Our Venerable Father Pachomius the Great (346)
Abstinence from meat and foods that contain meat.
Read
Acts 15:5-34; John 10:17-28
Christ is risen! Truly, He is risen!
“It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” This passage is the fulfilment of the gift of the Holy Spirit that Christ breathed on the Apostles in the upper room in John 20. There, Jesus links the gift the Holy Spirit with the power to forgive. To forgive is to ease a burden. In this passage in Acts, Peter moves to ease the burden by not requiring circumcision of the gentile converts to “the way” that is, what the early Christians called their faith and way of life. Peter’s move is decisive for the future of Christianity, allowing it to be a religion not offered to the select few but the many. We should not think that this makes Christianity any easier. Peter bears in mind restrictions gentiles must accept: “abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from unchastity.” Nor does the elimination of circumcision mean that Christian blood will not be spilt. Instead of the blood of circumcision, the early Church is marked by the blood of the martyrs, from which flows our own faith, as Tertullian reminds us: “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
As we endeavour to open our own Churches after this difficult pandemic, let’s pray for our leaders, successors to the apostles, that they experience the gift of the Holy Spirit to figure out what is good for us.