We conclude Acts 15 today that we have been in since Wednesday. Acts 15 is entirely concerned with what is known as the Council of Jerusalem. That is considered by all to be the very first council in the Church’s history. It was of immense importance, perhaps the single most important of all the councils of the Church ever since. As Acts has been relating before this, there was a significant group within the very early Apostolic Church, all converts from Judaism and all from Jerusalem or its environs, who although accepting the possibility of Gentile (that is, non-Jewish) converts, insisted that these Gentile converts also follow the complete Mosaic law as all of them still did even after becoming Christians.
 
Merely accepting non-Jewish converts at all was a significant step for the early Church, which was basically all composed of Jewish converts from Israel. It was only Peter’s vision in Acts 10 and what happened to the Gentiles with Cornelius in Caesarea, along with Peter’s authority, that convinced the early Church to admit Gentiles as well into the fold. We need to understand how difficult this was for them. They did not yet understand the nascent Church as something separate from Judaism itself. All of them continued to practice all of their Jewish laws and customs. Therefore, many very much felt that any Gentile converts would have to also adopt the Mosaic law as well. It was simply assumed.
 
The radicalness of the break with this thinking and the effort it took to achieve it is hinted at in Acts 15:2 and 7. It was only because of the combined authority of Peter and then Paul and Barnabas and finally the Apostle James, who quotes the prophet Amos in Acts 15:16-18, and who then states in verse 19 that, “I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God,” that they were able to prevail. It all culminates in the letter sent with Paul and Barnabas and three other elders to the Gentile converts in Antioch that we hear in today’s first reading. It lays on them an utterly minimum requirement that they can all easily accept. From now on it will be as Peter declared earlier in Acts 15:11, “We believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they (the Gentiles) will,” which is exactly what Paul will proclaim in the Letter to the Romans: we are saved (justified) by faith not by works (of the Mosaic law).
 
It is impossible to overstate the importance of this revelation from the Holy Spirit (and the Church’s willingness to accept it), because it is immensely clear from this entire story that the Holy Spirit alone brought about this radical new thinking in the Apostolic Church. Without the decision of the Council of Jerusalem here, Christianity would have been largely restricted to Jewish converts, since how many Gentiles would have agreed to take on the entire Mosaic law including its necessity for circumcision? And if the Church had not spread so widely to the Gentile world of its time, due to the Council’s decision here and St. Paul’s efforts primarily, then Christianity would have remained but a virtual sect of Judaism and would have vanished with Jerusalem and all of ancient Palestine in the Roman destruction of it in 70 A.D.
 
The very great question for us today is, how many other radical re-understandings of ours today is the Holy Spirit continually challenging the Church to come to? And will we as the Church today have the humility and awareness as was present at the Council of Jerusalem to hear the Spirit and change?