord. I’ve never defiled myself with unclean food.  Not even once.  And the Lord responded, “Do not call unclean what I have made clean.”  If that wasn’t mystery enough for Peter, he had the vision two more times.  And you’ll remember, I hope, that this was God’s way of preparing him to visit Cornelius, this God-fearing Roman centurion.  No sooner were those three visions over than Cornelius’ men knocked at the door.  As uncomfortable as he surely was, Peter knew what to do.  He invited them in and offered them lunch.  To eat with gentiles went against everything it meant to be set apart as a Jew, as one of God’s people, but Peter obeyed and the end results was an opportunity to proclaim the good news about Jesus to Cornelius and his household.  And the way Luke reports all of this, Peter’s trying to catch up with God all the way through.  Before he’s even done preaching, these gentiles believe.  Not only that, before Peter can even baptise them or lay hands on them, the Spirit fills them and they start speaking in tongues.  All Peter can do is insist that they be baptised after the fact.  All through the whole story, it’s like God is dragging Peter along to watch as God, not Peter, does this amazing thing to bring the gentiles into his covenant family, into this new Israel.  Peter’s just doing what he’s told and watching and I can only imagine the impact it had on him.  Jesus had already shaken so much of what he thought he knew about the God of Israel and now the Holy Spirit is shaking up everything he thought he knew about the people of God.

 

And like I said, this is really, really important.  Important enough that the Lord gives this vision to Peter three times and important enough that Luke, who’s already told us about it twice, is now, in Chapter 11, going to tell it to us a third time.

 

As Twenty-first century Christians we’re used to being part of a church that’s 99.9% fellow gentiles.  If we think about this fact at all, it’s not very much and it probably doesn’t seem very significant.  You know, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…not just Jews…that he sent his only Son…”  And yet I don’t think John or any of the other disciples gave those words much thought when Jesus said them.  If John had written his gospel in those first years after Jesus died and rose and ascended he might not have even recorded them.  But instead, he wrote decades later, long after the events of Acts we read here, and events like these brought back what Jesus said about the whole world to John.  For those first Jewish believers the inclusion of the gentiles in the covenant family was radical, earth-shattering stuff.  And I know without a doubt it was radical an earth-shattering for Cornelius, too.  He’d spent years with his face pressed to the glass, wanting in.  I’d find it discouraging to be stuck on the outside forever, but somehow he found hope just being on the fringe of God’s people.  That’s how deep his longing for the God of Israel was, so image what it was like not just to be let in, but to have this incredible encounter with the God of Israel as the Spirit came rushing on him in power and glory.  If there’s anything we take away from this, it should be the utter, the absolutely profundity of what happened that day in Caesarea and what will come next with more gentiles.  It’s a profound picture of the grace of God and through that of his immense glory.

 

So picture Peter.  He’s had this experience of spiritual shock and awe.  God is fulfilling his promises to Abraham in a way that none of them had ever even imagined.  They were just waiting for God to rain down fire and brimstone on the evil gentiles, but instead God had poured out his grace through Jesus and the Spirit, and—much to the overwhelming astonishment of Peter—totally wiped out the dividing line between Jew and gentile.  The dividing line between God’s people and the world had always been torah.  Now it’s Jesus.  And he’s excited to get back to Jerusalem to let everyone know what’s happened, but word travels even faster than he can.  Look at Acts 11:1 [page 1093]:

 

“The apostles, and the brothers [and sisters] with them in Judaea, heard that the Gentiles had received the word of God.  So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, those who emphasise circumcision took issue with him, saying: ‘You visited uncircumcised men and ate with them?!?’”  Luke describes these people literally as “of the circumcision”.  Since all the Jews were “of the circumcision” this has to be pointing to a specific group who were particularly hung up on circumcision and keeping the torah in general.  Remember that no one in those days thought of Judaism and Christianity as different or competing religions.  Even that notion of “religion” is very modern.  Their viewpoint was perfectly reasonable: If Jesus was the fulfilment of torah and of what it meant to be Jews, then of course gentiles were welcome in this new Israel, but they had to become Jews first.  So preaching Jesus to them?  That was great.  But eating with them?  That was right out.

 

But Peter doesn’t argue with these folks.  The point he makes is that this wasn’t his doing.  God was doing all of it and he was just trying to keep up.  So verse 4: “Peter began to explain it all, step by step.  ‘I was in the town of Joppa,’ he said, ‘and I was praying.  I was in a trance, and I saw a vision: something like a great sail suspended by its four corners was let down from heaven, and came toward me.  I stared at it; then I began to look in, and I saw four-footed land animals, wild beasts, reptiles, and birds of the air.  I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter! Kill and eat!’  ‘Certainly not, Lord,’ I replied. ‘Nothing common or unclean has ever entered my mouth!’  Then the voice came from heaven a second time: ‘What God made clean, you must not regard as common.’  All this happened three times, and then all of it was drawn back up into heaven.  Just then, suddenly, three men appeared at the house where I was, sent to me from Caesarea.  The Spirit told me to go with them, without raising scrupulous objections.  These six brothers also came with me, and we went into the man’s house.  He told us that he had seen an angel standing in his house and saying, “Send to Joppa and fetch Simon called Peter, who will speak to you words by which you and all your house will be saved.”  As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as on us at the beginning.  And I remembered the word which the Lord had spoken: “John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit.”

 

“‘So, then,’ Peter concluded, ‘if God gave them the same gift as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus the Messiah, who was I to stand in the way of God?’  When they heard this, they had nothing more to say. They praised God. ‘Well, then,’ they declared, ‘God has given the Gentiles, too, the repentance that leads to life!’”

 

This is going to continue to be an issue in Acts, but so far as these objectors here go, when Peter told them what happened, there was nothing more to argue about.  I don’t think they fully understood what this meant for torah and all of that.  It would take a while to work that out.  But what was clear—and not being First Century Jews we’re prone to missing this—the fact that God had filled these gentiles with his Spirit meant that they were now clean.  They were not circumcised, they did not observe the Sabbath, they ate the wrong food—maybe most important—they’d never been to the temple to offer a sacrifice to cleanse them from their sins.  By the standards of the Jewish law, they were filthy, sinning idolaters.  But in Jesus, because of Jesus they were clean.  God had come to them and filled them with his Spirit, he’d made them part of this new temple, and that could only happen if he’d first purified them.  This is where the point starts to be driven home: Jesus’ blood is enough.  It doesn’t need torah to help it.  What marks out the people of God in the new covenant is not the law of Moses, but union with Jesus and Jesus alone—being “in the Messiah” as Paul will come define it.  And, again, it’s going to take a good while for them to work this out, but they already know that somehow it’s true, because God had given his Spirit to these otherwise unclean men and women.  Peter knows how unexpected and upsetting it could all potentially be, but he says to them—you can almost see him throwing up his hands—“Who was I to stand in God’s way?”  Like: “I’m as confused as you are, but it wasn’t me; it was God and I was just along for the crazy, wild ride.”  And there’s only one thing these circumcision people can say in response: “Well, then God has given even the gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

 

And will he!  I suspect that at this point everyone—probably even Peter—was thinking that Cornelius was the exception, but God was using Cornelius to prepare the church for what was about to happen.  He wasn’t just going to fulfil his promises by bringing in a few token gentiles.  So now, in verse 19 Luke reminds us, he takes us back to the episode of Stephen’s martyrdom.  The Jewish authorities were cracking down on this Jesus movement.  Saul of Tarsus was breathing threats and all that and Luke said back then that while the apostles stayed in Jerusalem, pretty much everyone else scattered.  That’s how the gospel went to Samaria.  So Luke goes on: “Now, the people who had been scattered because of the persecution that came about over Stephen went as far afield as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the word only to Jewish people.”

 

You know Cyprus, the big island in the northeastern Mediterranean.  Phoenicia was the costal region of Syria around Tyre and Sidon, and Antioch was the capital of Syria and the third largest city in the Roman empire after Rome and Alexandria.  It would have had something like half a million people.  And there were Jewish communities scattered through all these places.  And these scattered believers, as they were scattered, told their fellow Jews about Jesus.  But what’s really important for Luke here starts in verse 20: “But some from among them, who were from Cyprus and Cyrene in the first place, arrived in Antioch and spoke to the Hellenists as well, announcing the good news of the Lord Jesus.”  Usually “Hellenists” means Jews who spoke Greek and had adopted various aspects of Greek culture, but here it refers to Syrians who done the same thing.  So these are gentiles.  There was a natural connection between these hellenised Jews from Cyprus and Cyrene and the hellenised Syrians.  They’re a bridge.  On the one hand, they’re Jews, they’re in the synagogues in Antioch and they’re telling their fellow Jews about Jesus, but they’ve also got connections in the non-Jewish community and they start preaching Jesus there too.  And Luke writes in verse 21: “The Lord’s hand was with them, and a large number of people believed and turned to the Lord.”

