By Austin B. Tucker
Acts 10:34-43
Like
most people who grew up in northwest Louisiana in the mid twentieth century, I
absorbed a lot of racial prejudice from my culture. I didn’t realize it at
the time, of course, for prejudice of all kinds is usually unconscious and unintended.
In time God let me see my racial prejudice and delivered me from it. Then I had
to overcome my prejudice against those who were still racist!
Pride
is such a subtle sin, isn’t it?
It’s
not a long journey from Joppa to Caesarea by the Sea. It’s only about thirty-two
miles up the coast of Samaria — little more than a day’s journey in the
first century world of Simon Peter. But for Peter it was a life-transforming pilgrimage.
It was a pilgrimage from prejudice.
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It
is interesting that prayer figured prominently on both ends of this journey. Cornelius
“and all his family were devout and God-fearing . . . and prayed to God regularly.”
At the hour of mid-afternoon prayers, God spoke to him in a vision about Peter.
At the same time God was preparing Peter for his pilgrimage.
Already
Peter had accepted the hospitality of Simon the Tanner in Joppa. A tanner deals
with dead animals all the time. That makes him ceremonially unclean. Not only
that, but this coastal town was in the territory of the much maligned half-Jews,
the Samaritans. Still, Peter was a very Kosher Hebrew and very faithful in his
prayers.
As
the servants of Cornelius approached Joppa, Peter was on the flat rooftop patio
in prayer. In spite of some baby steps Peter had already made, we may be sure
he was not praying about his racial pride and prejudice. Such a prayer is all
but impossible, for the person who can see his prejudice has already made the
first step away from that blindness. Peter was in prayer, and that’s a wonderful
place to meet God and come to know His heart – and your own!
During
his prayer he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a great
sheet or sail being lowered to him from heaven. All kinds of animals were gathered
in it, and a voice from heaven said, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat” (vs.
13). Even though he was hungry waiting for the call to the noonday meal, he could
not imagine obeying the heavenly voice. Why not? Well he was a Kosher Jew and
all these animals were on the list of forbidden foods. He had never eaten any
of them and reminded God of that.
But
the vision and the voice confirmed to him in a three-fold repetition, “Do
not call anything impure that God has made clean” (vs. 15). The men sent
by Cornelius arrived at the gate “while Peter was wondering about the meaning
of the vision” (vs. 17). The verb here means to be greatly perplexed as several
English translations show. A time of perplexity is often a very teachable moment.