The Council of Jerusalem tries to make table fellowship possible among people of different cultures. It doesn’t condemn anybody. In the same way as Vatican II did in our time, it aims at “bringing up to date” all the members of the Church so that they may answer the new demands of a community open to the world (this is aggiornamento). As then, even here and now, God keeps on working. Because He is life and love, God is the eternal ephemeral, always new. Those who are afraid of novelty are scared by the steps of the One who accompanies every journey of ours, even when we escape (Cf. Genesis 3:10). Reality, above all if it doesn’t come from our own projects, is not a problem to solve. It is Word of God to read with care: it manifests God and saves humanity.
The Church is a constant changing body: it is growing and it will grow until it reaches its “full stature” (cf. Ephesians 4:14). But a new identity puts the old one in a crisis. In the Council of Jerusalem, the ancient Church points out the way to solve the unavoidable conflicts.
In the confrontation between progressives and traditionalists, it is the essence of Christianity that is at stake: salvation comes from faith not from traditional laws. Faith adapts itself to all cultures like water to all containers. What matters is that nobody is cut off from life. It is easy, in the name of traditionalism, to hinder the faith transmission to all. This concerns us also since the distance between the Church and today’s world is greater than that between the then Jews and pagans. We are able to see how our fathers in faith lived the conflict of novelty.
Some Christian-Jews go from Jerusalem to Antioch in order to accuse the former-pagan Christians of not respecting their traditions. The new Christians stand up against them and rightly so. God, as He talked in the past, keeps on talking also in the present. Paul is very sure that the Gospel is one (Galatians 1:1ff), old and always new. There is only one door to salvation: the grace of faith in Jesus. This opens to everybody the salvation promised to Abraham, even if each one accesses to it in his/her own way.
The new community doesn’t break from the ancient one. In order not to jeopardize the good of unity, it sends Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, Peter defends Paul. He doesn’t use theoretical arguments. He tells his own experience: God gave the pagan Cornelius the Spirit in the same way He did to them (Acts 10:1ff). And yet even Peter had opposed God’s work in the name of non-negotiable, millenary and more than millenary traditions, like the circumcision and Moses’ law. James agrees with Peter and finds out that this novelty is already foreseen in the Holy Scripture (cf. Acts 15:13-22).
The problem is solved without condemnations. The Gospel is for everybody. It is necessary to welcome the novelty but also to extend mercy towards those who find it hard to accept it. For this reason, minimal rules that allow all to be together are devised. All are happy and consoled as nobody is cut off and each diversity is respected. The “traditionalists,” however, are called a “sect” (=hedge, barrier). In Greek, the word airesis (choice) is the origin of “heresy” (cf. Acts 15:5). As a matter of fact, they “choose” the past and refuse the present. Because of this, they refuse “the new thing that God does” (Isaiah 43:19). Moreover, they reject God Himself, Father of all, who is always present in all. The “traditionalists” don’t know that they are “heretic” and “sectarian.” The “innovators,” instead, are the Catholic Christians, who help the “traditionalists” to grow in their weak faith.
The aggiornamento (bringing up to date) – a divine word which patterns our steps on God’s steps in salvation history – must be ongoing, especially nowadays, in order to open the door of faith to the post-modern world. Otherwise, we betray our Gospel tradition. Paul would reproach us as he did the Galatians: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him, who called you in the grace of Christ, and turning to a different Gospel – not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ” (Galatians 1:6ff). © Popoli – www.popoli.info