 

“The Lord’s hand was with them.”  Not just in some vague sense of God empowering them.  He was certainly doing that.  But remember what I said when we read about the scattered Christians taking the gospel to Samaria.  It was an expansion of the new temple.  God’s people, purified by Jesus, filled with his Spirit are the new temple.  Where we go, the temple goes, and since the temple is the place where God’s presence dwells in order to meet the world, that means that God’s presence goes wherever we go.  God’s temple expands to fill the places where Jesus and the Spirit purify and fill new people.  And that’s the mission we see in Acts: Jesus and the Spirit filling the earth as this new temple goes out into the world with the power of the gospel.  And it’s a radical image.  Again, it’s one we miss, because for us being gentile believers is normal, but it wasn’t back then.  Gentiles were dirty pagans, unclean idolaters.  They couldn’t even go to the temple.  And yet through the blood of Jesus—powerful stuff—they’re being purified from their sin and from their idolatry and they’re not just entering the temple, they’re becoming the temple, the very place where God’s presence dwells.

 

And the way Luke tells it, it just happened.  Luke doesn’t even tell us the names of these people.  They just went to Antioch, not as missionaries; they went there because they feared for their lives, but they couldn’t stop talking about Jesus.  My guess would be that their friends and family saw something had profoundly changed them.  They recognised the life of the Spirit in them and they asked questions and they heard the good news as a result.  But through it all, God is at work.  It wasn’t an organised mission.  Neither Peter nor any of the other apostles were involved.  There was no SPCK, CMS, or SPG; no Foreign Mission Board, nothing like that.  Just believers providentially scattered to the nations, where they couldn’t help but be God’s temple, shining a light in the midst of the world’s darkness.  The Lord’s hand was with them.

 

“News of all this reached the ears of the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch.”  So this time there’s no objection, but they figured someone had better go to see what was happening.  They sent Barnabas, another hellenised, Greek-speaking Jew.  And Luke writes in verse 23: “When he arrived and saw the grace of God he was glad.”

 

At first I just passed over this, but the more I’ve reflected on it the last couple of weeks the more important I’ve realised it is.  In fact, I think it’s really the heart of what Luke’s writing here.  What did Barnabas see when he got to Antioch?  He saw Jews and gentiles gathered together as the church, as the body of the Messiah.  He saw Jews and gentiles gathering together to pray and to sing and to study the scriptures together.  But I think the most earth-shattering thing he saw was Jews and gentiles sharing meals together, and as part of those meals, they shared in the Lord’s Supper.  Jews and gentiles united by one baptism into Jesus.  Jews and gentiles sharing this new Passover meal as brothers and sisters, as one people.  And the Lord’s Supper in those early days looked a lot more like a Passover meal than it does today.  As a Jew Barnabas was profoundly aware of what the Passover was and especially of the clear boundaries drawn around it.  It was for God’s people and God’s people alone.  Jews ate it and no one else.  You had to be circumcised.  You had to be ritually pure.  And he went to Antioch and he found these brothers and sisters, Jews and gentiles, gathered around the same table, eating the same bread, drinking the same wine because the boundary around the people of God is no longer circumcision, but Jesus the Messiah, all purified by his blood shed on the cross.  Barnabas reported back: “I saw the grace of God.”

 

And knowing how fragile all this could potentially be and knowing that it could easily come under attack from their fellow Jews who might show up and start insisting on circumcision and torah, knowing that this could all be blown up too easily, Barnabas, Luke writes: “urged them all to stay firmly loyal to the Lord from the bottom of their hearts.  He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith. And a substantial crowd was added to the Lord.”

But Barnabas doesn’t leave it at that.  These people needed teaching and Barnabas thinks immediately of Saul.  Saul had been told that he would bear the name of Jesus before the nations.  He’d since disappeared to Tarsus, which is just a short sea voyage from the Syrian coast.  So Barnabas exhorts them to stay firm in the Lord—sort of a pastoral “sit tight”—then he goes off to Tarsus to look for Saul.  Luke writes, “Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul and, when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch.  They were there a whole year, and were received hospitably in the church, and taught a substantial crowd. And it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called “Christians.”  Literally something like “Messiahans”—people of the Messiah.  It’s perfect.  They’re this diverse community, not held together by culture or language or race, but simply by faith in Jesus the Messiah.

 

And then the grace of God.  Luke goes on at the end of the chapter with this episode about a prophet and a famine.  At first look it might seem like an appendix, but it’s actually Luke’s deliberate illustration of what this grace looks like in practise.  He says in verse 27: “Around that time, prophets came from Jerusalem to Antioch.  One of them, Agabus by name, stood up and foretold through the Spirit that there would be a great famine over the whole world. (This took place in the reign of Claudius.)  Each of the disciples determined, according to their ability, to send what they could to help the brothers [and sisters] living in Judaea.  They carried out this plan, sending their gift to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.”

 

They didn’t think how they might protect themselves.  They saw their Jews brothers and sisters in need and they did what families do: they helped.  Again, we might miss how unusual this was, because we live in a world that has been influenced so much by the gospel.  In the ancient world, you looked out for yourself, you looked out for family, and if you did help someone else, it was usually with some ulterior motive.  The Jews stood out in the middle of this kind of world, because they took care of each other.  And because they were scattered across the world, they had their own network of mutual support.  This is one of the things pagans noticed and found attractive.  But Jews didn’t help gentiles and gentiles didn’t help Jews.  But now we’ve got this mixed group of believers in Antioch pooling their resources to help their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.  It’s the gospel, it’s the grace of God at work to build a family centred in Jesus and showing the love he embodies to each other.  It’s what we saw amongst the Jewish believers earlier in Acts, but as the temple expands and extends to the nations, so does this covenant family.  The story here is amazing.  It begins with a group of people angry and confronting Peter because he ate with a gentile and it ends with this distant community of Jews and Gentiles, not only living and sharing in the Lord’s Supper together, but pooling their resources to help their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.  God’s grace at work.

 

Brothers and Sisters, what does the grace of God look like?  It can look like a lot of things, but what Luke stresses here is that it looks like a bunch of people who ordinarily have nothing in common, who come from disparate communities and backgrounds, who might even come from places and people and groups that the world sees as enemies, but who, united in Jesus the Messiah and filled with God’s Spirit become one family.  They turn away from the systems, the powers, the attitudes, the divisions of the old evil age and become part of God’s future where creation and humanity are set to rights.  In Acts 10 Luke showed us what God did in Cornelius.  Here Luke scales it up and asks: What does it look like when what God did in one gentile household becomes the life of the entire church?

 

Barnabas saw the grace of God in Antioch.  What would someone see if he or she came to Living Word Church?  Not just nice people.  Not just inclusivity or diversity for the sake of inclusivity or diversity in the modern sense.  Not a people united by ethnicity or language, by age or by social class or by our other interests.  Not even a people united by “classical Anglicanism”.  That person ought to see a people united by our faith in and our loyalty to Jesus the Messiah and for that reason, a people who recognises as a family everyone whom Jesus has purified with his blood and filled with his Spirit.  That person ought to see a family of people who love each other despite our differences, a people who are patient and kind with each other, a people who care for each other, who pray and sing and study the scriptures together—and a people who eat together.  Brothers and Sisters, we come to the Lord’s Table this morning, not because we naturally belong here together, not because we’ve made ourselves clean, but because Jesus has made us his people, because Jesus has taken us in our diversity and made us one in him.  So come this morning with your brothers and sisters, eat the bread, drink the wine, be fed by the King.  Reflect on what he has made us, but know too that as we are faithful to be what he has made us, we shine forth to the world his grace and his glory.

Let’s pray: LORD, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

Last Sunday we looked at the first half of the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10.  Peter had gone down to the coast to visit the little Christian communities that were popping up there, and while he was there he had a vision.  He was hungry and waiting for his lunch and he fell asleep.  And he saw this great linen cloth, like a sail, coming down from heaven full of every animal he could imagine.  “What this?” he thought.  And the Lord spoke and told him, “Kill and eat.”  “But Lord, some of these animals are unclean.  They’re animals you forbade us from eating.  I’ve never deliberately broken your law.  I can’t start now!”  And the Lord responded, “Don’t be prejudiced, Peter.  Don’t call something unclean that I have made clean.”  Three times this was repeated.  And Peter, confused, was just trying to figure out what it meant when there was knock at the door.  There were three Romans there.  And they explained that their master, A Roman centurion named Cornelius, had been visited by the God of Israel in a vision and was told to send his people to go down to Joppa to fetch Peter and bring him back to Caesarea to talk with him.

