NOTES for Act 15:36-16:15

What do we look to when we discuss what a person needs or does not need to do for salvation, or when we discuss questions of church order, when we ask questions like: "how and what should we believe?", "what decision will be pleasing to God?", "what does He expect personally from me"?

Usually we recall certain words from Scripture, from church rules, from other people's experience. At worst, we do whatever comes into our head. But the book of Acts opens before us an astonishing example of apostolic faith, when the Holy Spirit clearly lets them see how they must act and where they must go. That is why Luke can say so simply: "the Spirit did not allow them to go there"...

Only one question remains: if the apostles' experience differs greatly from our experience, what does that give us - a reason for gloom and despair, or a reason to plead for the Spirit?

The dispute over whether to take John Mark with them could have led to a rupture. But we see that even the division between the brothers proved fruitful: by going to different places, they were able to preach to more people. Even disputes and disagreements caused by human disorder are turned to good by the Lord, who makes up for what we strive to spoil.

It might seem that Paul, who denied that Old Testament rituals were obligatory for non-Jews and who, in general, hardly appears to have supported formal legalism, could have refrained from circumcising Timothy. True, Timothy belonged to the Jewish people through his mother, so circumcision was necessary if Paul and Timothy were to deal with Jews. But Paul departs from his own principles, as it may seem, not merely to yield to public opinion. Paul's actions are twofold: one cannot exercise free choice by destroying the law, and conversely, clear rules can become a support for free action.

The whole history of the earliest Christian Church is the history of apostleship. Mission. Witness. The apostles are always on the road. Of course, this reflects the essence of apostolic ministry as such. In the Jewish religious brotherhoods of the Gospel era, a messenger (that is exactly how the Greek word "apostle" is translated) had to be first of all precisely a witness, a witness of certain events that had taken place in a particular community. Jewish brotherhoods, like the earliest Christian Church, were community movements that had a council of elders but neither a single center nor a rigid structure. Under such conditions, the institution of messengers-apostles played the role both of a connecting link between the communities that made up the brotherhood and of a distinctive means for exchanging spiritual experience: after all, among other things, apostles could also tell about important events in the spiritual life of a particular community.

For the Church, of course, the main event was the resurrection of Christ. It made the very existence of the Church possible, and it is no surprise that the community of the apostles, the direct witnesses of this event and of everything connected with it, became the nucleus of the Church. Without apostolic witness, the life of the earliest Christian Church was unthinkable: it was precisely this witness to the reality of the Resurrection that gave meaning to Christianity and gave hope to those newly coming in. Paul's witness had special significance: he met the risen Christ after Pentecost, and he was converted not on the basis of others' testimonies, but on the basis of his own experience.

This meant that meetings with Christ did not remain in the past, that they belonged not only to those forty days that separate the Resurrection from the Ascension, that they are part of Christian history, the history of the Church, the history of the Kingdom entering the world. But apostolic witness also contained something else, something that could not exist in traditional apostleship. This is the Kingdom itself, which a Christian, if of course he is a Christian not only in words, always carries with him. It is the main Christian witness.

Otherwise it will not be possible to bear witness to Christ and to the Kingdom; words alone are not enough here. And if a Christian bears witness to the Kingdom that he carries with him, then through him the Kingdom spreads in the world, taking hold of more and more of it. This is the main task of the Church: to remain in the world while carrying the Kingdom to it. And the word about Christ and about the Kingdom is only a supplement to the main thing. An important supplement, but not an absolutely necessary one: where the power of the Kingdom is manifest and its breath is blowing, words are not needed very much.

In its own way, it is very comforting that the apostles, as it turns out, were living human beings too. Despite the fact that the Lord made them His great servants, they, it appears, also knew how to make mistakes, quarrel, and sometimes fail to get along with one another.

Paul and Barnabas, two men led by the Spirit, still cannot come to an agreement about whether to give a young disciple, who once failed to meet their hopes, a second chance. Their opinions differ so much that they part in different directions, and Paul chooses another helper for himself. It is even a little sad to realize that with them too everything sometimes happened "in a human way"...

But still, later everything will return to where it should be. Evidence that Paul and Mark will eventually be reconciled is at least the fact that they will even be imprisoned together (see Col 4:10).

For us, this story is extremely instructive. On the one hand, it helps us understand that things are not as bad with us as they might be: the saints also sinned. On the other hand, it reminds us that we still have room to grow, because these imperfect people nevertheless became saints.