Like ripples in a pond

Today's first reading from the Acts of the Apostles 11:19-26 is a revealing text about the spread of the early Church. The message about Jesus was carried across the western Mediterranean world, to the towns of Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch. It was inevitable. There was something powerfully convincing in the story about this man Jesus. However, it seems that, from early on, there was a split in the way this message was spread. Some only went to their compatriots, the Jews. Others realised that this message was about something larger than simply what it meant to be a Jew. It was about a new way of being human and it was for everyone. The story about the impact of the message and the way it touched Greeks as well as Jews, indeed people of all races, reached back to the leaders in Jerusalem and they made a remarkable decision – to send Barnabas to Antioch. Probably only Barnabas could have realised two things. One, that God was working through the emergence of this community in Antioch where Jews and Greeks, women and men, slave and free came together to pray and break the bread. But it was the second thing that was crucial. He knew that there was probably only one person who could make sense of what was happening. Barnabas couldn’t. But he knew who could – the one who had once sought to destroy this new Jesus movement, who had a life-changing experience on his way to Damascus, who went into the desert to try and make sense of what was happening to him and many others, who was still under suspicion among the leaders in Jerusalem, who had gone back home to Tarsus to wait and ponder. Paul of Tarsus was waiting for Barnabas to help him find his way, to direct him towards this community of Antioch where they were experimenting with what it meant to live out this faith in Jesus, what it meant to carry his name and become the first community of disciples to be called “Christians”.

 

So, it was not just the story or the message that was convincing. Even more so, it was the way this message was being lived out in the community of Antioch. Paul would now come to know what side of the split he was on. There was too much at stake. This wasn’t just about being a Jew. He had gone down that path before and it only pointed to death and destruction. This was for and about all humanity. There would be no turning back. Paul’s missionary journeys were about to begin thanks to that experience of living for a year with this extraordinary community of Christians in Antioch and, let us not forget him, thanks to the uncanny awareness of that man, Barnabas.