 

So it starts to click for Peter.  It wasn’t really about food.  It was about people.  Jews didn’t mix with gentiles.  They were unclean.  They didn’t live according to God’s law.  They worshipped idols.  You didn’t go into their houses.  You didn’t eat with them.  But Peter understood the vision now—or at least got the gist of it: It was God’s way of telling him to go with these Romans to meet Cornelius.

 

And Luke explained: Cornelius was a God-fearer.  He was one of those gentiles, one of those people from the pagan world, who had seen something in the people of Israel.  He’d heard the stories about their God.  And he was drawn to them.  In the world of brutality and moral filth he’d come from, he saw purity and holiness in Israel.  In contrast to the distant, fickle, and immoral gods he’d know, the God of Israel stood out as radically different.  Cornelius couldn’t actually become a Jew and live by torah.  He’d lose his job and probably everyone he knew, but he drew near—as close as he could.  He had his face pressed against the glass, longing for the people, the community, the family, and the God he saw inside.  Even if he couldn’t get in there, he somehow found hope just in being as close as he could get—again, think of him pressing his face against the glass, longing to get inside.

 

So Peter did the unthinkable: he invited these three Romans in, shared his lunch with them, and put then up for the night.  Now, continuing with 10:23 [page 1092 in the pew Bibles], Luke goes on and tells us. “The next day he got up and went with them.  Some of the brothers from Joppa went with him.  They reached Caesarea the following day.  Cornelius had summoned his relatives and close friends and was waiting for him.  When Peter came in, Cornelius went to meet him.  He fell down at his feet and worshipped him.  “Get up!” said Peter, lifting him up. “I’m just a man, too.” So they talked together, and Peter came in and found lots of people assembled.

 

The temple came to Cornelius.  The thing he’d been longing for.  The place he wanted to go, to be in the presence of God, not any of his Roman gods, but the real God, the God of Israel who had made his glory known in history, it came new to Cornelius.  Brothers and Sisters, do you realise what we are.  What we are when we go out into the world.  What we are when we meet people out there?  We’re God’s temple.  A people purified by Jesus and made fit to be God’s dwelling place.  A people filled with his presence because he’s poured his Spirit into us.  Brothers and Sisters, when Peter met Cornelius, Cornelius recognised the presence of God somehow—in him, with him—he recognised it the way people who went to the temple recognised God’s presence there.  Cornelius recognised or sensed or saw that in Peter.  And you and I, we should be the same.  Maybe it helped that Cornelius was in tune with this.  It was his desire to meet the one, true, living God.  He’d had his face pressed against the glass for so long, was so wanting to be in that presence, that he was especially ready to know it.  But there should be something in us that the people we encounter see or sense or know the way Cornelius recognised the presence of the living God in Peter.  He was meeting the living temple of God and that is what the world should see in the church, in us.  This would be good to reflect on.  Ask yourself what people recognise in you.  Is it God’s presence or is it maybe worry or pride or anger.  Do they find the fruit of the Spirit or the fruit of the works of the flesh?  Do they see the glory of God in you?

 

And so Cornelius did what came naturally.  He bowed down and started worshipping.  Cornelius’ response raises the question: Does a pagan see enough of the Holy Spirit in us that he might just bow down and try to worship?  I can imagine how shocked Peter would be.  Jews knew better, but it was the natural response to encountering God’s presence.  So Peter pulled him up and set him straight and he got them up to speed on what had happened to him:  Verse 29: “You must know,” he said to them, “that it is unseemly for a Jewish man to mix with or visit a foreigner.  But God showed me that I should call nobody ‘common’ or ‘unclean.’  So I came when I was asked, and raised no objections.  Do tell me, then, the reason why you sent for me.”

 

And now it’s Cornelius’s turn to get Peter up to speed on what this is all about.  Luke writes, “Cornelius gave him the answer. “Four days ago,” he said, “I was praying in my house at around this time, about three o’clock, and suddenly a man stood beside me in shining clothes.  ‘Cornelius,’ he said, ‘your prayer has been heard, and your almsgiving has been remembered by God.  So send someone to Joppa and call Simon, who is called Peter; he is staying in the house of Simon the tanner, beside the sea.’  So I sent for you at once, and you have been kind enough to come.  So now we are all here, in God’s presence, to listen to everything which the Lord has told you to say.”

 

I would think that Peter and Cornelius’ men would talk on the journey and Peter would figure out that this is no ordinary Roman centurion.  But Cornelius makes it clear here: he’s someone who respects the God of Israel and it’s the God of Israel who has spoken to him.  Luke then says in verse 34 that Peter opened his mouth and began to speak. I think it might better to translate that as, “Peter took a deep breath and began.”  Because things are starting to get clearer for him, but this isn’t easy.  He’s starting to wrap his head around what God is doing here, and he’s realising that it’s a total game changer.  He’s about to say something that he probably never thought he’d ever say.  “It’s become clear to me,” he said, “that God really does show no favouritism.  No, in every nation, people who fear him and do what is right are acceptable to him.”

 

Now, we need to pause here, because as modern people—I talked about this last week when we read about God telling Peter not to be prejudiced—as modern people what we’re prone to hearing Peter saying here that there are all sorts of paths to God.  Like Peter used to think that the Jewish people were God’s favourites and that only they had an in with him, a way to him, and everyone else in the world was doomed and lost forever, but now, somehow in light of Jesus, he’s realised that the ways that the gentiles—or at least some of them—go seeking after God, well, those ways are just as good and that Israel had nothing special.  And we think that, because this is the dominant view in our postmodern pluralistic culture.  Justification is by death—unless you’re one of those really obviously bad people like Hitler—so all paths lead to God and how dare anyone remind the world that Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.”

 

So, no, what Peter is saying is that when he—along with most of his fellow Jews—thought that they were God’s favourites and that everyone else in the world was simply doomed to one day know the wrath and judgement of God.  They were wrong.  They were wrong for thinking that when God came to visit his people as he promised, he would set them on top and rain down fire and brimstone on the nations.  There’s a sense in which that story is true, but they had the timing wrong.  God will come to establish the faithful and to judge the wicked—at the end, after the gospel and the Spirit and the Church have done their work and his glory fills the earth—but God had something else to do first.  He had a great act of amazing grace to make first in order to redeem both Israel and the nations.  This was the massive revelation that was now beginning to settle on Peter.  You can almost sense how Peter is thinking this through and working it out as he talked to Cornelius.  I think he’s explaining it to himself as much to these Romans.

 

It’s important to understand: the gospel is still exclusive.  I think this was why it wasn’t easy for Peter to work this through.  Jesus changes everything.  Jesus opens the way to God for all.  And yet unclean, unholy, idolatrous gentiles are still on the outside.  What Jesus has done is to reconstitute the people of God around himself.  Faith in him, not torah, has become the defining characteristic, the mark of membership in this new family.  His blood purifies us, Jew and gentile alike and makes us new.  This is why Paul, writing to the gentile Corinthians, can describe them as having once been pagans, led astray by dumb idols, but now they’re part of Abraham’s family.  Jesus has brought them into Israel’s story.  He’s seen their faces pressed against the glass and opened the door.  If they’ll come through his door, they can finally know the living God.  And, of course, Peter’s also realising that since God shows no favouritism, his own people now need to come through that same Jesus door too.

 

So Peter says, yes, there was something special about Israel.  Verse 36: “[God] sent his word to the sons of Israel, announcing peace through Jesus the Messiah—he is Lord of all!”  This was how it had to work.  God had chosen Abraham to be the one through whom he would make himself known to a world that had rebelled against him and forgotten him.  The intent all along was to work through Abraham and then his family to restore the whole human race.  By Peter’s day the Jews had taken that to mean that they were God’s favourites and he hated everyone else, but what it really meant, well, Jesus said in John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him should not die, but have eternal life”—the life of the age to come, life in God’s creation set to right and, most important, life in his presence. So Jesus was born one of those people called to steward God’s word to the world and he brought God’s announcement of peace—of restoration.  He was the promised Messiah, the King, the one in whom God would return to his people and set everything right.

 

So Peter goes on in verse 37: “You know all about this, and how the word spread through all Judaea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism which John proclaimed.  God anointed this man, Jesus of Nazareth, with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, since God was with him.  We are witnesses of everything he did in the land of Judaea and in Jerusalem.  They killed him by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day, and allowed him to be seen, not indeed by all the people, but by those of us whom God had appointed beforehand. We ate and drank with him after he had been raised from the dead.  And he commanded us to announce to the people, and to bear testimony, that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.  All the prophets give their witness: he is the one! Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

 

Being so close to the people of Israel, I expect Cornelius knew about Jesus.  And I also suspect that wanting to have a relationship with the people of Israel while being an outsider and a Roman, would have made him very hesitant to think of or affirm Jesus as the Messiah.  All of the Jews he knew denounced Jesus as a fraud and laughed at these men and women going around claiming he’d been raised from the dead.  But God broke through that.  He spoke and he brought Cornelius and Peter together.  It’s really a stunning story of God’s providence working to fulfil his promises.  Jesus had told his friends that they would carry the good news of his death and resurrection from Jerusalem to Judaea, Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth.  In the First Century there was no better way of doing that then for the gospel to get hold of a Roman.  And so God prepared a Roman to hear it.  He brought this man to Caesarea where he saw something beautiful, something holy, something of the glory of God and was drawn to it.  And when the time was right, he brought an eyewitness to the gospel story to him and he brought him, he brought Peter in a way that Cornelius couldn’t dismiss.

