Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Acts 15:1–6
Jerusalem was the city of pilgrimage.
The psalmist rejoiced: “We will go up to the house of the Lord.”
But not every journey to Jerusalem was filled with singing.
Paul and Barnabas also went up.
But they did not go to celebrate a feast.
They went because the Church was in danger of losing the Gospel.
A question had arisen, sharp and serious:
How is a person saved?
By the grace of Christ?
Or by carrying the whole yoke of the Law?
Some said: Faith in Christ is not enough.
The Gentiles must also be circumcised. They must also keep the law of Moses.
In other words: Christ must be accepted— but something else must be added.
And this “something else” was not small.
It meant commands, rules, boundary lines, ritual obligations.
It meant that salvation would no longer be received as gift, but approached as burden.
It meant that the door opened by grace would be narrowed again by human demands.
This was not a small dispute.
This was a struggle for the heart of the Gospel.
For if salvation comes through the Law, then Christ is no longer enough.
And if Christ is not enough, then the Good News is no longer truly good.
The question was not whether the Law was holy.
It was.
The question was whether the Law could save.
And the answer, slowly emerging in the Church, was this:
The Law can guide. The Law can reveal. The Law can name sin.
But the Law cannot give the new life that only Christ can give.
No one is saved because he has managed to carry every command.
No one is saved because he has succeeded in making himself worthy.
We are saved because God has acted first.
Because Christ has opened what we could not open.
Because grace is given before it is deserved.
That is why this moment in Antioch matters so much.
The Church stood at a crossroads.
One road would turn the Gospel into a heavier religion.
The other would let it become what it truly is:
good news for the nations, good news for the weak, good news for those who cannot save themselves.
This debate did not die easily.
It returned again and again in Christian history.
Whenever people begin to think that grace must be earned, that Christ must be supplemented, that salvation belongs only to the disciplined, the worthy, or the strong, Antioch speaks again.
And its question remains:
Is Christ enough?
The whole Church had to go up to Jerusalem to face that question.
And every generation must face it again.
For the heart of faith is this:
we do not climb up to God by our own strength.
God comes down to us in Christ.
That is the way of salvation.
Scripture Attribution
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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