Every day during the
Easter season, the 1st reading at Mass is taken from the Acts of the
Apostles – the 2nd volume, so to speak, of the Gospel according to
Luke – the story of what happened next, the sequel to Jesus’ resurrection and
ascension. It’s the wonderful
story of how a mere 120 disciples were transformed by the Risen Christ’s
parting gift of the Holy Spirit into a missionary movement that spread from
Jerusalem to Rome and in the process was transformed from a small Jewish sect
into a world-wide Church with a universal mission.
To us, who already know
the story, that all seems to have been so obvious and inevitable. For the first
Christians, however, it must have seemed like one new learning experience after
another. Today’s 1st reading [Acts
10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48] recounts one pivotal point in that process.
The story actually began earlier with Peter, the leader of the Christian
community, making what we today might call a “pastoral visit” to the disciples
in a town called Joppa (near today’s Tel Aviv). While there, Peter had a dream,
in which he saw various animals, not all of them kosher, and heard a heavenly
voice tell him to kill and eat them. When Peter responded that he had never
eaten non-kosher meat, he was told, What
God has made clean, you are not to call profane. That’s a good example of
something the meaning of which, to us in retrospect, seems so obvious,
but which at the time, in its actual context, must have seemed so perplexing.
While Peter pondered this perplexing dream, however, emissaries from a Roman
centurion, named Cornelius, came calling and asked Peter to accompany them back
to Caesarea, which Peter promptly did. And that is where today’s reading picks
up the story.
Cornelius was a Roman,
a foreigner, a pagan.
He was in fact a rather pious pagan, and was somewhat sympathetic
to Judaism; but he was still a pagan, an uncircumcised Gentile! No
observant Jew would normally have entered his house, but these were not
normal circumstances. Already “prepped” by his perplexing dream, Peter crossed
that boundary. He listened to Cornelius, then replied: “I see that God shows no partiality. Rather,
in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is
acceptable to him.” He then did what no one had yet thought of
doing. He proclaimed the Good News of Jesus to a house full of Gentiles.
Suddenly what had happened to the original 120 disciples on Pentecost now
happened to Cornelius and his household – a “Pentecost for pagans,” as it has
been called. And so, Peter asked, “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing
these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”
Thus began the momentous
change that enabled Christianity to spread and take root throughout the world,
becoming eventually the largest religion in the world and the largest growing
religion in the world today. I say “began,” because, of course, the full
implications of something so unexpected took time to sink in. There were many
Gentiles sympathetic to Judaism at the time. Some even went all the way and converted. Had
Cornelius converted and become a Jew and then acknowledged Jesus as the
Messiah, he would not have been all that different from the other early
Christians, who were, of course, also Jews who acknowledged Jesus as the
promised Messiah. Cornelius, however, had not become a Jew. He had
“jumped the line,” so to speak, directly into Christianity. Soon the Church
would have to debate whether Gentiles needed to become Jews first in order to
become Christians, and Peter would cite this transformational event as the key
to understanding God’s will for this Church – that it be the vehicle for
conversion and repentance for all, without exception and without
restriction.
This was not like some
modern or post-modern dismissal of parts of the Bible that the apostles
suddenly found inconvenient, but rather a recognition of how God’s covenant
with Israel was being fulfilled in Christ. It was God who took the
initiative in all this – directing Cornelius to invite Peter, prepping Peter
with his dream, and then dramatically demonstrating God’s plan to include the
Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit. For his part, Peter, as leader of the
Church, recognized God’s action and accepted its implications, baptizing the first
Gentile Christians and incorporating them into the community.
This story speaks volumes
about the very nature of the Church – not just the 1st century apostolic
Church, but the Church of the 21st century, which is, if
anything, even more global and more universal than ever before.
The Church is not a club, a fraternal association, a social networking group,
or even a prayer group, though it may have elements of all those things. As
Pope Pius XI put it, almost a century ago: “The Church has no other reason for its
existence than to extend over the earth the kingdom of Christ and so to render
people sharers of his saving redemption.”
As a practical matter, of
course, we experience the Church largely as part of a locally defined parish
community. The parish nourishes and supports us in our faith. It brings us
together to hear the Good News that makes our lives so different from what they
would otherwise have been. It brings us together to respond to that Good News
with worship and prayer, support for one another, and service to others in the
day-in, day-out dying and rising that defines a disciple’s life. But it
doesn’t stop there. The parish is never just about itself. In union with
Peter’s successor, the Pope, and the apostles’ successors, the Bishops of the
entire world, the Church unites us across time back to the faith and
witness of the apostles their first converts - pagans like Cornelius - and
across space to take in the entire world, today’s world.
Precisely as Christ’s
Church, we are challenged at every level to expand our horizon,
just as the apostolic Church had its horizon expanded, to understand our
own local experience of Church as one with that of the young, emerging
Church in Africa, the aging Church in Europe, and the even more ancient Churches
in India and the Middle East, to understand how our own middle-aged American
Church is being rejuvenated and revitalized by many new immigrants, to
understand our own local experience of Church in the wider terms
of God’s great plan for the salvation of the world – God who sent his only Son into the world so that we
might have life through him [1 John 4:9].
Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 13, 2012.
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