The men not the menu

Friends, this is the last of my series on Jesus and food laws.  (If you are late to this series, scroll down to July 12, where it started.)  I trust you have seen that Mark 7.19b is critical to a millennia-long debate over the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and whether Jesus and Paul were starting a new religion called Christianity that is a radical departure from the Judaism of their day.  This discussion also gets at the role of the Law in the Christian life.

Today we will look at the Acts 10-11 passage about Peter’s vision of the sheet coming down with unclean animals.  Many have asked, Doesn’t this prove that God told Peter to eat unclean foods?  That kosher and the Law were therefore defunct?

I want to show you that we are told four times in this story that what was at issue was the men, not the menu.  God was indeed teaching something new to Peter, but it was about table fellowship, not the food on the table.  Peter had been instructed by a rigorist school of Pharisees (not all Pharisees had the same views), perhaps like those who followed Shammai, that Jews were never to eat with gentiles, for the latter were unclean and would make the Jews unclean.  This was taught by these Pharisees but this rule itself was not taught by Torah.

We all remember that God showed Peter a sheet with unclean animals on it, God told Peter to kill and eat them, and Peter protested that he had “never eaten anything that is profane or unclean” (10.14).

As I have said several times in the last few days, note that this was years after Jesus talked about “all foods being cleansed” (Mk 7.19b) and yet Peter was still refraining from certain foods.  Was Peter a slow learner?  Did he ignore what Jesus had said?  Or did Peter realize that Jesus was not doing away with kosher laws but instead talking about Gentiles?

Let’s get back to the story.  Once Peter and his entourage arrived in Caesarea at Cornelius’ house, Peter, who had done a lot of thinking on the several-day journey to Caesarea, said that he now realized the meaning of the vision was fellowship not food: “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or visit a gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean” (10.28).  The uncleanness is about people, not foods.  This is the first mention.

Here is the second: Later in the conversation Peter refers to the meaning of the vision again.  “I truly understand that God hows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (10.34-35).  Again it is about people not foods.

Third: When Peter went up to Jerusalem to report on these extraordinary events, those who were apparently also of the rigorist Pharisaic party (but now following Yeshua) asked him why he joined in fellowship with gentiles: Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” (11.2)

Fourth: Peter’s response to their challenge shows yet again that the issue was men not the menu: “The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us” (11.12).

There is no sign in this long story that Peter ever ate unkosher food.

Peter learned a lesson about fellowship with gentiles, who were different but equal now in the Body of Messiah.  There is no lesson here about the end of the legal parts of Torah, or the end of kosher for Jews, or the rejection of Torah as a guide for Jews.

Bottom line for this series.  Jesus was doing a new thing, but it was not starting a new religion that departed radically from the Judaism of his day.  It was not a rejection of Torah or its food laws. Jesus put Torah in a whole new light, and showed that his obedience to it saves, and that no Jew’s imperfect obedience to it could ever save.  But Torah stays, reinterpreted as the Torah of the messiah.

This is what Paul meant in Galatians 6.2 by “the law of Christ”: the  Torah of the messiah.