Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 5 May 2013

6th Sunday of Easter year c

I wonder if we really understand just how momentous were the events mentioned in the reading from the book of Acts?

To us, hundreds of years removed from the events the dietary laws of Judaism and the issue of circumcision seems very remote and even rather arcane. Has it anything to do with us we can ask?

Well yes it has and it does!

This meeting in Jerusalem was one of the most significant milestones in Christian history, it changed the course of the early community and put them on a path of freedom from servitude to the old law. It was also a huge pastoral response to the needs of a burgeoning gentile community. Quite literally those involved stepped right out of their comfort zone, removed themselves from the safety of the known traditional path of Judaism and trusted quite simply in what the Gospel calls the work of the Holy Spirit.

If these people had NOT done this, we would not be here as Christians today, possibly the history of the community would have ended in a seditious rather odd sect of Judaism that would have been cast out as an heretical sect.

Thank God that Paul and the others had the courage to discern and listen to the promptings of the Spirit. But these readings do not excuse us from attentive discernment to the signs of our times, we cannot be complacent and need to respond to the work and drive of the Spirit in the Church and the world.

Fifty years ago the Second Vatican Council opened the Catholic Church to the world and set it on a course of engagement with others. That is the true ecumenism seen in the book of Revelation where all nations, languages and peoples are united with the Lamb. In our world today, what is the Spirit calling us to do? Perhaps like those people gathered in Jerusalem it is a call to openness and transformation.

I have been in the USA this week, busy with graduate theological students, Christians, Jews, Moslems and other faiths. Talking with one of them I was given what could be a word from the Lord, what was it? Quite simply this, that the official Churches are too caught up in their own internal struggles to really see and hear the Spirit, instead this aspect of God is to be seen at work outside of the structures, calling us to radical conversion of heart and life. Somehow that ties up with our Gospel!

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.