9 May 2004
Eating With The Enemy
I do wish the people who compiled the lectionary
wouldn’t start us off right in the middle of a story! You never know quite what is going on. I do see that they wish to take pity on those whose turn it is to
read the Scriptures aloud, but even still!
And this story in Acts, that was our first reading
today, starts off bang in the middle of things. What is Peter up to, and, more to the point, what has he
been up to?
It seems a little odd to
us, but, of course, in our day we don’t have rules about associating with
unbelievers. But it was very different
back then. If you were Jewish, you
didn’t associate with unbelievers, end of.
You certainly never went to their homes – you might speak to them in the
street, if you absolutely had to, but going to their homes would have made you
what was known as “unclean”, and you would have had to have had a ritual bath
before you could associate with your friends and family again. That’s one of the reasons why the Priest and
the Levite walked past the dying victim in Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan –
if the man was actually dead, they’d have made themselves unclean for no good
reason. Far better to pass by on the
other side of the road, and pretend you hadn’t noticed. And it’s why the Roman Centurion wouldn’t
let Jesus visit his house when his servant was ill – he told Jesus there was
absolutely no point in his getting unclean when he only needed to say the word
and the servant would be healed. Which
he did, and he was.
Jesus, I’ve noticed,
didn’t seem to give two hoots about whether he was unclean or not, and whenever
he was told off about his practices – which was basically whenever the
Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day, whenever they noticed what he
was doing, he would tell them that the rules were made for our convenience, not
God’s. Once, when he was told off
because he hadn’t washed his hands in the ritually-prescribed manner, he
pointed out that outward things like that totally didn’t matter, and what you
ate passed straight through you and ended up down the drain, anyway. It was what came from inside you that
mattered.
The gospel writer
commented “By saying this, he declared all foods clean”. Which basically brings us back to the story
in Acts, because Jesus might have said it, but St Peter, for one, certainly
hadn’t hauled it in.
So when Cornelius, a Roman
official, wanted to learn more about God, God sent an angel to him saying, in
effect, “The man you want is called Simon Peter, and he’s staying at the house
of Simon the Tanner, here in Joppa – why not send for him?” Snag was, it was going to take more than an
invitation to persuade Peter to go round to the Cornelius’ place. So Peter, too, gets a vision. Or, just possibly, a dream – he’s gone up to
sit on the flat roof to pray for awhile before lunch, and he might easily have
nodded off. Anyway, whatever, what he
sees is a large sheet, full of the kind of animals he simply wouldn’t have dreamt
of eating in a million years. The sort
of animal he’d always considered unclean, and probably made his stomach churn
to think of eating it – rather like we might feel about ants’ eggs or sheep’s
eyeballs. But three times he was told
to do this, and three times he was told not to call anything unclean that God
has called clean.
When he woke up, or came
to himself, or whatever, he was still inclined to wonder what God meant by it
all. So you can imagine how surprised
he was when he found Cornelius’ servants waiting downstairs, asking him to come
along.
Now,
Peter, since the Holy Spirit came, is a changed man. But at times there are still traces of the old Peter there, like
now, because the first thing he said was "You yourselves know that it is
unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile."
I
wonder how that made Cornelius feel.
Peter might just as well have said "You know, I have trouble telling any of you people apart
from one another. And I realize that your kind of people are generally
lazy and just come here to sponge off of social security. Your people all
have lots of babies so you can get more money from the Government without
having to work. I shouldn't be crossing the picket lines to talk to you
scabs. I am fully aware that God does not approve of your life style and
that you are an abomination to God. But hey, here I am. Aren't you
impressed?"
But
Peter has learnt to listen to God the Holy Spirit, and suddenly realises what
his vision meant. He rightly concludes,
"God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or
unclean." Peter is slowly realizing that he had been sent to this
particular household for a reason.
Until
then, the disciples had thought that they were only meant to be preaching to
the Jews, and the Good News wasn’t for everybody. Jesus had tried to show that it was, but I have a feeling he wasn’t
altogether too clear on that one while he was on earth, so it became an issue
to be addressed primarily after the resurrection, like now. Peter suddenly sees the light: "I truly
understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears
him and does what is right is acceptable to him."
