You know what a prejudice is? A prejudice is a judgment you make about somebody before you really know that person. We do this all the time in our culture. We form judgments about people without any real, deep, lasting knowledge of them. We stereotype them. This kind of stereotyping happened on both sides of the divide between Jews and Gentiles. There was mutual loathing and ridicule between Jews and Gentiles in the first century. That is part of the background of this conflict that we read about in Galatians 2.
To summarize this very briefly: it came to focus on three issues. One was days (when you worship), another was diet (what you eat), and the third was a distinctive form of body piercing (circumcision). Days — which days you should set aside for religious observance; how you observe the Sabbath; what you can do and cannot do on certain days. Diet — what kind of food you can or cannot eat; kosher/non-kosher; or even more important, and more to the point of Galatians 2 — with whom can you eat such food? Days, diet, and a distinctive form of body piercing, which was required as an essential rite of entrance into the covenant people of God. These were the three issues that separated Jews and Gentiles in this early Christian community.
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Jesus had already broken through some of these barriers. We all know Luke 15, right? It is a wonderful chapter that contains within it some of the most beautiful stories Jesus ever told: the three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. But how does it begin? Luke 15:1, “Now the tax-collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus but the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”
With whom you eat with says a lot about who you are. Isn’t it funny that the civil rights movement began at a lunch counter? “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” Imagine that! Jesus had already broken through some of these barriers, but they were long, deep, and hard to overcome even among those who followed Him and believed in Him and saw Him resurrected from the dead in their midst. Even then they did not get it completely. This brings us to
Act II: The Breakthrough.
The breakthrough is Acts 10. Do you remember Cornelius? Cornelius was a Gentile — a God-fearing Gentile. He was not an atheist. He believed that there was a supreme being. He knew something about the Old Testament law. He was familiar with the scriptures of the Torah. He went to a synagogue perhaps from time to time. All of this is true. But there was still this fact that he was not a member of the covenant people of God. He was a Gentile. And Peter, even though he had walked and talked with Jesus for three years all around Galilee and Nazareth and Jerusalem; and had heard Him speak and had seen Him eat with sinners — even after all of that, Peter still harbored prejudice against Gentiles.