 

And the story here is interesting.  Luke doesn’t say anything about Cornelius asking, like others do in other places, something like, “What must I do to be saved?”  Cornelius was so close.  He just needed to hear about Jesus.  And Luke writes in verse 44: “While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell on everyone who was listening to the word.  The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter were astonished, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles too.  They heard them speaking with tongues and praising God.”

 

These Romans heard and they just believed.  The Spirit filled them up and as evidence—evidence that these Jewish Christians like Peter and his friends desperately need to see—the Spirit started speaking through these Romans in tongues.  I can imagine those Romans, they spoke Latin, they spoke Greek, they stumbled over Aramaic.  They didn’t know Hebrew at all.  And I picture the Spirit suddenly speaking through them to Peter, maybe singing Psalm 110 in fluent Hebrew, because that seems to have been the purpose of tongues in the New Testament.  The Spirit proclaiming the good news and God’s glory.  But the main point of this demonstration was to say to Peter and the other Jewish believers that God had seen fit to bring these uncircumcised gentiles into his temple.  Jesus’ sacrifice was so powerful, his blood so powerful that it can purify even the gentiles and make them fit to be the dwelling place of God’s Spirit.  Cornelius didn’t have to get circumcised or change his diet or start observing the Sabbath to fit for the Holy Spirit or to be part of God’s new creation.  Because that’s going to be the big debate coming up soon in the story.  What happened that day at Caesarea sent a clear message: this new Israel, this new people of God is not defined or marked out by torah, by the law of Moses, but by faith in Jesus and Jesus alone.

 

And Peter gets this.  And so Luke writes, “Then Peter spoke up. “Nobody can deny these people water to be baptized, can they?” he said. “They have received the Holy Spirit, just like we did!”  So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus the Messiah.  Then they asked him to stay for a few days.”

 

Usually it was the other way around: believe, be baptise, be filled with the Spirit and incorporated into God’s new temple.  But in these early days God was sometimes mixing up the process to communicate important messages to the early church.  In Samaria it was the opposite.  The Samaritan had believed, but the Spirit didn’t fill them until the apostles paid them a visit.  Here the Spirit fills these new believers before they’re even baptised.  And so Peter makes it clear: Let’s baptise these people. Not, let’s circumcise them to bring them into the people of God, but let’s mark them out by baptism.  You don’t have to be a Jew to be part of this people.  Just the opposite in a way.  Be baptised, be united with Jesus the Messiah, you become a part of this new people of God, and the Spirit circumcises your heart—he does for you really, and deeply what circumcision and the law had always been external symbols of.

 

As I’ve been reflecting on this story over the last weeks, I’ve been moved by how it reveals God’s faithfulness and his glory.  This is God taking the first steps to fulfil his promise that through Israel he would bring the nations to himself.  And when you think about the context of this story: the Romans and Judaism in the First Century, it’s amazing to reflect on God at work, not just setting his own people to rights here and bringing them to a point where they’re accomplishing the mission he’d given them two millennia before when he called Abraham, but he’s set things up so that it’s just the right representative of the gentile nations who meets Peter.  A man already pressing his face against the glass, a man already valuing the very thing that God had given to his people and that so many of them took for granted.  And now he’s brought into the family—not through circumcision—and oddly enough not even through baptism, but directly: hearing the gospel and being filled with the Spirit.  Peter has to rush to catch up with the baptism part—because that’s essential too.  And giving the gospel to a Roman centurion.  It’s like putting the gospel on a high-speed train to the rest of the empire and from there to the world.  This and what comes next are the setup for the rest of Acts and for Paul’s story.

 

But here—I’ll just say this in conclusion—here we’re reminded what the gospel is and what it’s about and how we become part of its story ourselves.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s not through what we do.  It’s not through who we are.  It’s through Jesus.  Through faith in him as the Messiah, as the King, as creation’s true Lord who has come to set the world to rights, to drive away the darkness, to defeat sin and death, to bring light and life—and most of all God’s presence back to men and women.  His blood is what purifies us from the stain of sin and death.  And when he’s washed us clean, he fills us with God’s Spirit—with new life and a new way of life.  The Spirit in us is God’s glorious future in the present.  And it’s Jesus who brings us into that life and into the presence of God.

 

Someone recently asked me why we drink wine in the Lord’s Supper and whether it was really necessary.  Why can’t we just drink grape juice?  Brothers and Sisters, it’s because Jesus’ blood is powerful.  And because, like alcohol, Jesus’ blood is purifying.  Like the wine that hits your tongue with a bit of a shock, the power of Jesus’ blood ought to get our attention—the way it did for Peter that day in Caesarea.  Brothers and Sisters, Jesus’ blood is powerful enough to wash away the greatest stain—of sin, of idolatry, of death—to make us sons and daughters of Abraham, sons and daughters of the living God.  Come to the Table this morning.  Eat the bread.  Drink the wine.  And give glory to God.

 

Let’s pray: Keep, O Lord, your Church, with your perpetual mercy; and, because without you our human frailty cannot but fall, keep us ever by your help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

by William Klock

 

Back in 2012 Barack Obama, in what became something of an infamous campaign speech, told business owners, “You didn’t build that.”  His point was that private business relies on public infrastructure, but most people just heard him dismissing their hard work as irrelevant to the businesses they had built.  It wasn’t a good campaign move.  But that line keeps coming back to my mind as I read the closing verses of Act 9.  Amazing things were happening in the church.  The apostles were doing amazing things.  The church was growing by leaps and bounds.  And in the middle of it all, Luke says, “You didn’t build that.  Jesus did.”

 

You might remember back to when we first started out look at Acts and I said that even though we call the book “the Acts of the Apostles,” what Luke really makes clear throughout is that this is really about the acts of Jesus—picking up where the Gospel left off.  It’s just that now Jesus is working indirectly through his people.  We—and I can say that especially pastors—need this reminder.  When we look at the church, when we’re tempted to take credit for the things we see happening, Luke reminds us: “You didn’t build that.  Jesus did.”  Brothers and Sisters, the glory—all of it—belongs to God and this long story of God and his people, of Israel and the church that continues today has one purpose and one purpose alone: to reveal God’s glory.

 

Now,most of Chapter 9 was about Saul of Tarsus and his encounter with Jesus.  That’s going to be important.  But first Luke brings us back to Peter.  We’ll pick up with 9:32 [page 1091 in the pew Bibles]: “As Peter was going through various places among all the believers, he went down to God’s people who lived in Lydda.  There he found a paralyzed man named Aeneas who had been confined to bed for eight years. “Aeneas,” Peter said to him, “Jesus the Messiah heals you!  Stand up and fold up your bed!”  And at once he stood up.  Everyone who lived at Lydda and Sharon saw it, and they turned to the Lord.

In Joppa [today it’s Jaffa not too far from Tel Aviv] there was a disciple named Tabitha, whose name translates as Dorcas.  She was full of good works and generous deeds.  Around that time she fell ill and died.  They washed her and laid her in an upper room.  Lydda is near Joppa, and the disciples, hearing that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the urgent request that he shouldn’t delay, but come to them at once.  So Peter got up and went with them. When he arrived, they took him to the upper room, where all the widows were weeping. They showed him the tunics and the other clothes that Dorcas had made while she was with them.  Peter requested them all to leave.  Then he knelt down and prayed, and turned to the body.  “Tabitha,” he said, “get up!”  She opened her eyes, and when she saw Peter she sat up.  He gave her his hand and lifted her up. Then he called God’s people, including the widows, and presented her alive.  This became known throughout the whole of Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.  Peter stayed on in Joppa for some days, at the house of Simon the tanner.”

 

I don’t want to spend too much time on this interlude.  Surely there were other wonderful things happening, but Luke focuses us on Peter and the healing of Aeneas and the raising of Dorcas and in them he gives a sense of the church’s growth through Judaea.  Dorcas is interesting, because she seems to have lived in a community of widows—and we know that was one group, one demographic where the gospel spread early on—to a group of women living with poverty and grief.  Jesus was good news.  But I think Luke’s key point in these verses is in the words of Peter when he told Aeneas to get up: “Jesus the Messiah heals you!”  Not just, “Get up.”  Not, “I’ve healed you.”  “Jesus the Messiah heals you.”  Peter knew who was at work.  Jesus—and the Spirit—are behind everything we do as the church.  And we need to be reminded of this sometimes.  Sometimes when we’re tempted to take the credit for things.  Sometimes when we get frustrated with a lack of things happening or with what seems like too slow a pace and we wish bigger things would happen faster in the church.  Brothers and Sisters, it’s Jesus’ church, not ours.  He’s the one who makes things happen.  If Saul’s conversion isn’t proof of that, then nothing is.  Trust Jesus.  Wait on Jesus.  Give Jesus the credit.