The
Greek word used originally to express the idea that God show no partiality has
a lot to do with the recognition of faces - that God does not accept anyone on
just the appearance of his face. Some have transliterated it, "God is not
an accepter-of-a-face." Others have said, "God is no
face-receiver." It doesn't matter if the face is black, white, or
brown. It doesn't matter if the person is Gentile or Jew, and the realization
stuns him.
We
can hardly imagine the shock that Peter must have felt. Every day, Peter
prayed the prayer from the Talmud which said, "Oh God, I thank thee that I
am not a Gentile, that I am not a slave, that I am not a woman."
Peter had been steeped and trained in an exclusivist religion that thrived on
making clear distinctions between those acceptable to God and those who were
the outcasts. This statement of Peter's marks a dramatic and amazing
shift. Now the Gospel can be proclaimed to the Gentiles.
And
so Peter tells the believers in Jerusalem, when they send for him and ask what
on earth he thinks he’s been doing. For
Peter, this is a start of a whole new journey of discovery, of what God is
doing among other people, people who aren’t Jewish. He does have his moments of backsliding – St Paul tells us, in
the letter to the Galatians, that he had to remind Peter that he was perfectly
able to eat with Gentiles and not to be so stupid about it. But, by and large, the early church had
turned a huge corner.
===oo0oo===
The
trouble is, it’s a lesson we didn’t learn once and for all, that day back in
Joppa. It’s a lesson we’ve had to learn
over and over and over again. It’s a
lesson we’re still learning. Just look
at the pictures that have been in the papers this week, of soldiers torturing
Iraqi prisoners. Or the fuss the
newspapers made about the ten new countries joining the EU last weekend, and
expecting us to be quote, swamped, unquote by people coming here to take our
jobs. They didn’t, of course, make a
fuss about people from here going there to take advantage of
cheap booze or unscrupulous employers here taking advantage of migrant workers.
But
we are tribalists at heart. St Paul may
have been able to write, all those years ago, that “As many of you as were
baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no
longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are
one in Christ Jesus.” But we don’t
really believe it. Look at Rwanda, for
instance, where it matters so dreadfully if you are Hutu or Tutsi, or whatever
the tribes are called. The most recent
massacres are only that – the most recent ones; they’ve been murdering each
other for years. Look at Northern
Ireland. I don’t see how they’ll ever
be able to get a sensible internal government structure in place there, since
the two tribes distrust each other to a degree that, unless you’ve actually
seen it happening, you find impossible to believe. Look at Bosnia, Serbia, the Lebanon, India… the list goes on and
on.
And
even in our own personal lives, we are sometimes guilty of it. Especially in this country, where, as
Bernard Shaw so rightly said, “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his
mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”
Of
course, we are always going to associate mostly with people who are more like
us – we have more in common with people who come from the same sort of
background, went to the same sort of school, enjoy the same sort of
hobbies. Christian folk may well prefer
the company of other Christians. That’s
okay. What is so not okay is despising
those who are not like us. Thinking
they are lesser people. Thinking that
their views and opinions don’t matter in the same way that ours do. And, above all, thinking that they are not
loved by God every bit as much as we are.
Listen,
Peter had to learn this lesson the hard way.
He had to have a direct lesson from God to learn that it was okay for
him to visit Cornelius, and then he had to justify that decision to the other
believers in Jerusalem, who were shocked.
Why
does God still have to teach us the same lesson today, two thousand years
later? Can we never learn that, to
quote Peter, and Paul, “God shows no partiality”? If God does not, then why do we?
We
need to pray, not only for forgiveness for ourselves when we are guilty of
tribalism – and, let’s face it, we all are from time to time – but also for God’s
enabling power to help us be free of
it, and to help us to be part of eradicating this dreadful scourge from the
world. If only these dreadful pictures
in this week’s press could be the last of their kind. But unless we, unless you and I, get our acts together, they will
not be.
Most
people agree that torture is, of itself unacceptable. Those pictures have shocked the world. But the mental attitude that “They are only Iraqis” or “only
Moslems” or, in other contexts, “only Catholics or only Hindus”,
still dies hard. And it is this
attitude of classifying people as only this, that or the other, that
leads, eventually, to torture and abuse.
Let’s not be part of that, but let’s try to learn to value each and
every individual that we meet as a person for whom Christ died. Amen.