Sharing Food and Breaking Boundaries: Reading of Acts 10–11: 18 as a Key to Luke’s Ecumenical Agenda in Acts

Abstract

In Acts 10–11: 18, Luke use a set of connected stories about Peter, shared eating, and food to explore issues of Christian boundaries and the boundaries between Christians. Luke’s presentation of the apostolic history argues for a genuine ecumenism between Jewish and Gentile Christians characterized and enacted through commensality. Moreover, when this commensality within the Eucharistic pattern of all early Christian community meals, we see that it has a bearing on how Luke viewed the Christian symposium; while it has definite implications for Christian Eucharistic sharing/ecumenism today.

In Acts 10–11:18 Luke presents us with a series of meals whose memory he considers of importance in his vision of a world church: ¹ one that reaches from Jerusalem out to the ends of the earth. ² Moreover, these meals were recalled by him in such a manner that they were intended to challenge the already received wisdom of the churches in which his stories were being heard. ³ Recalling the structure and salient points of Luke’s narrative allows us to speculate on some of the tensions present in early communities, while offering us material for reflection on our own practice which may have a bearing on certain issues in both missiology and ecumenism.

Peter’s meals

The section of Acts with which I am concerned – 10: 1–11: 18 – is conventionally seen as forming a unit within a larger set of stories about Peter as a missionary (9: 31–11: 18), ⁴ and this particular section is usually characterized not in terms of meals but in terms of its final outcome: the conversion of Cornelius and his household. ⁵ However, instead of reading the story as one about conversion, or indeed its immediate Sitz im Leben in the churches where Luke was being read, where it was probably related to the disputes between Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians about keeping the purity laws, one can read it as a story about how food was used in the churches. The basis for this shift in emphasis is provided in the text itself when at 10: 28, Peter is presented as declaring that no person is ‘common’ (koinos in the sense of ‘profane’) or unclean on the basis of his previous vision that no food is common or unclean (10: 14). Luke is, therefore, thinking simultaneously about food and people. So, reversing the interpretation of the images, we can read the whole story in terms of food, its consumption, and how the table manners of those who follow Jesus can be, in this story, a guide to Christian action.

The scene is set in 10: 1–9 when a Roman soldier – who is neither a Jew nor a gentile follower of Jesus – is praying at the ninth hour and is told by an angel that because of his righteous human behaviour (10: 4) his path and that of Simon Peter would encounter one another. This means that he will be brought within the new covenant community (Lk 22: 20) through an apostle: Peter (Acts 1: 2). The ‘back-story’ complete, Luke now tells the main story beginning with a hungry Peter.

Peter is at the sixth hour praying, and becomes hungry and so wants something cooked for him and for this he has to wait. Luke just takes it for granted that we understand that when an apostle wants food there is some sort of provisioning service available to him – and we must recall that Peter is not in his own home but a guest lodging with Simon the tanner in Joppa (Acts 10: 6). However, the guidance offered on how followers of The Way are to receive visiting ‘apostles and prophets’ in the Didache illumines the situation. Normally, the guests are not to stay more than one or two days (Acts 9: 43 tells us Peter had stayed there some time – no doubt due to his special position as a leader among the apostles), but any apostle or prophet is to be welcomed ‘as if they were the Lord’. Clearly, these guests often asked their hosts to provide them with food, because the Didache reminds communities that they are to be given just enough food when they leave to sustain them until their next lodging, and communities are to be suspicious of those who order a banquet for themselves ‘in the spirit’. ⁶ It was, therefore, taken for granted that Peter, an apostle, would be provided with the food he needed while a guest, and indeed that he had simply to ask for it from their hospitality! It is also clear that other apostles – a much larger group than ‘the twelve’ ⁷ – were abusing the customs that we see taken for granted here in Acts – and hence the Didache has to offer warning advice to communities. ⁸ One other point needs to be noted: this household in which Peter is lodging is a Jewish household (as we should expect given that this tanner is named ‘Simon’), and the food that would be provided would be lawful in accordance with purity and food customs that claimed their basic authority from Lev 11: 2–23 and Deut 14: 3–20. Everything is, in other words, proceeding according to the Torah and the expected customs: ‘situation normal’.

