Monday, 11th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 13:44-52

Paul and Barnabas have preached to the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia (not the Antioch from which they started their mission). Now, they are preaching to the whole town. And the Jews, it is said, “were filled with jealousy.” But the Greek word translated here as jealousy is actually zelou, from which we get “zeal.”

Too many English translators of the Bible have simply assumed selfish motives on the part of the Jewish people in this story. Perhaps some were jealous to see so many Gentiles turning to these upstarts and strangers. But I suspect that many also were still nursing the slights, the insults, and attacks that they, and their ancestors, had suffered at the hands of the pagan nations. And now who they were being welcomed into the worship of the one God without being made to grovel in shame at the feet of those they had oppressed. Who were Paul and Barnabas to be so presumptuous as throw the doors open?

Some years ago, H. Richard Niebhur wrote a book called Christ and Culture. In that book he examined the five different positions that Christians had taken toward the secular culture in which they had lived. They range from the extreme of total opposition to total accommodation, and alternatives in between. For those faithful Jews who had found themselves in constant tension with the surrounding culture, Paul’s message seemed to signal a loss of what had made their faith distinctive. In some of his personal letters to the local churches he founded, Paul would find himself having to pull his Gentile students back from the prevailing culture.

In a world where many forces would be our Lord – greed, pleasure, ideology, etc. – we must always be ready to make clear that “Jesus is Lord.” And yet, Jesus continues to come to us, in the form of the Holy Spirit that blows like the wind into our lives from unexpected directions. Let us hold fast to our Lord, even when he blows new people, and new ideas into our midst.