We ought to stop troubling the Gentiles who have turned to God, for God who knows what is in the hearts of men and women has granted them the Holy Spirit. And the teething problems continue…The Church of God has always had its fair share of issues to deal with, and these issues will not be coming to an end anytime soon. The Holy Spirit that gives life to 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 members of gentile background. To the members of Jewish background, there was no difference between culture and religion. As a matter of fact, their culture (way of life) was their religion. This is why in today’s First reading from the Acts of Apostles, we see them demanding that Christians of Gentile background 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 as they had come to know and understand it.
In response, Peter reminds Christians of Jewish background of an important factor that they were seemingly forgetting: Christianity was not a mere transplanting of Judaism. Christianity was not a Jewish sect, even if that is how it was perceived. Rather, the Christian religion 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 the one God worshipped by Israel. The promise to gather all nations together unto the Lord had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and by extension, in the new way of life that he had founded. “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 his brothers and sisters that circumcision belonged to the old dispensation 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.”