Fifth Sunday of Easter, April 24, 2016
“Do you remember all the names of the Christian communities we just heard in the reading from the Acts of the Apos-tles (Acts 14:21-27)? The message Paul and the others in his group transmit always comes from a certain specific community. Many of us have yet to recognize the importance of these local communities in the early church. Certain-ly, there are individuals who stand out. But the local communities which helped form and sustain those individuals often fade into the background, are almost forgotten. That is why today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles is so significant. There is no way to ignore the com-munity which gave birth to the missionary journeys of Paul and Barnabas. Wherever Paul and Barnabas went, they always introduced themselves as representatives of the church at Antioch. That community, the church at Antioch, sent them out and paid their bills. And it was to that community that Paul and Barnabas eventually returned. The news they brought back to Antioch seems to have pleased everyone. In the last sentence of our reading we hear that through their evangelization “God ...had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.” We know from other chapters in the Acts of the Apostles that the Antioch community was one of the first Christian churches to take the step of baptizing non-Jews. And this was an ultra-liberal step – unexpected, controver-sial, not unanimous. We know that this progressive Antioch community prompted Barnabas to travel to Tarsus and to encourage the newly-converted Saul to return with him to Antioch. Saul was a “Hellenist” Jew, that means he had grown up in a non-Jewish culture, he spoke Greek and he knew how to relate to Gentiles, to non-Jews. Saul was per-fect for carrying on a ministry among the non -Jews. Of course not every Christian community agreed with the practice in Antioch to baptize Gentiles, non -Jews, without first converting them to Judaism. We shall see this in later passages of the Acts of the Apostles. Paul would have to fight that battle literally until the day he died. The early church certainly had more variety “community to community” than we have today. Certainly each community dedicated itself to carrying out Jesus’ gospel command to “have love for one another.” But each community devel-oped and showed that love in different ways. It is like with couples: each couple must create its own path, its own way of loving one another. Love demands they do so. That is also the reason why no two Christian communities are exactly alike. Because each community exists in order to show love to one another, each will do that in a different way. That’s also why we have four gospels. Since each gospel springs from a different community, it is impossible to have just one single gospel. The author of Revelation often speaks about “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1-5a). If God is really dwelling among us and helping us show love to those around us, we shall always be new and creative. I insisted on the importance of different communities, they enrich each other – and I insist on unity in diversity. Today almost every diocese is closing and combining parishes. The Berlin diocese has the process “Wo Glaube Raum gewinnt”, “New spaces for our faith”. And there we have a real challenge. Church by church, we are getting rid of each parish’s unique theology, the special way in which its members have loved one another. This process is disturbing. But it might be one way the risen Jesus proposes us. We need to re-flect on how our own community demonstrates that it is one of a kind love, caring for one another. A love that shows that we are Christians (the last words of today’s gospel, John 13,35), “and they’ll know that we are Christians by our love”, as the song says (Missalette N° 587).
Fr. Wolfgang Felber SJ