God always acts in history, also here and now. Many times His initiative doesn’t start from the Church, but from those whom the Church excludes. As a matter of fact, God sends His angel not to Peter but to a pagan with the order to fish the fisher of man in his fishing. In the announcement to Mary, the Word became flesh in Jesus. In the announcement to the pagan Cornelius, the Word wants to become flesh in every man “so that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). This is the Father’s desire who created the world looking at the Son. Jesus has abolished the separation between heaven and earth: on the Cross, He even became sin and a curse so that every atom of creation may become fullness of glory.
The Gospel continues its run from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria and beyond, up to Damascus. With Cornelius, it reaches its end which is to open horizons without end. Every division among human beings is obliterated: Abraham’s blessing extends also to the “pagans.” Humanity becomes one family. In the Son, we are all free, children of God and brothers and sisters among ourselves, although in diversity. It is the eternal mystery of God and humanity now disclosed. To everybody’s salvation, even God’s.
We are not dealing with a kind of homologation under only one power, but “globalization” under the sign of love. Our cultural and religious differences remain, but not as place of fight, instead as communion. Diversities are no longer barriers but mutual openings. Our finitudes become encounter with other finitudes, contact with the others, sacrament of the One who is infinitely Other.
Love is, first of all, freedom from our egoism and respect for the journey of the others, even if mistaken or incomplete (1 Corinthians 7,1ff). In fact, there is “only one God,” who is Father of all and “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6).
All cultural and religious taboos come to an end. Things are all good. Evil is not in them: it is in the intention and action of people who use them in order to demolish instead of building up mutual communion. Love makes Paul free to make himself Jew with the Jews and lawless with the pagans. Since he is now within Christ’s law, he can make himself “everything to all” (1 Corinthians 9:19-23). Because Christ’s law is to bear one another’s burden (Galatians 6:2). This is the true freedom of God’s children: through love, to be servants of one another (Galatians 5:13).
Simple principles that demand clever solutions. For example: how to live and eat together, paying respect to cultural differences? The first “Council” of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1ff) will give practical guidelines that will help Jews and pagans to live as brethren among themselves. The following Councils instead will go astray uttering excommunications against those who don’t think as we do. But to identify God with our ideas about Him is idolatry that destroys the Church: it makes us unable to accept the others in their otherness. Let us think of the question of the Chinese rites and of certain present idiosyncrasies towards the contemporary condition. And what shall we say of the times when we are looking for power in order to impose our own ideas or to obtain privileges?
God, eventually, will make Peter understand that those he thinks of as “dogs,” are God’s privileged children. They have to sit at the common table, without too many cautions of circumcisions, prohibitions and rules. These are topics of burning present-day relevance. God doesn’t want to send the world to Church, but the Church to the world so that, in brotherhood towards everybody, she may reveal the face of God, the Father, to everyone.
Even in the Gospels, God hides from those who are close and reveals Himself to those who are far away (Cf. the Samaritan woman in John 4:1ff, the Syro-Phoenician of Mark 7:27ff; the centurion of Luke 7:1ff and the centurion of Mark 15:39). The Church is beseeched to be herself from outside. Our identity comes always from outside: it is always “the other” who continuously converts us to the brotherhood which makes us children of the Father. The last to sit at the table will be the Son of Man who goes back to His glory. © Popoli – www.popoli.info
