As long as I have attended church, and that’s a long time, I
have never yet heard a sermon on the story of Cornelius the
Centurion. Perhaps it’s too long. It takes up all of Acts, Chapter
10, and extends through verse 18 of Chapter 11. (This second bit
gets included in the Lectionary, but it leaves out important, if
repetitious, elements.) Preachers tend to quote a pithy set of
verses, and work from there.
The Book of Acts tells Cornelius’s story in a looping,
roundabout way — and it includes, what’s more, a more famous
passage (Chapter 10: 9-16) describing the Apostle Peter’s vision of
a sheet being dropped from Heaven, bearing “all kinds of
four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air.” A voice
commands him, “Get up, Peter, kill and eat.” Peter puzzles over the
imperative, which violates Jewish dietary laws. The vision is
repeated three times.
All in all, it’s an awkward and mixed and large chunk of
scripture, and it gets overlooked, unfortunately. Because the story
of Cornelius settled the issue of racial discrimination for
Christians two thousand years ago.
Here’s the story: Cornelius, identified with pleasingly
journalistic precision as “a centurion of the Italian cohort” in
Caesarea, sees an angel, in answer to his constant prayers. The
angel tells him to go to Joppa and find the Apostle Peter.
Cornelius sends “two of his slaves and a devout soldier.” During
their journey, Peter has the aforementioned vision of unclean
animals. Cornelius’s emissaries arrive at the house where Peter is
staying and re-tell the story of Cornelius and his angelic vision.
Peter returns with them to Caesarea to meet Cornelius. Peter
re-tells the story of his vision, explaining that he ordinarily
would not have come to the house of a Gentile. But, as he explains,
“God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or
unclean.”
Cornelius re-tells the story of his vision, too. (See the
problem here?) Peter responds by telling the story of Jesus and the
forgiveness of sin through his death and resurrection.
Acts 10: 44-47: “…The Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard
the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were
astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even
on the Gentiles. Then Peter said, ‘Can anyone withhold the water
for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just
as we have?’”
Peter baptizes Cornelius and his household. They become the
first Gentile converts to the new Christian religion.
In Chapter 11, Peter returns to Jerusalem and tells the whole
story again to the “circumcised believers” there (the new Jewish
Christians). By now, the story has become a sermon, which Peter
concludes with the words, “If then God gave them the same gift that
he gave us…who was I that I could hinder God?”
It is impossible to overstate the cataclysmic nature of this
revelation. It fell like lightning on the Holy Land, a place where
the usual practice between tribal and ethnic groups finds grim
summary in the Old Testament book of Judges, Chapter 12, verses
1-6. “…The Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against
the Ephraimites,” who were trying to escape from their defeat in an
earlier battle. The Gileadites challenged each fugitive, asking,
“Are you an Ephraimite?” If the fugitive denied it, the men of
Gilead would command him to say the word, “Shibboleth.” The
fugitive, unable to pronounce the phoneme “sh,” would say
“Sibboleth,” and the Gileadites would kill him. “Forty-two thousand
of the Ephraimites fell at that time.”
“Shibboleth” has entered modern English as a synonym for a
nonsensical belief. (“Shibboleth” means “river, or ear of corn,”
according to Bible dictionaries.)
All this is not to say that Christians have never discriminated
on the basis of race or ethnicity, or do not ever do so now. We all
sin and fall short of God’s grace. But two millennia ago, God
himself gave us our reason and our command for racial amity. As the
hymn says, “In Christ, there is no East nor West…”
As the University of Michigan case on racial preferences in
college admission moves before the Supreme Court, Peter Kirsanow of
the U.S. Civil Rights Commission wrote recently in National
Review Online, “A review of the amicus briefs in the Michigan
case … reveals a nigh religious belief among elites in the
benefits of diversity.” And he argues that modern devotion to
“diversity” will likely prevail no matter what the Supreme Court
rules.
Does this “nigh religious belief” evince a devotion to the
sharing of the Holy Spirit? Or is it a species of shibbolethism? Is
it new? Is it “progressive”? Or is it more correctly the modern
version of the barring of the fords of the Jordan?