 

And then there’s one other detail here.  Peter’s staying at the home of Simon the Tanner.  This says something about who the first Christians were.  Tanning was dirty, smelly work.  It didn’t necessarily make you unclean as people used to think, but it was nasty work and it put tanners on the social fringe of society.  But Peter doesn’t shrink from Simon’s hospitality.  He stays at his house, even though it probably stinks to high heaven.  Most people would think he was crazy, but Brothers and Sisters, this is what the gospel does.  It makes people of unlikely—and even unsavoury backgrounds—family.

 

Now, Luke goes on in 10:1.  “In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion with the cohort called the Italian.”  He was devout, and he and all his household revered God. He gave alms generously to the people, and constantly prayed to God.”

 

As Twenty-first century Christians we might miss how significant these two verses are.  Luke says that there’s a centurion named Cornelius at Caesara.  Caesarea was the main Roman base in Judaea.  It was a port city built by Herod the Great to funnel all the shipping into one place to make it easier for him to tax.  But it was also the home of the Roman governor.  It wasn’t a backwater.  It was a significant outpost of the Roman Empire and a centurion stationed there—a centurion was the commander of a unit of one hundred soldiers—he had some status.  Cornelius had the respect of his Roman superiors.  But then Luke says that he was “devout”—eusebes.  He was godly, pious, and reverent, not in a vague religious sense, but towards the God of Israel.  He was generous with his money so far as the local Jewish community was concerned, and he was constant in his prayer, again, to the God of Israel.

 

That wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual.  I’ve said before, there was this group of people, gentiles, pagan in their background, whom the Jews called “God-fearers”.  They were attracted to the God of Israel, to the purity of Jewish life, and to the community they saw there.  Remember, pagan life in the pre-Christian world was mean and brutal and merciless.  The gods were mean and brutal and merciless too—along with being unknowable and fickle.  Sexual immorality was everywhere.  Women and slaves existed to satisfy the desires of men.  In the upper classes, boys were initiated into adulthood through sex with older men.  Marriage was pragmatic and divorce was common.  So were abortion and infanticide.  When you look around the world today and you see the darkness and the brokenness around you and know in your bones that this is not how God meant for things to be, the pre-Christian pagan world was much, much worse.  And for all of Israel’s failings, she still stood out as a light in the darkness.  And a lot of the pagans, seeing that, mocked Israel.  But some were drawn to it.  They didn’t go all the way.  They had their reasons.  A centurion like Cornelius, for example, would probably have to give up his career—or would be forced out of it—if he was circumcised and chose to live by torah.

So it’s interesting—because the progression of the story in Acts will eventually lead us with Paul to Rome.  And it sort of starts here, although it starts with Peter.  And the first Roman we meet breaks all the stereotypes.  He wasn’t one of those soldiers who took pleasure in abusing the local Jewish people.  He wasn’t one of those Romans doing unspeakable things at the bathhouse.  Caesarea had a huge temple—built by Herod!—a huge temple to the goddess Roma and to Caesar Augustus.  And I can imagine Cornelius going there and going through the motions for his job, but he wasn’t the sort to otherwise frequent the pagan temples.  He’s a little like Jesus’ good Samaritan.  He’s supposed to be the enemy.  Everyone wants him to be the enemy.  Everyone wants to hate him.  But he’s actually a good guy and even the Jews in his community grow to respect him.

 

So, Luke goes on in verse 3: Cornelius ‘had a vision.  Around three o’clock in the afternoon he saw, quite clearly, one of God’s angels coming to him. “Cornelius!” said the angel.  He looked hard at him, terrified.  “What is it, Lord?” he said.  “Your prayers and your alms have come to God’s notice,” said the angel.  “What you must do is this.  Send men to Joppa, and ask for someone called Simon, surnamed Peter.  He is staying with a man called Simon, a tanner, whose house is beside the sea.”  When the angel who had spoken with him went away, he called two of his household and a devout soldier from among his retinue.  He explained everything to them, and sent them off to Joppa.”

 

So God’s obviously been working in Cornelius for a while now and he’s been doing it through his people and their witness.  This why God created a special people.  And Cornelius has been hearing the scriptures—probably in the local synagogue.  But that’s not enough.  I mean, even as far at the old covenant went, that wasn’t enough.  He wasn’t circumcised.  He didn’t live according to torah—except maybe in a few ways easy for a gentile to do.  He’d never taken part in Passover.  He couldn’t enter the temple.  He was drawn to God, but he was still far away.  He could see the hope that Israel embodied, but it wasn’t his hope.  But even life on the fringe of Israel, even life looking towards a God he couldn’t actually approach, was better than pagan life.  And this sets things up for where the gospel is going to go and how it’s going to challenge the church.  Because up until this point, the gospel, Jesus were still very much a Jewish thing.  To be a Christians was to continue to be a Jew, but to be a Jew living in the fulfilment of the covenant and of God’s promises to you and to your people.  But—this is key to the book of Acts—for those promises to be fulfilled also meant that Israel’s calling to be a light to the nations, to make God known amongst them, to set them to rights had to be fulfilled.  And bringing gentiles to fringes of the people of God, to make them attracted to the family, but to leave them still outside—that wasn’t fulfilment of God’s promises.  It anticipated the fulfilment, but somehow the new people of God and the Spirit had to fully incorporate the nations.

 

But up to this point, it seems like those first Christians—pretty much all Jews except for the Samaritans—who were like quasi-Jews—and the Ethiopian eunuch, whom at this point they may not have even known about yet—the idea of Jesus bringing the nations under his rule through the gospel, it doesn’t really seem to have been on the radar.  That was the part of the promises that Israel had kind of forgotten—and when they did remember it, they thought of it mostly in terms of God coming on the gentiles and their kings in judgement to rain down his wrath—not his mercy and grace.  And, well, those first Jewish Christians also had plenty on their plate already just proclaiming the gospel in Jerusalem and Judaea.  So, again, it’s God who moves things forward—just as he’d done with the Samaritans.

 

And angel appears to Cornelius.  Send for Peter in Joffa.  And so Cornelius chooses two of his servants and one of his soldiers who is also a God-fearer to fetch Peter.  I had to pause there for a bit, because it sounds like Cornelius is devout enough that he’s been sort of an evangelist for Judaism even though he isn’t even a Jew.  That’s pretty remarkable.

 

Now, verse 9, Luke takes us about fifty kilometres down the coast, to Joppa and to Peter: “The next day, as they were on their journey and getting near the town, Peter went up onto the roof of the house to pray.  It was around midday; he was hungry, and asked for something to eat.  While they were preparing it, he fell into a trance.  He saw heaven opened, and a vessel like a great sail coming down toward the earth, suspended by its four corners.  In the sail there was every kind of four-footed creature, reptiles of the earth and birds of the air.’

 

So it starts out pretty ordinary: Peter’s hungry and while he’s waiting for his lunch he falls asleep and dreams about a banquet coming down from heaven.  But then he looks at what’s on this great linen picnic cloth and there’s everything.  Clean animals good for food, but also forbidden unclean animals.  He’s perplexed.  Why would he dream about eating unclean things.  That’s gross.  ‘Then he heard a voice: “Get up, Peter!” said the voice. “Kill and eat!” “Certainly not, Lord!” said Peter. “I’ve never eaten anything common or unclean!”  Peter was a good Jew.  He lived by torah.  Diet—along with circumcision and keeping the sabbath—were the big things that marked out the Jews from everyone else.  God had chosen Israel, he’d rescued them from Egypt, he’d set them apart, he’d come to live in their midst, and he’d given them his law to set them apart from the nations—to be a holy people.  And out of gratitude for the Lord’s grace—not to earn anything, but out of gratitude—they did their best to be obedient.  It was their way of being faithful in response to the Lord’s faithfulness.  For the Lord to tell Peter to eat, say, a pig, well, he might just as well have told him to break the Sabbath or to go worship at a pagan temple.  To break the law was to break faith with the God of Israel.  Peter was shocked.  He was confused.  Was this really the Lord speaking?  Verse 15: “What God has made clean,” said the voice, coming now for a second time, “you must not regard as common.”  And just to make a point, verse 16: ‘This all happened three times, and then suddenly the sail was whisked back up to heaven.’

