Today’s reading: Joshua 22; Acts 10
One thing that I think can be easily missed in Acts 10 is how significantly out of his comfort zone God is taking Peter.
When the sheet filled with all kinds of creatures descends and Peter is told to kill and eat, he responds by saying, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” It is easy to assume this is a pious response from Peter, that he simply cannot imagine eating an animal that the Lord has called unclean! But the reality is that he probably found the thought to be disgusting. Peter didn’t grow up as the lone kid in town that didn’t eat bacon or pork chops, he grew up in the midst of a society and culture that viewed these unclean animals as dirty and abhorrent. This would be somewhat like a sheet of rats, cockroaches, bats, and corgis being lowered to an American who is told to kill and eat. Are there cultures in the world that eat rats? Certainly. Are there places in the world that eat cockroaches? Yep. Are there societies that eat dogs? I don’t know, probably… But the point is that just because these things are edible doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be grossed out at the thought of being made to eat them, and a decent bit of that is social and cultural conditioning.
That makes this vision a little extra weird. God isn’t just telling Peter, “Hey, no animals are unclean anymore, and people are free to eat whatever they want to now,” and then leaving it up to him if he personally wants to try something he hasn’t been allowed to eat before. Instead, God expressly commands Peter to kill and eat that which he hasn’t eaten and that probably makes him pretty uncomfortable.
Then, as Peter is thinking about this vision, the messengers from Cornelius show up and Peter is told to go with them, and off they go to the house of a Gentile. When they arrive Peter says to them, “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person unclean.” The thing is though that this wan’t unlawful, at least not according to any law God gave Israel (we’ve just finished working our way through the laws as part of our reading plan and we never came across any instruction like this at all!). But while God had not made it unlawful for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile, the Jewish leaders at the time had. They taught that if you associated with the unclean Gentiles, you would be made unclean by association, so you were to actively avoid Gentiles.
Much like the animals Peter was told to kill and eat, it’s not like Peter had really been wanting to hang out with some Gentiles, and maybe even share the gospel with them, but just felt like he wasn’t allowed until Acts 10 when he finally got the permission he had been waiting for. Peter was raised to believe that if he entered the house of a Gentile he would be defiled by it. The Jews were God’s people, and Peter himself had seen God’s mercy stretch even to the Samaritan half-Jews, but the godless, heathen Gentiles were simply too far outside to be reached, weren’t they?
This is why Peter wasn’t just told he could eat unclean animals now if he wanted to, but was instead expressly told to kill and eat that which he had been conditioned to consider dirty and wrong. With food, it ultimately wouldn’t matter if Peter wanted to try some pig or some hoopoe at some point, but with people, God wasn’t giving Peter the choice. God was making it abundantly clear to Peter that He was including the Gentiles in His plan of salvation and Peter was the one to whom Jesus had given the keys of the kingdom, so whether it made him uncomfortable or not, he was to go and take that message of salvation to the Gentiles and welcome them into the family of the Lord.
God is essentially declaring that racism or cultural biases had no place in His kingdom. Salvation didn’t belong to the Jews; it came from them, in that Jesus was a Jew, but it did not stop with them. All the nations of the earth would be blessed through Abraham’s descendants, and whether it made him uncomfortable or not, Peter was the one through whom God initiated bringing those nations in under His grace.
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