Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the believers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company... Acts 15:36-39
When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles... Galatians 2:11-12
Arguments and divisions in the church are nothing new; they go right back to the earliest days.
That was the point of our last post, where we looked at the sad story of Paul falling out with his friend Barnabas over John Mark (Acts 15). The two men simply couldn’t see eye to eye over something that mattered very much to both of them, so they “parted company”.
But I said there was another big falling out involving Paul, this time with the apostle Peter. Paul gives his account of it in Galatians 2, and it’s clear that it was even more serious than the Paul-Barnabas dispute: “When Cephas (that is, Peter) came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned”.
That’s strong language! Can you imagine the atmosphere in the hall when this confrontation between the two spiritual giants took place? It must have been electric.
Two questions arise…
First, what was actually going on in Antioch?
The Antioch church was a key church in those early days (go to Acts 11 to see how it was founded). It was where the word “Christian” was coined, and it was where something happened that seems to have taken the original church in Jerusalem by surprise. What was that? – large numbers of non-Jews – “Gentiles”, or “Greeks” – came to faith in Jesus (Acts 11:20-21).
We need to remember that “Christianity” was originally a thoroughly Jewish affair: Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, the twelve apostles were all Jews, and the gospel was the fulfilment of God’s promises to the people of Israel.
But no-one seems to have fully grasped that it was God’s intention to gather all peoples and nations to himself - in spite of passages like Genesis 12:3, where God tells Abram that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you”; and Isaiah 49:6, where he tells Israel that “I will make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation shall reach to the ends of the earth”.
But now exactly this was happening… in Antioch!
So the question arose: How should we receive these strange new converts - people who don’t dress like us, who don’t share our history, scriptures and language, who have never learned our laws, whose men have never been circumcised? Do we just baptise them into Christ and have done with it? Or should we in effect require them to convert to Judaism in order that they can truly belong to the Jewish Messiah?
The essential answer was simple: just accept them as they are! All that matters is faith in Jesus!
And so a truly mixed church was born, Jews and Gentiles side by side. So far, so wonderful.
But that leads to the second question: why was Paul so angry with Peter when they met that day in Antioch?
Answer: because Peter – yes, Peter of all people… Peter who had been with Jesus in his earthly life, and had seen how decidedly unpicky he was about the company he kept… Peter who had received from God a remarkable vision (Acts 10) that should have taught him all he needed to know… Peter who had stood up before a full church council (Acts 15:6-11) and declared that God “does not discriminate between us (Jews) and them (Gentiles)”… Peter who knew Jesus as well as anybody on the face of the earth! – yes, this Peter had decided that he, as a Jewish Christian, could no longer sit at the same meal-table as Gentile Christians. Jews just didn’t eat with Gentiles because they were “unclean”; and that was that.
No wonder Paul is utterly horrified.
There were, it seems, some hard-line Jewish Christians from Jerusalem who felt that if any Gentile wanted to follow Jesus they must first become “real” Jews, food laws and all. They claimed to be sent by James the brother of Jesus, the head of the Jerusalem church (Galatians 2:12; I wonder if they really were?). They are referred to by Paul as “the circumcision group” – which suggests that it wasn’t only Jewish food laws that they were concerned about.
And – this is the point - it seems that Peter had allowed himself to be persuaded by these people. He “began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group”.
Paul, then, is outraged by Peter’s inconsistency, indeed, by his “hypocrisy” (Galatians 2:13). But it wasn’t just that, not at all. No, there was a matter of vital principle here, unlike in the spat with Barnabas.
But (sorry!) I think we will need a third blog to bring that out…
Lord God, thank you that you love all people alike. Help me to do the same, regardless of their colour, their race, their background, their education, their wealth or poverty, their intelligence or simplicity – just as people for whom Jesus died. Amen.
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