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Early Christians shared a common meal. Everyone brought something.
- Possibly the only good meal many of the slaves had all week.
- Meal marked the unity among the Christians.
Jewish law was clear: Israelites were not to defile themselves by eating with Gentiles.
When Peter came to Antioch, he at first gloried in new-found faith; ate with Gentiles
- Then people came from Jerusalem
- Probably not really from James but used his name
Worked on Peter to maintain Jewish disntinctiveness.
- "Embrace your heritage."
- When Barnabas began to drift, Paul jumped in.
Paul saw two things clearly:
- A church with class distinctions ceases to be Christian. In God's presence, people are not rich, poor, noble, common, etc. If men are sons of God, then they must be brothers.
- Saw immediate and forceful intervention was necessary to counteract the drift back to the law.
According to William Barcaly, the root of the matter was that the Council of Jerusalem was a compromise.
- Gentiles could be free from legal requirements, but the Jews could go on living as Jews.
- This agreement had the seeds of trouble.
- This set up a situation to have a Jewish and a Gentile church, not a Christian church.
Paul points out that the "Gentile sinners" were defined by the Jewish mindset. Gentiles, according to Jews, were sinners not so much because of their specific behaviors but because they did not have the law. The absence of the Law is what defined "sinners".
Even though the Jewish Christians knew that Jesus, not the law, saved them, they still had the visceral conviction that the law gave them an advantage.
- They didn't give up hundreds of years of tradition in a few months and years.
- They believed, from millennia of tradition, that the law defined God's people.
The Jerusalem agreement allowed the Jews to keep the trappings of the Old Covenant while not requiring them of the Gentiles. This compromise perpetuated the sense of chosen-ness and holiness, the sense of being the remnant, based on inheritance and privilege and understanding.
Paul confronts Peter in Antioch and argues that not only did the Gentiles have to come to Christ and behave like Christ followers, but the Jews had to give up the law and throw themselves on the mercy of Christ. If sin, he argued, is defined by not keeping the law, then are we going to say that Christ taught us to sin? Obviously not.
Only one conclusion is possible: The old laws were wiped out. A new law is in its place: Love one another as I have loved you.
We are tempted to try to prove ourselves worthy of God and to compare ourselves with our fellow Christians.
A religion which measures itself by one's activities or which drives us to compare ourselves to others is not true Christianity.
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