 

Luke writes, ‘When Peter came to himself, he was puzzled as to what the vision he had seen was all about.’  No kidding.  I bet he was confused.  Why would the Lord tell him that something clearly unclean isn’t actually unclean.  Had God changed his mind?  I don’t think Peter would go in that direction.  He knew as well as anyone that God doesn’t change his mind like that.  We’ll get back to that in a bit.  I expect Peter started thinking about all those times he was with Jesus and Jesus did something that seemed like it was against torah, but then showed how God was doing something new, how God was fulfilling what torah had always been pointing toward.  But before he had time to work it all through, Luke says, ‘Suddenly, the men sent by Cornelius appeared, standing by the gate. They had been asking for Simon’s house, inquiring if someone by the name of Simon called Peter was staying there.  Peter was still pondering the vision when the Spirit spoke to him.

“Look,” said the spirit. “There are three men searching for you.  It’s all right; get up, go down, and go with them. Don’t be prejudiced; I have sent them.”  So Peter went down to the men.

“Here I am,” he said. “I’m the one you’re looking for.  Why have you come?”

 

“There is a man called Cornelius,” they replied. “He is a centurion, and he’s a righteous and God-fearing man. The whole people of the Jews will testify to him.  A holy angel told him in a vision to send for you to come to his house, so that he can hear any words you may have to say.”  So he invited them in and put them up for the night.”

 

When he met the soldiers at the door everything started to make sense.  It wasn’t about the food.  The Lord didn’t care what Peter ate.  Peter could never eat a nice bacon-wrapped shrimp—and the Lord would be sad for him missing out on the wonder of a bacon-wrapped shrimp—but it was no moral failure on Peter’s part.  It wasn’t about food; it was about people.  If we put ourselves in Peter’s shoes, a first century Jewish fisherman, it makes sense.  Because for someone like him, it wasn’t just what you ate, it was just as much who you ate with.  Jews didn’t eat with gentiles.  They didn’t even go into their houses.  Because even if a gentile wasn’t serving you obviously unclean food, like a shrimp or a porkchop, you never knew where that food might have come from.  It might be meat that was offered to an idol and bought from the butcher shop behind the temple.  In the Jewish mind, gentile homes always ran the risk of corpse defilement.  The gentiles didn’t take the same care with their dead that the Jews did, plus they aborted their infants and threw them in the privy.  Who knows how you might find yourself defiled if you consorted with gentiles or ate their food.  And to let yourself be defiled that way, well, it was to dishonour God.  Even a God-fearer like Cornelius.  A soldier? He was probably regularly defiled by corpses.  He ate bacon.  Even if he didn’t really worship them, he spent time around idols.  If you were a Roman soldier there was no escaping it.

 

And I can easily picture Peter, meeting Cornelius’ God-fearing men at the door and, even though he hasn’t had a chance to work it all through, something clicks.  Again, it wasn’t actually about the food.  It was about people.  In the Jewish mind, these men were pigs: unclean, idolaters.  But God had told him: “Don’t be prejudiced against these men.  I’ve sent them.”  And so he let them into the house.  I expect there was more to it than Luke tells us.  Peter hadn’t had a chance to tell any of this to his hosts.  It’s not hard to image their, “But…um…Peter…uh…what are you doing…not in my house.”  And in those days, to welcome someone into your house was to offer them hospitality.  His host had just made Peter lunch and now Peter’s going to invite these unclean Romans to sit and share it with him.  This went against everything.  But the Lord had been clear: “Don’t be prejudiced against them.  Do not call common what I have made clean.”  It’ll take a bit for Peter to work the implications of this all the way through, but he knew what to do and I’m sure he was already starting to wrap his head around what the Lord was doing.

 

You see, our problem is this.  Because of the secular thinking that’s been ingrained into us, when we hear the Lord say not to be prejudiced and not to call common what he has made clean, our first thought is something like “God changed his mind”  or maybe we’re thinking something like, “Good, it was about time God set those prejudiced Jews straight”—as if their keeping apart from gentiles was wrong.  In our culture, the default view is that all religion are the same.  We rankle at the idea that a person’s religious views might be wrong.  I’ve pointed out before that, first, this modern idea of “religion” didn’t exist in the First Century.  But the bigger mistake we make is to think that there was something wrong with the law, with torah, with the way Jews kept themselves apart.  And that’s not it at all.  If that’s what we’re thinking, then we’re the ones with a prejudice that needs to be removed.

 

Brothers and Sisters, the law was good.  The law was God’s gift to his people—and through them to the nations.  When God tells Peter not to call common what he has made clean, it’s really important that we hear this properly, because I think we’re prone to misreading this as God saying, “You’ve mistakenly called common what I’ve called clean”—as if Leviticus and the rest of torah were a mistake.  No.  Cornelius, Romans, gentiles, pagan idolaters were unclean.  They are still unclean today.  The law hasn’t changed.  What’s changed is that Jesus has shed his blood to purify, to wash clean—not just his own people, Israel, but every last one of us, Jew and gentiles alike.  If we will hear the good news that he has died, that he has risen, and that he is Lord; if we have heard the good news that his blood washes away our sin and our idolatry and the stain of death; if we have heard the good news that he is setting this broken world to rights; if we have heard the good news that in his Spirit, God is fulfilling his promise to build a new temple and to dwell with is people; if we have heard this good news and believed, we are no longer unclean.  Jesus washes away our sin, he washes away our idolatry, he fills us with God’s Spirit.  Jew and gentile alike, and he makes us holy.

 

God didn’t change his mind.  He didn’t retract his previous word.  I can remember once as a young kid in a parking lot, getting distracted, dawdling, and getting left behind when my mom crossed a busy thoroughfare.  Being a kid, blind to traffic, I was just going to run across to catch up with my mom.  But she noticed what had happened and she yelled at me to stay put.  It sticks in my mind, because a complete stranger, seeing what was happening, grabbed my shoulder and held me there when I was about to run.  A moment later Mom told me to come to her, to run across that busy thoroughfare.  And it wasn’t that she changed her mind.  Something else changed.  She told me to stay put the first time, because there was a car coming and she didn’t want me to run into its path.  But then the car was gone.  It was safe to run to her.  And just so with the law and the gospel.  The law kept Isreal holy so that she could live in God’s presence.  The law kept gentiles away, because it’s not safe for what is impure, what is sinful, what is unclean to be in the presence of holiness.  Brothers and Sisters, that hasn’t changed.  Not one bit.  What has changed is that Jesus, through his death and resurrection, has made a way for us to be washed from the stain of sin and death, to be purified from our idolatry, and to be made holy.  So holy, in fact, that God fills us with his own Spirit and makes us his temple.

 

And that’s what God was communicating to Peter that day.  Peter already understood all of that.  He knew that the church, that Jesus’ people, filled with the Spirit were the fulfilment of God’s promise to return to his people, to rebuild his temple, and to live with them.  But this was the day that God started to show his people: the blood of Jesus and the life of the Spirit weren’t just for Jews.  In fact, to fulfil his promises, this new life was also for the gentiles.  Jesus’ blood can wash them—can wash us—just as clean.  And in that God reveals his faithfulness and his glory.  And it is his glory, above all, that draws men and women to him in faith.  Just like Cornelius.

 

This is only half the story here in Acts.  I’m already going long.  We’ll finish it next week.  But this is the takeaway.  Not so much something you can do, but something you need to know, to understand, so that you can see the glory of God better.  He doesn’t change his mind.  In the law, he didn’t give Israel something bad that he later had to revoke.  It’s all part of the story of God and his people and his redemption of humanity and all of creation.  It’s a progressive revelation of himself through promise and fulfilment and at each step of the way, as we see God’s goodness, his love, his faithfulness, his glory is ever more revealed.  That’s is, I think, how we should think of “law and gospel”.  There’s been a lot in the history of the church that has mucked that up, but think on Peter and Cornelius this week—maybe go home and at some point read the rest of the story in preparation for next week—and see the goodness and faithfulness of God—and give him glory.  And as you do, do so in joyful anticipation, knowing that one day, through our witness, through our proclamation of Jesus, the knowledge of that glory will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

 

Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and love; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

by William Klock

 

When I was a sophomore in University I took the first of several art history courses, where I discovered—I should say it was more like I was confronted by—Caravaggio’s famous painting of the conversion of St. Paul: Paul fallen from his horse, hands covering his face, his servants scrambling to figure out what’s going on and to help him, everything in darkness—except Paul, bathed in heavenly light.  I’d read Act 9 who knows how many times before then.  But seeing Caravaggio’s interpretation of that scene suddenly piqued my curiosity—made me wonder what really happened to Paul that day, what did he actually see, and why did it make such a powerful change in him.  Paul, that day, became for me—I suppose after Jesus—the most intriguing character in the Bible and I wanted to figure him out, to understand him—I think, because I wanted a faith of my own like Paul’s, because I wanted to know the same kind of transformation, the same kind of passion, that Paul had after meeting the risen Messiah.

