He is risen indeed, Alleluiah!

Collect:	God our Redeemer, You have delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the Kingdom of your Son: grant, that as by his death He has recalled us to life, so by his continual presence in us He may raise us to eternal joy; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, Who is alive and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. *Amen*.
Readings:	Genesis 8, 20 – 9, 17 (omit if only three readings are used)
	Psalm 66, 7 - 18
	* Acts 17, 22 – 31 (compulsory reading)
	1 Peter 3, 13 – end (omit if only two readings are used)
	John 14, 15 - 21

In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles today, we have jumped ten chapters, and about sixteen years, from the reading last week. Last Sunday, we were at the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, the first Christian to die for our faith, in about 35 AD, two or three years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Saint Paul was then the devout Jew, Saul, breathing dreadful threats against the people of the Way. You may remember that I suggested he was minding the coats of those who were stoning Saint Stephen to death, because Saul was then still a minor, too young to be involved in carrying out the Law of Moses (even though the kangaroo trial and lynching of Saint Stephen was not in accordance with the Law of Moses at all).

In today’s reading, Saul has grown to adulthood, and become Saint Paul. He has had his conversion on the Road to Damascus, and been to Jerusalem. He didn’t stay there long, though. It seems that he was prone to being outspoken and controversial, and his preaching rendered Jerusalem unsafe for him, even though we are told that the Church enjoyed a period of peace there at this time. Paul returned to his home in Tarsus, probably for several years. Then he spent a year with the Apostle Barnabas in Antioch, learning more of the Christian faith, and he began his missionary work among the Gentiles.

Just before our reading today, there had been the Council of Jerusalem, to settle the first great division which had appeared in the Church. It took place between 50 and 66 AD, and most scholars agree that it was probably nearer 50 AD. The big question was, should all the People of the Way, who were then only just beginning to be called Christians, be Jews first?

Some People of the Way from Jerusalem had gone to Antioch, without any authority to do so from the Apostles, or from the Church in Jerusalem, and had tried to convince the Gentile Christians (as they began to be called in Antioch) to accept the Law of Moses, and live as Jews as well as Christians.

The People of the Way in Judea, led by Saint James, though they had not sent these people to Antioch, shared their point of view; they were themselves Jews, and they thought all Christians had to be Jews first. After all, Jesus and all of the Apostles were Jews, and the Church in Jerusalem, at least to start with, met in the outer part of the Temple.

Paul and Barnabas, on the other hand, fresh from missionary work among the Gentiles, thought that it was not necessary. They had seen God the Holy Spirit at work among non-Jews, and though they were Jews themselves, they could appreciate the point of view of the Gentile converts, to whom Judaism was an alien and largely incomprehensible religion, whose leaders had arranged to have the Lord executed.

The question was settled by Saint James, probably the James who was the brother of Jesus, since he seems, in this matter, to be taking precedence over Saint Peter. James’ judgement is based on a vision given to Saint Peter, in which he saw all kinds of creatures that were ritually unclean to the Jews, being lowered from heaven in a sheet, and a voice, saying, “Arise, Peter, kill and eat.”

The decree of Saint James (also known as the apostolic decree) was a sensible compromise. The Jewish Christians could go on obeying the Law of Moses, as well as accepting Jesus as the Messiah, but the Gentile Christians had a minimum of the Jewish Law imposed upon them in the Apostolic decree. They had to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.

This is a cut-down version of the seven Laws of Noah, which Jews thought applied to all mankind, and by and large have been kept in pretty well every society in history, even down to the present day. The seven laws of Noah, sometimes called the Noahic law, are:

No worshipping idols
No murder
No stealing
No sexual immorality
No blasphemy
No eating an animal while the life is still in it
Make just laws.

Number 6 is sometimes misunderstood as not eating an animal with the blood still in it, which has caused no end of unnecessary suffering to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

So, this is the point, about AD 50, when Christianity stops being part of Judaism. From now on, Christians only have to keep the same law as other non-Jews; they have ceased to be under the Law of Moses.

Straight away, Paul gets stuck in, preaching to the Gentiles. In our reading today, we find him in Athens, the heart of Greek philosophy and debate, and he is really trying to be a bit too clever, proclaiming that Jesus is the “unknown God” whose temple he has just found. This was unfortunate, because the temple of the unknown God was a “just in case” thing. The Greeks knew very well who the important Gods were, Zeus, Poseidon, Mars, Juno, Ceres, Apollo etc., but there were so many minor Gods, too, and they might just upset a God so unimportant that they didn’t know his name – hence the altar to the “Unknown God”.

Saint Paul, of course, was not a trained Greek Orator. To those used to listening to the great Orators, he would have seemed at best a little awkward, and at worst hopelessly out of his depth. They were fairly polite: “Thank you, very interesting, we’d love to hear more of this another time.” Paul is damned with faint praise. Even so, a few believed.

You might think, the vicar is banging on about the Acts reading today, what about the Gospel? But that’s the whole point. Our God is not a concept, He is not a set of principals, He is not abstract. He is the living, loving God, who gets his hands dirty in creation – a concept utterly alien to the Greek intellectuals on the Areopagus.

The Jews knew that God is the Living, Loving God too – perhaps this is why, apart from the murder of Saint Stephen, the threat to the life of Paul and a few other such violent outbreaks, Christianity was more or less tolerated in Jerusalem for its first 15 years or so.

The Jews, made several important discoveries about God:

He is one
He is eternal
He is not dependent on anything else
He is righteous
He is ethical (He minds how we behave)

But the one thing that they didn’t put at the top of this list, though they knew that it was in there somewhere, was that God is love. That‘s what our Gospel passage today is about.

Warning – do not think that you can get to heaven by keeping God’s commandments! You cannot! That is the Jewish way, not the Christian way.

We get to heaven because God loves us, even though you and I are sinners. Nothing you can do will make God love you more. And nothing you can do will make God love you less.

No, we try to do what God wants because He loves us, and because we love Him. We try to allow ourselves to be guided by the Holy Spirit in accordance with Jesus’ promise, and when we are loving and serving God’s other children, we are generally doing the right thing. But, and it is a fundamental “but”, however rightly you behave, it is never going to get you into heaven. Only God’s love that can do that.

As Saint Paul found in Athens, when he spoke on the Areopagan hill, very few people are ever argued into the Christian Faith. Nearly all of us have to be loved into it, by God of course, but by other Christians too.

May God bless you, this week and always, as you share in his work of loving His children.

Alleluiah, Christ is Risen!

He is risen indeed, Alleluiah! Amen.

Father Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy of Midi-Pyrénées & Aude

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