We ought to stop troubling the Gentiles who have turned to God, for God who knows the heart has granted them the Holy Spirit. And the teething problems continue…The Church of God has always had its fair share of issues to solve, and these issues will not be coming to an end anytime soon. The Holy Spirit that animates the Church is both animate and fluid (the wind blows wherever it wills, Jesus had said [cf. John 3:8]) and cannot be contained. One of the issues that the early Church had to grapple with was cultural. As a “sect” of Judaism, the early Church didn’t know how to strip itself of some of its Jewish practices in order to make itself more accommodative of the Gentiles. To the Christians of Jewish background, there was no difference between culture and religion. As a matter of fact, their culture (way of life) was their very religion. This is why in today’s reading we find them demanding that Gentile Christians be circumcised before they can be fully considered as Christians. This was not out of malice or ill intentions on the part of the Jewish Christians. They were just following the law.
In response, Peter reminds them of an important factor that they were forgetting: Christianity was not a mere transplanting of the Jewish religion. Rather, Christianity was a fulfillment of what God had begun a long time ago, when God had called the nation of Israel and set it apart for a special mission: a mission of bringing the nations of the world to the knowledge of God. The promise to gather all nations together unto the Lord has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and by extension, in this new way of life. “The coming to faith by the Gentiles is not their own doing,” Peter says, “but is rather that of God. As such, if God had required of them circumcision, God would have made this known to them (as God did for Abraham and his descendants). But as it stands, God has not demanded this of the Gentiles.” Picking a cue from Peter, James, a fellow elder, reminds them that circumcision belonged to the old covenant which has been surpassed by the new one made in the blood of Jesus Christ. In this new covenant, what sets apart a worshipper is not external but rather internal. In this new covenant, God is worshipped in the heart, and not in the external “shows.”