Cultural Barriers to Jesus

On the next day, as they were on their way and approaching the city, Peter went up on the housetop about the sixth hour to pray.  But he became hungry and was desiring to eat; but while they were making preparations, he fell into a trance; and he saw the sky opened up, and an object like a great sheet coming down, lowered by four corners to the ground, and there were in it all kinds of four-footed animals and crawling creatures of the earth and birds of the air.  A voice came to him, "Get up, Peter, kill and eat!"  But Peter said, "By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything unholy and unclean."  Again a voice came to him a second time, "What God has cleansed, no longer consider unholy."  This happened three times, and immediately the object was taken up into the sky. (Acts 10:9-16 NASB)

 An important characteristic of Jesus that gets mentioned, but not understood, is that Jesus entered the world as a Jewish man.  Modern Christians will agree, but modern Judaism obscures what that really means.  First Century, Second Temple, Judean Judaism is not what we see today.  I haven't asked a rabbi, but I'm pretty sure they would agree.  There are tremendous cultural differences between the various Jewish groups  today; and even more differences between those of the region and time of Jesus and now.  So trying to understand Jesus as Jewish man is difficult when the understanding is attempted through modern Judaism.

In a sense through, one aspect that remains the same is a "survivor" mentality that doggedly holds Jewish groups together and attempts to rigorously maintain their distinctness from other cultures among which they may live.  In First Century Judea, the fairly recent history had seen the end of oppression of the Jews by Seleucid Greeks who attempted to force them to adopt Greek culture.  It had witnessed the inability of the Jewish religious leadership to also govern the people well.  It had recorded how the Romans were invited into the country to stabilize the region.  And, in the days of, and just beyond, Jesus' earthly ministry, the attempted rebellion of the Jews against the Roman presence in the land.

Part of the consistent thread that held these people together is their persistence in being distinct from those they lived among.  The end of the First Temple Era eradicated syncretistism (mixed religious practice) which included idols from their culture.  That was never a problem again.  In the first century, the main focus of the Jews was survival of their race and traditions.  In that focus, they made some mistakes.  In these mistakes, they lost sight of their true King.  By the time He showed up in person, they were not ready.  It wasn't until after He left that many seemed to understand or at least accept Jesus as the true Anointed One of God.

One of the biggest struggles Jesus faced was the continued pressure from the religious leaders to conform to their traditions.  He consistently refused in many respects.  In other respects, he conformed already.  I suspect that in what He ate, He conformed.  But He also taught His disciples that "unclean" was really a characteristic coming from within a person, not from outside (Mark 7:14-23).  There the issue was "hand washing" rather than specific food, but the writer notes that Jesus declared all foods "clean".

So why, having had that lesson, does Peter hang so tightly to the isolationist practices of his people?  I'm not sure, but I suspect there at least two reasons.  The first is that those traditions were what he knew and was familiar with.  There seemed no good reason to leave them when they were Scriptural (i.e. in the law).  In some sense, if it's not broken, why fix it?"  What he was about to learn is that it was broken in one way.

I suspect that another, possibly unconscious, reason is that Judaism was legal in Roman society where the belief in Jesus as Messiah was not.  Romans permitted other beliefs as long as their requirement of venerating the emperor was also practiced along with what ever belief was held.  Followers of Jesus could not do that.  Their only protection from the requirement was their attachment to Judaism which was exempt from the practice.  This is never given as a reason in Scripture, it would need to be derived from an examination of the culture in which Christianity was born and grew.  It may have been more in the mind of Paul in Europe than in Peter in Joppa. 

This chapter does make one thing very clear though.  The lesson of the animals in the sheet was not about eating, it was about cultural barriers to salvation.  That wasn't obvious to Peter at first because he didn't have the context in which to understand it.  He needed Cornelius' story to point out to Him that God had already accepted this Gentile soldier occupying Judea.  Once he had that, he was able to connect the dots, and saw a new characteristic of God, that He accepts people outside of Jews.  Judaism itself became understood as an unnecessary barrier to a relationship with the Maker of galaxies and atoms; a dangerous proposition in that day.

So where's the lesson for me?  I set up my own barriers to others by my cultural practices.  I chose who I associate with based on social position, economic status, and my perception of safe and prudent practices.  That is not the path on which I see my Master taking and leading His people.  Instead, my Master crosses those boundaries of economics and society.  He reaches into the lives of those left behind and marginalized by their culture.  This is a difficult, very uncomfortable, lesson for me.  I don't enjoy hugging someone who smells.  But don't I smell?  Am I more acceptable to my Master than those with whom I am uncomfortable associating?  I don't think so, and yet I do believe so.  I behave that way.  And I do so to my own disgrace.

I suspect the only way out of this is by practicing crossing those boundaries.  I need to.  I have a lesson to learn through practice.  I don't like those, those character-building-lessons my Master seems to like so much.  Well, I guess I need to go.  It seems I have "homework" to do.

