The impact of the Antioch experience

 

This passage from today’s first reading, Acts 11:19-26, tells of how the elders in Jerusalem sent Barnabas to Antioch where the Christian community had begun to attract a large number of non-Jewish people or “Greeks” and “Gentiles” as they were called. In Antioch Barnabas saw a community of diverse races, people who were filled with the Holy Spirit and who regularly came together to celebrate their faith in Jesus Christ. It prompted him to think about one person who needed to see this, what was happening in Antioch, and to spend time with this community. That person was Saul who was living back in his hometown of Tarsus. Barnabas had met Paul when he (Paul) came to Jerusalem to see Peter and James (Acts 9:26-30). This brief encounter must have impressed Barnabas and made him aware that Paul’s conversion experience had opened a whole of lot of questions for Paul as he struggled to come to grips with this newfound faith in Jesus Christ. So, Barnabas went to look for Saul, found him in Tarsus, and convinced him that he needed to come to Antioch.

 

They went down to Antioch and stayed with this community for a whole year. This had such a profound impact upon Paul that he became the apostle to the Gentiles. It also helped him to understand the true scope of Jesus’ mission. There are no longer Jews and Greeks, male and female, slave and poor. We are all one in Christ. This is a new way of being truly human which fulfils the intent of the original creation and looks towards the completion of that initial creative outburst, the vision of a new heaven and a new earth. In many ways, this experience of Barnabas and Paul is one that has resonated with the experience of cross-cultural missionaries down through the history of the Church. Such an experience changes our lives. It also changed the life of Robert Prevost when he went to Peru to work as an Augustinian monk and later as a bishop. Let us pray for our new pope, Leo XIV, as he brings his missionary experience to the work of bringing people of diverse races, languages and cultures together, enabling us to give witness to what it means to be an ever-emerging new and renewed creation.