07/05/2026

Thursday Week 5 Easter

My judgement is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God.

Today St James summarises what he and those who have taken part in the discussion about what part the pre-Incarnation revelations to the Hebrews should play in the Good News/Resurrection revelations that Jesus had commanded them to preach inclusively to the "whole world", have decided about "The Law of Moses".

Therefore my judgement is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood. For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues.

I am looking at those words two thousand years later. My opinions have been informed by the Gospels and by reading the opinions of  learned scholars and Theologians, but St James, St Peter were themselves Jews who had known the INCARNATION as their Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth.

I know that our relationship with God underwent a complete reset, a re-creation (Jesus himself told us that he came to fulfill the original Law not to change it) when "The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary and she conceived by the Holy Ghost", but I don't know how much of what is our New Testament was truly understood in the same way that I do, by those who had shared in the real-time of the events recorded therein.

In the real-time of today "this world" is again very much concerned with what is happening in the Middle-East. The Jews "who still proclaim Moses, by reading him every Sabbath in the synagogues" are again at the centre of history and again manipulating the most powerful of the rulers of this world as they did with Pilate in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

The continuing human suffering being perpetrated in Palestine by them and at their behest amongst their neighbours reveals to us all that we have never truly accepted the final revelation made in the real-time of this Universe by the Incarnate Son of God, Jesus. We have not accepted the grace to completely renounce sin that was created as God suffered death for us on Calvary.

We are all capable of knowing that we are individual beings and that we are each free to make choices. Jesus was a willing participant in his own Crucifixion to reveal that the defeat of humanly created evil requires something greater than created being and that if to prevent sin we had had our freedom removed  (remember that God is all-powerful) we would no longer be the image and likeness of the Love by which we are both created and re-created by forgiveness of sin.

We who cannot return ourselves to the nothing of pre-creation for we have been created and are loved to choose to fulfill the intentions of Our Father, have had it revealed to us how we are to live in this world to avoid adding to the humanly created evil which has been evident in all previous generations and in my lifetime has revealed itself in war, concentration camps, holocaust, fire-storms, atom bomb, ethnic cleansing, racism, clerical abuse, religious persecution and all the personal sins of which I have been guilty and am still capable. 

Today I pray that we can all receive the Word as did both Jew and Gentile in today's Acts and thus be delivered from the evil of our own making. Amen