Paradigm Shifting on the Fly

Now while Peter was greatly perplexed in mind as to what the vision which he had seen might be, behold, the men who had been sent by Cornelius, having asked directions for Simon's house, appeared at the gate; (Acts 10:17 NASB)

Peter said: "I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality, 35 but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him. (Acts 10:34-35 NASB)

All the circumcised believers who came with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. (Acts 10:45 NASB)

Another of the ironies in Acts 10 is the inability of Peter and those with him to conceive of Gentiles being acceptable to God.  The clues are all through all 4 Gospels, and one of my favorites is when Jesus is being interviewed by Nicodemus, the Pharisee.  In that conversation, Jesus cuts right to the point for the Pharisee when He says, "To enter the Kingdom of God, you must be born again."  We use that phrase in these days to mean something very different from what Jesus was getting at in this conversation.

For Nicodemus the Pharisee, his birth is what set him apart from all the other people on the earth; he was  born different, superior.  Being born a Jew meant that he was automatically tied to God by His sovereign choice.  What could be better than that; to be born into immediate acceptability before God?  So Jesus' words rocked Nicodemus, and I think that is why he struggle so much with what Jesus meant by that.

If human birth no longer is what determines acceptability before God, then Gentiles have as much opportunity as anyone else.  This point seems to be missed by the disciples.  I suppose the Ethiopian on his way home was at least a proselyte or something because Philip didn't seem to have a problem with him receiving the Holy Spirit. On the other hand it doesn't specifically say he ever did (but it also doesn't say whether he was a Jew, or a proselyte, or a native of Ethiopia at all).

The word translated "perplexed" is a Greek compound word made up of two prepositions and a verb.  It means "through not carrying over", as in "because of not making the connection" (carrying over referring to being carried across something, like the River Styx for a Greek).  So I think of it as "because of not being able to shift the paradigm" which is obviously a modern read on an ancient problem.  After the vision of the unclean animals in the linen vessel, Peter is struggling shifting his paradigm to include what he has seen and heard.  It isn't until he reaches Cornelius' house and hears his story that he finally makes the connection.

But Peter's companions from Joppa didn't get the vision, they hadn't heard the voice, and so they were completely unprepared for God receiving Gentiles in such a way.  They may even have been skeptical of Cornelius' story.  This catches them completely by surprise.  But why?  Weren't the clues around them?  What did Jesus tell them? "You will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and all the earth."  What did they think that meant anyway?

And there were other clues in the Hebrew Scriptures and so on.  Clearly the problem was how entrenched in their own Jewish culture they were.  Their paradigm wasn't constructed only from the Hebrew Scriptures or only from that and Jesus' teaching.  There was a huge element of their culture still embedded in their paradigm of which they may not have even been aware.  And even so, they had made huge strides in adjusting their world view already to accommodate what the Holy Spirit had done so far.  Perhaps they figured they'd "shifted" enough.

Now, what I've done here is constructed a framework with which I can support my own analysis of my cultural enmeshment.  How different am I in this problem?  I have a culture which has influenced me my whole life.  How many perceptions of what I read in Scripture do I filter through this cultural perspective?  In once sense it enables me to apply what I read, but on the other hand it obscures the message of my Master when what He commands strikes a stark contrast with my cultural assumptions.  There are just some things you don't do, or are considered foolish to do in our culture.  Sometimes I too quickly put a command or perspective of my Master into the basket of that time period rather than my own, "Surely He didn't mean that for today?"

There are somethings I'm not likely to do, like wearing clothes of only one type of cloth, or walking a second mile with a Roman soldier's pack on my back.  I freely confess that I'm not likely to do these, but what about loving my neighbor as myself?  What about when Jesus said we are to have that perspective in the Sermon on the Mount where we bless our persecutors, consider being reviled for His names sake as being happy beyond belief?  Do I accept these in my culture?  In the day of Paul, when he wrote that husbands are to love their wives as Jesus loved the Church selflessly, that was radically out of the cultural paradigm for both Jews and Gentiles.  It's radical for me, but I still don't do it, not like I should (like, I try, then resent having to - I'm a mess).

What I'm saying is that I need my paradigm, my world view, my mental framework through which I interpret and make sense of my world; I need that destroyed and reconstructed by my Master.  It makes me shiver just to write that.  How much would remain of what I have now?  It's uncomfortable to consider, in fact, it's probably so overwhelmingly huge, it becomes easy to ignore.  It's like how-big-is-our-sun huge, I can't mentally grasp it, so I don't think about it.  Too often I think the glory and majesty of my Master fits into that same category for me.  Yet, perhaps if I dwell for awhile on that, deconstructing my paradigm might be more imaginable.  So, I guess, once again, I shall start with praise for my Master.  Worship, why does it seem to always boil down to worship?  Probably because I'm such a slow learner.  Well, I seem to have some worship and "demolition" to do.