NOTES for Act 21:27-28
The most serious trial for a religious person is the trial of freedom. And not only one's own freedom, but someone else's too. Especially if it concerns someone whom this religious person perceives as "one of us." Coming to Jerusalem, Paul fully experienced the anger of "his own," who were indignant at his freedom. The apostle, of course, was not an opponent of religion as such. He fully shared the view of the apostolic council: religion is permissible in the Church, but it must not be obligatory and must not be imposed on anyone. The Jerusalem church consisted almost entirely of Jews, and therefore of religious people.
Paul, of course, had no intention of planting in Jerusalem the order and practice of the churches of Asia Minor, which consisted to a large degree of recent Gentiles and therefore of secular people. He is not burdened at all by his own religious tradition: without any inward protest he performs the prescribed purification rituals, well known to him from childhood, and comes to the Temple, familiar since his youth, from the time of his study under Gamaliel. But it turns out that being a religious person oneself is not enough to calm the religious consciousness.
The religious consciousness has an integrity that excludes every alternative. If a person does not belong to religion entirely, if for him it is only part of life and not all of life, his religious conscience is never calm. For Paul his religiosity was not an absolute, but neither was his conscience any longer the conscience of a religious person. He had long since gone beyond the bounds of his religion and his religiosity. His spiritual life was bound up with the Kingdom, not with religion. Religion, of course, did not frighten the apostle, but it did not stand in first place for him. And the religious crowd gathered in the temple court felt this perfectly.
They even expressed their feeling through the mouths of people who accused Paul of urging others not to observe Jewish traditions. It would seem, why should those whom the Jews themselves regarded as Gentiles observe Jewish traditions? And why should Paul impose those traditions on them? He never turned anyone away from Judaism; he simply did not try to make Jews of each and every person to whom he preached. But for the religious consciousness this very behavior is apostasy.
There is only one truth in the world, there can be only one goal in life, and if a preacher does not preach my religion, he is an infidel. And if he used to be "ours" and preached our religion, but now preaches something else, then he is an apostate. At that point it no longer matters whether the Ephesian Gentile whom Paul allegedly brought into the court where he was not allowed to be actually existed: if he did not exist, he had to be invented, and they invented him. Thus begins the final stage of Paul's ministry and earthly path: with a collision with religion, with the very power he considered the chief threat to the Church's spiritual formation.