To Be or Not To Be---Thorny

Thursday of the 5th Week of Easter

Acts 15:7-21

Thorny Osage Orange branches---real nasty!

It is best to start this reading at 15:1.

Luke has been leading up to this Come to Jesus moment since chapter 10.  Paul and Barnabas come to Jerusalem to meet the church…the apostles and the elders.  They recount with joy the stories of the new gentile Christians. 

Welcoming the gentiles without circumcision is a real sore spot for some in Jerusalem.  I am not sure I can fully appreciate what looks to me like bull-headed stubbornness.  What Luke is narrating is subtle and nuanced.  I hear it as the beginning of the both/and of what I treasure so much about my catholicity.  The Jerusalem crowd fears a discontinuity with the past…with the Torah, with Israel.  But Luke chooses to emphasize the essential continuity…not a replacement but a fulfillment.  Fearing identity change…that I can understand.

The action for the rest of Acts follows Paul’s mission.  The action is on the edges.  It sounds like Pope Francis and his call to missionary discipleship that leads us out to the margins.  But the margins are not just those that are clearly obvious and outside our experience. The margins are all around us…in our own neighborhoods, in our churches, in our homes, in my own heart. 

I am confronted today by the theological virtues of welcome and hospitality. Virtues indeed. 

May I not make thorny what need not be thorny.

Saints Paul and Barnabas, Pray for me.