He Saw the Grace of God and was Glad

He Saw the Grace of God and was Glad Acts 11:1-30 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.