 

And one of the things I came to realise is that Paul’s passion, his zeal didn’t start when he met Jesus on the road to Damascus.  Actually, let’s call him “Saul” for now, because that’s where he’s at in Acts 9.  Saul’s zeal was already there: for the God of Israel, for righteousness and justice, for the world to be set to rights.  He truly hoped in the God of Israel, whom he knew to be good, and just, and faithful to the promises he’d made to his people.  That was what it meant to be a Pharisee.  Paul knew that his people had sinned, they had been unfaithful, they had engaged in idolatry.  They had ceased to be a holy people, so the Lord departed from them.  His presence—the cloud of glory—departed from the temple and then the people were conquered and exiled to Babylon.  “You want to worship pagan gods,” the Lord was basically saying, “Fine, you can spend a few decades in Babylon living with the pagans and their gods and see how it works out for you.”  And the people of Judah learned the lesson.  They set aside their idols, they embraced the torah, and they longed for an end to their exile—they longed for the return of God’s presence.  And they became a people of hopeful longing.  It’s funny how experiencing God’s discipline so often gives us more hope, because it just underscores all the more his faithfulness—to do what he said, even if it’s making good on his promise of judgement.  They knew his promises of restoration if they repented were just as true.

 

And in the meantime, with no temple and with no visible manifestation of the presence of God, they did the best they could.  They devoted themselves—the Pharisees more than others—but they devoted themselves to torah, to holiness.  If they couldn’t go to the temple, they would become like the temple themselves—a holy people waiting for God to return to them.  And when they returned to Judaea and rebuilt the temple and the Lord still did not return, the empty temple—all the more—became the symbol for their longing.  And missing his presence, they would meditate on the very idea of the Lord’s presence.  If they dared—and at least the later rabbis urged caution, based on the Lord’s warning to Moses that “no one may see my face and live”—but if they dared, some would meditate on Ezekiel’s weird and mysterious vision of the Lord in his heavenly chariot—not looking for some personal mystical experience, but out of a hope and a longing for the day when the Lord would return, when heaven earth, so long sundered by our sin, would be brought back together, for the day when the Lord’s people would once again live in his glorious presence.  It was a longing borne of the absence of the temple and of God’s presence there.

 

It was this passionate longing for the Lord’s return that fuelled the zeal of men like Saul of Tarsus.  This zealous young Pharisee, steeped in Israel’s scriptures and Israel’s story, with a passion for the Lord and a longing to see his return.  And in his mind, if anything was going to hinder the Lord’s return to his people, it was the new Jesus movement, these people who blasphemously believed in a crucified Messiah.  It had to be stamped out.  And so Saul supervised the stoning of Stephen.  And now, as we get into Acts 9 [page 1090 in the pew Bibles) we find that he’s one of the chief orchestrators of the persecution of the early church.  Luke writes: “Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out threats and murder on the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest and requested from him letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that he could find people who belonged to the Way, men and women alike, tie them up, and bring them back to Jerusalem.”

 

And along the way, I think that Paul was probably meditating.  Luke doesn’t fill in these kinds of details, but between his telling of the story here and Paul’s telling it later in his epistles, there are parallels with the accounts we have of Jews engaging in this practise of meditating on Ezekiel’s vision.  Paul was a man of faith, a man of hope, a man who knew that the Lord is faithful to his promises.  And so he knew the Lord would return to his people and I think Paul lived out that hope in the present by just this sort of meditation on scripture.  Up and down with the rhythmic movement of what was probably a donkey—there are some stunning parallels here with Balaam even if this donkey never says a word—the hot sun beating down on him.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Recall Ezekiel.  Eyes closed, Paul pictures as best he could the four bizarre living creates, all wings and eyes, and the chariot wheels, somehow wheels within wheel all going different directions.  He concentrated and mentally looked upward from the wheels to the crystal chariot itself, and then to the throne where Ezekial wrote that he had seen a figure not unlike a human, but gleaming with holy fire.  I expect Paul had meditated like this before.  Maybe it had never come to much.  Just try it yourself.  Try to visualise what Ezekiel describes.  Good luck making sense of it.  Or maybe Paul had done this many times before and had really been met by the Lord, the God of Israel through this kind of meditation.  But this time was different.  Luke goes on: “While he was on the journey, and was getting near to Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven shone around him.  He fell on the ground and heard a voice speaking to him.  “Saul, Saul!” said the voice.  “Why are you persecuting me?”  “Who are you, Lord?” he asked.  “I am Jesus,” he said, “and you are persecuting me.  But get up and go into the city, and it will be told you what you have to do.”

 

Saul, in his mind’s eye looks up: angels, wheels, chariot, throne—and then the figure on the throne—to his shock—is Jesus, the crucified Messiah, now risen from the dead and here.  And Paul tries to tear himself away.  No!  He tries to open his eyes to escape the vision and realises that his eyes are already open.  This isn’t a vision.  It’s not in his head.  It’s real.  It’s really Jesus.  And the sight is too much to bear—in so many ways.  He throws up his hands as Caravaggio imagined him doing, as—stunned—he loses his balance and topples off his donkey.  And the vision of glory is still there.  Where Paul expected to see the God of Israel, there was Jesus and Jesus was asking, “Why are you persecuting me?”  And Paul’s thinking that this just can’t be.  “Who are you?” he asks, even though he already knows.  And the figure of glory confirms it, “I’m Jesus.”  And he might as well have said at the same time, “I’m the God of Israel, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”  And again, “Why are you persecuting me?”  And Paul, stunned, his whole world being rearranged and reinterpreted faster than he can take it in, he says nothing as Jesus tells him simply to go to Damascus and to wait.

 

Luke says in verse 7: “The men who were traveling with Saul stood speechless.  They heard the voice but couldn’t see anybody.  And Saul, he been struck absolutely blind by the vision.  So they led him by the hand and took him to Damascus.  He went for three days, being unable to see, and he neither ate nor drank.”

 

I expect the gears in Saul’s mind were spinning away like never before during those three days.  This man of prayer was suddenly praying like never before.  If Jesus was alive, it meant he really was Israel’s Messiah.  It meant that the Lord, in him, had fulfilled already the very promises that Saul so longed to see fulfilled.  It meant that the Lord, in Jesus, had returned to his people.  It meant that God’s new world had already begun.  Paul, intelligent and deeply steeped in Israel’s scriptures, began the long, slow process of rethinking everything he knew in light of Jesus.  Paul knew—really knew the story, the scriptures.  I try to steep myself in those same scriptures and I’m like a watered down Americano compared to Saul.  Saul was a dark, black, espresso—the kind your spoon will stand up in.  That’s how steeped he was in God’s word.  It wasn’t so much a “conversion” he experienced as it was a reorientation.  The temple, the presence of the Lord, the place where heaven and earth meet, had finally come to Saul.  And, too, those words of Jesus: “You’re persecuting me.”  It meant that these people he’d been dragging off to prison, they were Jesus’ people, his covenant family, even in some way an extension of himself.  God’s promises to Abraham and to Moses and to David, the words of the Prophets, it all spent three days spinning through Saul’s mind as he reevaluated everything in light of Jesus.

 

Now, verse 10: “In Damascus there was a disciple named Ananias. The Lord spoke to him in a vision.  “Ananias!” he said.  “Here I am, Lord,” he replied.  “Get up,” said the Lord to him, “and go to the street called Straight.  Inquire at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul.  Look, he’s praying!  And he has seen, in a vision, a man named Ananias coming and laying his hands on him so that he can see again.”

 

You can go to Straight Street today—even on Google Earth.  It runs from the last remaining Roman gate, through the Christian Quarter of the old city.  Imagine the shock of Ananias.  He may have been in Damascus having fled from Saul already.  And now he has a vision and the Lord tells him he needs to go to Saul.  You can almost hear his “Ummmm…”  Was this vision for real?  Had he heard right?  “Lord,” replied Ananias, “I’ve heard about this man from several people…all about how he’s done wicked things to your holy people in Jerusalem…and now he’s come here with authority from the chief priests to tie up everybody who calls on your name!”  Ananias is worried.

 

“Just go,” replied the Lord. “He is a chosen vessel for me, to carry my name before nations and kings—and the children of Israel, too.  I am going to show him how many things he is going to have to suffer for the sake of my name.”  So Ananias set off, went into the house, and laid his hands on him.  “Brother Saul,” he said, “the Lord has sent me—yes, Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here—so that you may be able to see again, and receive the holy spirit.”

 

Worried, hesitant at first, Ananias’ faith got the better of him.  Maybe on the way.  Maybe when he met Saul and there was so clearly something different about him.  “Brother Saul,” he called him.  As Jews, yes, they were brothers, but Ananias somehow recognised in Saul the same faith, the same Jesus, the same Spirit.  I don’t think Ananias ever expected to be in a situation like this.  What do you do?  Jesus said that Saul had already had vision of Ananias laying hands on him, so that’s what Ananias does.  He lays his hands on Saul and he prays, and Luke writes (verse 18): “At once something like scales fell off his eyes, and he was able to see.  He got up and was baptized.  He had something to eat and regained his strength.  Ananias and Saul stayed with the disciples in Damascus for a few days.”

