NOTES for Act 21:1-26
Today's reading once again makes us reflect on the place of religion and religious tradition in the life of the Church. Apparently, despite the decisions of the Apostolic Council, concern was growing in the Jerusalem church about the Torah (the Law) and its observance by Jewish Christians—Christians from a traditional Jewish background (vv. 18–21). This is hardly surprising: for these people, the Torah was an unquestioned and indisputable authority, and Jewish religious practice was a way of life familiar since childhood. They may have understood the Council's decisions as diminishing the importance of the Torah and Jewish religious tradition. The question was extremely serious, and not only because the Jerusalem church apparently consisted entirely of Jewish Christians (v. 20). The question was this: is there room for religion in the Kingdom? By performing the rites prescribed by the Torah, Paul bore witness that there is room in the Kingdom both for the Torah and for religion (vv. 23–26). This was not merely a matter of avoiding disagreement with a church that kept its own customs. It concerned how a person enters the Church and the Kingdom, and what they bring with them. For a Jew, bringing their religion into the Kingdom was entirely natural: it was the only form of inner, including spiritual, self-organization wholly natural to them. Of course, one could enter the Kingdom with another religion, or even without any religion at all. But for a Jew raised in a traditional Jewish setting, any other option would have been a kind of violence, forcing them to give up something they did not need to abandon. The situation was different for Gentile converts to Christ: requiring them to adopt this religious way of life as a necessary condition for entering the Kingdom would indeed have placed upon them a “burden hard to bear.” Yet for most members of the Jerusalem church, paradoxical as it may sound, an obligatory renunciation of Judaism would have been just such a burden. By his action, Paul bore witness that in the Kingdom, and therefore in the Church, everyone can truly remain themselves: a Jew, a Jew; a Greek, a Greek. The one condition that had to be observed without fail was that no one's traditions or religion should hinder others, conceal the Kingdom from them, or erect insurmountable barriers on the way to it. On that condition, one can bring everything into the Kingdom. Except, of course, sin, which has no place there.