Canter Bridge

Peter’s behavior in the face of the gentilizing Jesus movement is the stuff of wrong-headedness, unclarity, and gross misapprehension.

The man is either too easily swayed. Or a craven opportunist. Or the right kind of mystic.

A man who has battled for the kind of conceptual precision that will allow the movement to retain its causal link with Jacob’s God and its covenantal compact with Israel can hardly be excused for turning his back on that project the moment a promising messenger summons his company.

Yet Peter, we are asked to understand to the considerable peril of enduring definitions, has heard from God and changed his mind for that reason rather than for any other.

If our understanding of the Jesus movement is to be anything better than sentimental, it is important that one reads carefully Peter’s affirmation that God is no player of the prestige game, no lifter of the heads of the capable, no capricious bestower of favors and demerits.

Although Peter understands the equity of Jacob’s God with fresh clarity, he is not postulating a novum. He is, rather, underscoring an embedded conviction of biblical faith, one that is forever destined to live in dangerous and parallel proximity to YHWH’s choice of Israel for reasons no man or woman will ever understand.

Peter’s behavior is not to be explained by a novelty of YHWH’s personality, opened up to humankind for the first time on the day Peter stopped being the kind of Jew he had forever been, the kind of Jew that would be buried without apologizing for being that kind of Jew.

Rather, Peter’s ‘never!’ has changed to acceptance of a new role as distant patron and sometime adversary of non-Jewish followers of Israel’s messiah for reasons that can only be described as consecutive. The ages have swung on their hinge, the writer of Luke-Acts thinks and considers that we ought to join him in his conviction. The times have changed. The equity of God—eternal, enduring—now slides with some tectonic consequences into the experience of God’s Jews and God’s gentiles.

YHWH has not repented of having called some things ‘unclean’. In the light of the work and witness of Jesus Christ, he has now announced that things formerly unclean are now to be embraced, tasted, touched, welcomed, loved. Things. People. A nation defined in terms that do not erase the former things, yet terms that profoundly relativize their meaning.

History, for the compiler of these early events, is linear. It moves in stages. The discerning observer will not posit a change in God, but rather a shifting of the stage upon which he has chosen to do his most applause-worthy work.

Although it is not this author’s principal task to conjur dangerous questions, he manages with his pen and his editorial selectivity to do so: What next?