ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
6th Sunday of Easter, 2006
Fr Alan Moses
Readings: Acts 10.44-48; 1 john 5.1-6; John 15.9-17
Cornelius the Centurion is, I suspect, someone most Christians are no
more than vaguely aware of. He appears in the Acts of the Apostles and
then disappears again. But Luke clearly regards this incident as of great
significance because he devotes no less than 66 verses to recounting it.
What happens has been overshadowed by the conversion of Saul which led
to the mission of the man we know as St. Paul, a ministry which continues
to reverberate because of his writings which came to be included in the
canon of Scripture. Cornelius left no writings behind, although there
is a tradition that he became the Bishop of Caesarea..
He was the first Gentile converted to the Christian faith, along with
his household. He was a centurion in the Roman army, an officer in the
cohort based at Caesarea, a Roman citizen. He is described as a “devout
man who feared God with all his household, gave alms liberally to the
people, and prayed constantly to God.” (Acts 10.2). He was probably
a pious Roman who like others in the ancient world, disillusioned by pagan
religion and philosophy, had gravitated spiritually towards Judaism, becoming
one of those called the “God-fearers”.
At three o’clock one afternoon, one of the Jewish hours of daily
prayer, he saw a vision in which an angel told him that his prayers and
alms had been accepted by God and that he was to send to Joppa to fetch
Simon, called Peter, who was staying with Simon the Tanner whose house
was beside the sea. Cornelius sent messengers to Joppa.
Just before they arrived, Peter fell into a trance, in which he too had
a vision. A great sheet was let down from heaven, full of strange animals
and birds; a voice called to him, saying, “Rise, Peter, kill and
eat,” to which Peter, thinking of himself as a good Jew and forgetting
for the moment what his Lord had said about food regulations, answered,
“No, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.”
The voice replied, “What God has cleansed , you must not call common.”
This sequence was repeated three times.
While Peter was puzzling out the meaning of this vision, the messengers
from Cornelius arrived on the doorstep. It was then that the Spirit told
him, “Behold, three men are looking for you. Rise and go down, and
accompany them without hesitation; for I have sent them.” So Peter
welcomes them and the next day, sets out to Caesarea with them.
On Peter’s arrival, Cornelius, his family and friends are assembled
and waiting. Cornelius prostrated himself at Peter’s feet, then
each explained their visions and Peter added, “Truly I perceive
that God shows no partiality, but in very nation any one who fears him
and does what is right is acceptable to him.” (Acts 10.34-35)
Peter then spoke to them of the good news of Jesus, his life, death and
resurrection, and proclaimed the eternal purpose of God in sending Jesus
to be the Saviour.
This brings us to the section of the story we have just heard. While Peter
was speaking, the Spirit came to all who were listening, to the astonishment
of Peter and his Jewish companions, because these Gentiles had not yet
been baptised. This wasn’t what they were expecting. It broke the
rules in two ways. First of all, because the normal pattern in Acts is
for believers to receive the Holy Spirit after they have heard the word
proclaimed and in conjunction with their baptism. But far more importantly,
these people are not Jews.
For Luke, the important question is not when the Holy Spirit engulfed
them, but why. This is the question that the text makes central. What
is significant is that the 6 Jewish Christians, “the circumcised
believers”, who had accompanied Peter to Caesarea, witnessed this
spiritual outpouring; “they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling
God.” This probably means ecstatic utterances rather than foreign
languages.
As the story unfolds, we hear echoes of the account of Pentecost in Acts
2: the coming of the Spirit and the speaking in tongues. This incident
has often been referred to as “The Pentecost of the Gentiles”
and it is clear that Luke wants his readers to understand it this way.
From what Peter says later, it was also a moment of illumination for him.
He noticed, too, that the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles assembled,
but this triggered his memory. He recalled “the word of the Lord,
how he had said ‘John baptised with water, but you will be baptised
with the Holy Spirit’” He could only conclude that what he
and the apostles had experienced at Pentecost, the Gentiles were now experiencing
too. They were both witnessing and experiencing the breaking in of the
kingdom marked by the coming of the Holy Spirit. To have excluded them
from the formal initiation into that kingdom, from baptism, would have
been to resist God.
Peter’s conversion has a number of important ingredients:
1. he witnesses again the coming of the Holy Spirit, which reminded him
of Pentecost;
2. he recalled “the word of the Lord” and interpreted his
experience in light of it.
3. he drew the inevitable conclusion: God has been at work among the Gentiles;
and
4. he conformed his practice to this newly informed perspective; he instructed
that the Gentiles be baptised with water.
5. he then stayed with them for a few days, accepting their hospitality,
sharing their table - something no observant Jew could do.
Luke considers Cornelius’ conversion to be momentous for the future
of Christianity. He shows it happening as a result of divine intervention
and revelation, and as a response to the preaching of Peter the chief
apostle. He sees the experience of Cornelius’ household as comparable
to a new Pentecost. It was a primary precedent for the momentous decision
of the apostolic council , held in Jerusalem a few years later, to admit
Gentiles to full and equal partnership with Jewish converts in the household
of faith.
The experience of Peter, and later of Paul and Barnabas at Antioch, demonstrate
to Luke and to us, that the mission of the Church is the mission of God.
The Holy Spirit is at work ahead of the church preparing people to hear
the message of Christ. Mission is often thought of as something we organise,
a carefully orchestrated programme. Now there is nothing wrong with organisation
and planning in themselves. But time and again in Acts we find the apostles
not so much sitting in the department of missions in Jerusalem planning
where the next evangelistic campaign should be but responding to promptings
of the Holy Spirit, often delivered to people in visions. This is not
the kind of language which ecclesiastical committees respond to with natural
ease.
What Luke shows us again and again in Acts is what those words of Jesus
from John, “You did not choose me but I chose you” also point
out: the initiative, the driving force, is God’s. Often what happens
is not that Church councils, great or small, then or ever since, initiate
things, but that they respond to the workings of the Spirit.
You and I are the descendants of Cornelius, Gentile Christians, yet we
all have within us the tendency to react like the circumcised believers;
to see the Holy Spirit working on our terms, within the boundaries we
set. When we see things that are different, new, unsettling, we react
defensively. That cannot be of God, we say. We know that God does not
work like that. But what happened to Peter is not simply a piece of ancient
history but a pattern for all of us, for all time. He witnesses something
which is both familiar and strange; it is like what he has experienced,
but it has not come through the official channels. He could have rejected
it outright but he did not.
He reflected on this experience in the light of scripture. In fact the
experience brought to mind something Jesus had said which he had forgotten.
The Church often finds that new events and experiences bring passages
of scripture, aspects of revelation previously neglected to mind. Our
continuing reflection involves bringing new experience together with scripture
and tradition, the apostolic witness to the purposes of God revealed in
the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, in that process in which Christ
makes known to us everything he has heard from the Father.
That reflection takes place in the context of our abiding in Christ, in
the sacramental fellowship of the Church, represented by the water and
the blood, the community of those he has called to be his ‘friends’,
in the mutual love without which
we cannot love God,
will not be able to bear the fruit that will last,
will not know the life of faith as the source of joy but merely as some
wearisome and fearful burden.