Monday, 10th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 11:19-30

“And in Antioch the disciples were first called Christians” (v.25b)

In Acts, when the first disciples of Jesus the Christ refer to themselves, they call themselves, “The Way.” It wasn’t “Christians” who first called themselves, “Christians.” That was the nickname given them by their neighbors in Antioch. And at this point, “Christ” wasn’t Jesus’s last name. It was the title his followers referred to him by – Jesus the Christ. So, what did it mean for the Antiochenes to call Jesus’s disciples “Christians?” What they perceived was that these men and women believed that Jesus was, in Greek, Christos, “anointed,” in Hebrew, messiah.

Essentially, the Jewish people had gleaned from their prophets that this man to come, anointed by God, would be a powerful king who would save Israel from her enemies, and would perfect the people’s worship of God at a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. But Jesus has predicted the Temple’s destruction. And he had died the humiliating death of crucifixion at the hands of Israel’s enemies. How could he possibly be this “Christ,” this king that his disciples kept saying he was so much that they become known as “king’s men?”

Only the outrageous claim that he had risen from the dead, and that he had appeared to over 500 witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:6), could be the foundation of their insistence that Jesus was , in all truth, The Christ, the King of life and death, the King of success and failure.

The world mostly measures power, wealth, success, in terms that we can see, or count. And Jesus’s power over death was seen by those who he chose as his witnesses. But first he had to endure failure and death. And 2,000 years later, his power is not measured by the wealth procured, or the territory conquered. His power is measured by the hearts changed, the relationships built on the foundation of steadfast love. Most truly, Jesus is the King, the King of love.