NOTES for Act 15:36-16:15
Today's reading helps us better understand how the Kingdom spreads through the world after Pentecost. The account begins with a disagreement between Paul and Barnabas over the membership of their future missionary group (15:36–41). It was serious enough to cause tension between the apostles—this is how the corresponding Greek word can literally be translated. It was probably connected with Paul's ardent and determined temperament: apparently, he did not have much confidence in John Mark, who, as the evangelist tells us, had earlier left Paul and Barnabas in Pamphylia. This disagreement evidently made the apostles part company.
This episode clearly shows us that even people who know the Kingdom are sometimes far from free of disagreements and even quarrels. The only question is how such quarrels end. In our world, not yet transfigured, they often turn into enmity, as we know. In the Kingdom, however, things do not reach that point: when there is a disagreement over a matter of principle, those involved usually simply part company—generally for a time—and continue separately the work God has entrusted to them, though the work itself does not cease to be shared. Of course, a quarrel is not the best form of human relationship. But if a quarrel does not turn into enmity and hatred, disagreements do not become insurmountable or destroy the unity without which the Kingdom is impossible. Such a situation certainly creates obstacles and difficulties, but God's power overcomes them: what is absent here is that resistance to God's will before which God stops, respecting human freedom of choice.
The situation involving Timothy that Luke mentions is also interesting (16:1–3). Given the decisions of the Council of the Apostles, it would seem that he had no need of circumcision at all. Yet Paul circumcises Timothy, in the evangelist's words, “for the sake of the Jews.” Evidently, the issue here is not that “there is no salvation without circumcision,” but that one should not set oneself against a particular church, probably made up entirely or predominantly of Jewish converts. In such circumstances, observing Jewish religious norms was quite natural, whereas ostentatiously rejecting them would more likely have caused disturbance within the community.
This is how the religious question is resolved in the Kingdom: if religion forms an organic part of the life of an individual or a whole community, there is room for it both in the Kingdom and in the Church. For in such a case it itself becomes one of the forms of the Kingdom, which is as many-sided as the lives of those who enter it.