 

I wonder what happened when Ananias took Saul back to meet the other Christians in Damascus.  I expect there were some skeptics.  Was this just a fake-out by Saul to get in amongst them.  And I bet, when Ananias showed up to say, “You’ll never guess what’s happened!” there was someone else there, older, wise, steeped in the scriptures who wasn’t surprised at all.  “Brother Ananias, why would you have expected otherwise?  This is how our God does things.”  God dealt with the persecution of his people by making their persecutor one of them.  And Saul?  Well, he’s as zealous for God as ever; Jesus has just given him new direction.  While the rest of the saints in Damascus were hiding, now that he can see again, Saul marches straight to the local synagogue to proclaim Jesus, risen and Lord.  Luke goes on: “At once he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “This really is the son of God!”  Everyone was astonished, and said, “Isn’t this the man who caused havoc to those in Jerusalem who call on this name?  And here he is, coming to tie them up and take them off to the high priests!”  But Saul grew all the stronger, and threw the Jews in Damascus into confusion by demonstrating that Jesus is indeed the Messiah.”

 

I bet.  Saul was one of the best of them.  He knew the scriptures and the promises of God inside out and upside down.  He was brilliant.  And he was passionately zealous for God.  And I expect—you know how when you figure something out that you’ve been wrestling with for a long time and it lights a fire under you and you get really excited to tell other people?—well, meeting Jesus lit that kind of fire under Saul.  It would take him a long time to really work it all through—he would go off to Arabia by himself to work it all through—but already he’s been rethinking what meeting Jesus means about the God of Israel and about what it means to be Israel.  Even what it means that Jesus is the God of Israel.  And so he went to his fellow Jews to proclaim this good news.  To tell them that Jesus is the son of God.  This is, by the way, the first time in Acts we hear Jesus called “son of God”.  It was a big deal.  And then Luke says that the other thing Saul was eager to do was to explain to his fellow Jews that Jesus was the Messiah—or maybe it would better to say that the Messiah was Jesus.  Because given the context here in Acts and what we know of Paul later from his epistles and how he roots everything so deeply and richly in the Old Testament, I expect he was in the synagogue in Damascus reminding the people there of the scriptures and especially of these two ideas, these two characters: the son of God and the Messiah.  “Son of God” isn’t used much in the Old Testament, but when it is, it refers to Israel.  God said to Pharaoh, “Israel is my firstborn son”.  But Jesus is also the son of David, the Messiah.  And God had promised that David would have a son who would build the temple.  God would raise him up and he would sit on David’s throne.  “I will be a father to him,” God had declared in 2 Samuel 7, “and he will be my son.”  All this is swirling madly in Saul’s mind and starting to take shape, to make sense.  And then there was Psalm 2, invoked by the first Christians as they faced persecution.  God confronts the wicked rulers of the world and declares that he has set up his King in Zion and that the nations will tremble before him.  He’s the one to whom the Lord has made his firm decree, “You are my son, this day I have begotten you.”  Luke doesn’t tell us exactly what Paul preached or even if he preached.  Maybe he just hung out at the synagogue and proclaimed the good news to whomever would listen.  But knowing Paul, I have to think he did some preaching.  And he reminded his people of God and of his promises and he appealed to their hope: God’s promise to return to his people.  God’s promise to set the world to rights.  God’s promise to bring the nations under his sovereign rule.  And how all this is now coming true, how it’s being fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah.  Through him God will reach out to the gentiles and bring them under his sovereign rule and make them his inheritance.  How the Messiah will rule them with wisdom and justice just as God promised.  This would be the heart of Paul’s preaching: The risen Messiah is God’s anointed King.  He’s God’s son, he shed his blood to purify us from our sins that he might bring us back from our long exile.  He’s God’s son who has built a new temple, a house for his Holy Spirit.  In him God’s promises are being fulfilled.  2 Samuel 7, Psalm 2, Psalms 72 and 89 and 26 and 27.  God’s promises.  Psalm about Israel’s hope.  Psalms about the Messiah.  We know from the scrolls we’ve found at Qumran that how Paul was handling these scriptures was exactly the way other Jewish groups in his day were handling these scriptures and asking the same questions.  And struggling to find an answer.  Because no one ever dreamed that a man who was crucified could be the Messiah.  But Paul had met him, risen from the dead.  And the dots began to connect.  The royal psalms began to connect with the psalms of lament.  The great king who would rule Israel and the nations began to connect with the suffering servant who represented Israel.  And then it gelled: The king represents his people so that he can stand in for them.  So that what happens to him, happens to them—and what happens to them, happens to him.  And so the king died.  And then the king rose from the dead.  And in that great act, God had declared: “See!  This really is my son.  And with him I am well-pleased!”  Pleased with his beloved son—and through him, pleased with his beloved sons and daughters.

 

And surely some believed.  But others were angry.  Verse 23: “After some days, the Jews made a plot to kill him, but Saul got wind of their plan.  They were watching the city gates day and night so that they could do away with him.  But the disciples took him by night and let him down through the wall, lowering him in a basket.

 

When he got back to Jerusalem he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple.  But Barnabas took him, brought him to the apostles, and explained to them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and that he had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus.  He was with them in Jerusalem, coming and going and speaking boldly in the name of the Lord.  He spoke, as well, to the Hellenists, who tried to kill him.  But the brothers heard of it and took him down to Caesarea. There they sent him off to Tarsus.  So the church in all Judaea, Galilee, and Samaria found itself at peace.  It was built up and gained in numbers, living in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.”

 

And Paul knew, this too is how God works.  He saved the brothers and sisters in Damascus from their persecutor.  But Saul, well, God humbles him.  He has to be lowered over the wall in a basket so he can run.  Sometimes that’s also how God works.  He was preparing Saul for his missionary task and the struggles and dangers and humiliations that would come with it.  Even returning to Jerusalem, he is initially rejected by the apostles.  God bless Barnabas—the “son of comfort”—he vouched for Saul and told him that he really had met Jesus on the road to Damascus and that all the rest was, in fact, true, no matter how impossible it seemed.  And Saul then proved himself in Jerusalem, preaching to the Hellenists who promptly set about to kill him.

 

And so Peter and the others packed him off.  Luke doesn’t say exactly why.  Maybe the trouble his zeal for Jesus stirred up in Jerusalem was just too much right then.  Maybe they knew that Saul needed to go home to Tarsus, to begin his preaching with the people who knew him.  So—and not for the last time—Saul boarded a ship and set sail.  This would be the pattern for the rest of his life.

 

Brothers and Sisters, Saul of Tarsus—Paul—knew better than anyone that Jesus changes everything.  That Jesus is the embodiment of God’s goodness, his mercy, his love, and maybe most importantly his faithfulness.  Remember that last week we looked at that bit of Paul’s writing in 2 Corinthians where he talks about the glory of God that was on display in the Exodus: at the burning bush, in the plagues, at the Red Sea, at Mount Sinai, in the cloud of glory that descended on the tabernacle.  And he wrote that Jesus upstaged it all.  The Messiah he met on the road to Damascus revealed the glory of God in a way Paul had never imagined possible.  Brothers and Sisters, may we encounter that same glory ourselves.

 

I think for most—probably all of us—our experience of God’s glory is far more hum-drum and ordinary and unsensational.  Maybe that’s because, as far as being steeped in scripture and knowing the glory of God revealed there, we’re a watered down Americano.  We’re like those can of LaCroix that say they’re orange flavoured, but the flavour is so weak—well—you wonder if it’s just carbonated water that was bottled in a plant where there was a solitary orange sitting in the corner to imparts the tiniest hint of its essence.  Paul was the opposite.  And we need to aspire to be like him.  Pray that God will give us a hunger for his word and a desire to know him and to know the story.  My observation has always been that the better people know the story, the more saintly and the more passionate they are, the more zealous they are for the Lord and for his good news.  Steep yourselves in the scripture.  And meditate on your baptism and how Jesus has brought you through the water into life with him.  How he’s plunged us into God’s Spirit and given us new life.  And come to his Table.  Eat the bread, drink the wine, and recall what God has done for us in Jesus, in his incarnation, in his death, and in his resurrection.  Experience here the fulfilment of all God’s promises that you might see his glory.  Then be the people who—like Saul who just couldn’t stay quiet—make that glory known in the world.

Let’s pray: Almighty and merciful God, by whose gift alone your faithful people offer you true and laudable service: Grant that we may run without stumbling to obtain your heavenly promises; that we might truly see and know your glory along the way; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.