NOTES for Act 10:1-23
The ancient prophets already said that the messianic Kingdom would be open not only to Jews but also to Gentiles, at least to those who wished to devote their lives to the God of Israel. Now the Messiah has come, the Kingdom is entering the world, and the time has come for the Gentiles to share in its life. The Roman Cornelius was one such seeker of the Kingdom. His officer's rank—he was a centurion—did not hinder his search for truth. Evidently, he was among those then known as “God-fearers.” He had not converted to Judaism, but he believed in the God of Israel.
The good deeds of Cornelius mentioned by the author show that his faith was not merely intellectual. For such people, the path into the Kingdom was the most natural one: there was nothing left for them to seek in this world. God sends His messenger to show Cornelius the way forward, which was to lead him to Peter's house. Another messenger tells Peter of Cornelius's coming visit to his house and what it means. This is conveyed in a symbolic vision: the non-kosher, unclean food on a platter before Peter evidently symbolizes those very Gentiles who, as people then thought, had no place in the Church, just as nothing unclean had any place there.
It was assumed that those seeking Christ and the Kingdom first had to embrace Judaism; only then could they be told about the Messiah and everything else. But God judges otherwise. He tells Peter: do not call unclean what God has cleansed. Indeed, the division of the world into clean and unclean was originally linked to its fallen condition, to the fact that not everything in the world in that condition could be sanctified to the same degree. But now the Kingdom has entered the world, and in the Kingdom there is nothing that cannot be sanctified in all its fullness.
The division between clean and unclean disappears in the Kingdom not because of a return to some primitive state in which humanity could not yet distinguish purity from impurity, but because the world is transfigured in the Kingdom. In that transfiguration, every impurity is expelled from it together with the evil in which the fallen world abides. This is what was revealed to Peter before his meeting with Cornelius.