Please read the passage before reading the comments.
Paul and Barnabas proclaimed the Christian message that the God who created the world and all that is in it had sent Jesus as Savior. Pagans were to leave their false gods as they came to faith in Christ. This raised the question of the place that Judaism played in bringing pagans to Christ? Could the pagans skip this step of being Jewish? Some followers of Jesus taught the necessity of becoming Jewish first and then Christian; others disagreed. The controversy, the tension, and the uncertainty this provoked led the leaders of the Church at Antioch to check with the mother Church in Jerusalem for guidance.
The arrival of Paul and Barnabas and the other leaders from Antioch was warmly welcomed by the members of the Church in Jerusalem and by their leaders, the apostles and presbyters. They were glad to hear of the great successes experienced by the apostles among the pagans. There was also a felt need for pagans to maintain contact with the Jewish roots of the Church by practicing circumcision.
There still remains in the Church of today a need to be true to the past while living in the present. This is why popes die and are replaced by their successors. This is why the Church is forever young and forever aged at the same time. This is why we have to reassert our allegiance to God in the Church. We are forever meeting new challenges and new situations in the Church that demand our faithfulness to the gospel.
A general Christian refusal to accept poor migrants and refugees from poverty and violence is one such tension in the Church today, despite the strong scriptural insistence that we welcome strangers “because we were once strangers in a foreign land”. How does the Spirit speak to us in our day through the office of St Peter?
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