While Peter awaits his hosts’ provision of food, something happens. Luke wants us to imagine this as explicitly out of the ordinary for he tells us that Peter fell into an ecstasy (ekstasis) and so this does not belong to the world of rational discourse or the cultural world of Joppa. A great square sheet full of impure animals is lowered down before him; and all these animals are offered to Peter as a divine gift of food. The four-cornered sheet is meant to bring to our minds a table cloth and all that is akin to a banquet of many meats suitable for a feast, ⁹ and it can be taken as implying the whole living world as created. ¹⁰ Peter is to kill and eat, but refuses for he rejects – and always has until this moment in his life – that which is common (koinos) and unclean. Now the voice tells him that God makes all clean, so to call any food ‘common’ is to be untrue to reality – even if (we are to infer) such a statement would be true to the law. Just so that we know this is a serious message we are then told it happened three times – in the narrative world of the early Christians important moments need to be produced in triplicate. ¹¹ But despite the repetition, the significance of the vision of all this food offered from heaven for his hunger was not immediately apparent to Peter for, fully awake and back in the world of Joppa, he was ‘greatly perplexed’ (10: 17).

At this point the three people sent by Cornelius appear outside and Peter is told by the Spirit that he is to go with them without hesitation – but before they went anywhere, Peter (a lodger himself in Simon’s house) ‘invited them in ¹² and he received them as guests (exenisen)’ (10: 23). ¹³ Peter the guest has now turned into the host, and is extending a welcome to others. This shift in status to make Peter the primary agent of what is happening is demanded by the nature of Luke’s message: Peter is taking a decisive step and he is fully responsible for it. But what is this step – surely ‘giving them lodging’ (a common translation) is no more than practical hospitality – in our parlance ‘putting them up for the night’ – in view of the fact that they have a long journey to Caesarea to make the next day. It would be quite unreasonable to imagine that a journey of approximately 30 miles could be embarked on immediately by those who had just come from there. ¹⁴ But this is far more than just ‘finding them a bed’. What is implicit in welcoming them as guests – sharing not only the house space but the table in the house – is spelled out a little later: Peter will be criticized for having dealings with the uncircumcised and for eating with them (11: 3) and will say that at the very moment he met these messengers that ‘the Spirit told [him] to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us’ (11: 12). In effect, in welcoming these messengers as guests Peter has recognized that one can eat – precisely because the Spirit has revealed it – with any of God’s creatures because this too has been revealed: no one is common or unclean (10: 28). It is with these three anonymous messengers – two slaves and a pious soldier – that Luke imagines The Way moving beyond the confines of the People of Israel and the boundaries of the Torah. And that boundary is transgressed in an act of welcoming and table sharing. Thus Peter – and so all apostles – are expected to continue the boundary breaking commensality that was an important theme in Luke’s portrayal of Jesus: ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them’ (Lk 15: 2). ¹⁵

Two days later, Peter and Cornelius meet in Caesarea, and began to talk. Lest the significance of what had already happened in Joppa (when Peter entertained the Gentile messengers) and of what was now happening in Caesarea be lost on his audience, Luke spells out the settled position of the Jerusalem church explicitly. Peter speaks to the assembled Gentile household – a group that already looks like ‘a church’ ¹⁶ because they are said to be ‘in the presence of God’ (10: 33) – thus: ‘You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call any common or unclean’ (10: 28). Peter is now formally acknowledging what those who were attentive in the audience have already realized: since he welcomed those messengers as guests, Peter has been living in a new cosmos where nothing can be called common because all is made good by God.

Cornelius then tells his part of the story (10: 30–33) and Peter replies with a ‘history of salvation’ sermon (10: 34–43) such as Luke places in his mouth on several occasions in Acts. ¹⁷ But there are two variants. First, previous speeches have been addressed to people of Israel, this is addressed to the righteous in every nation – because he now recognizes that God does not have favourites (10: 35). Second, for the first time the appearance of the risen Jesus contains a reference to the theme of the post-resurrection meals: ¹⁸ the witnesses to the resurrection are those who ate and drank with Jesus then (10: 41). Encountering the risen Lord is a meal-sharing experience – which would have been heard by Luke’s audience in terms of their own Eucharistic meal-sharing. ¹⁹ Moreover, eating is not simply a matter of nourishment or a matter of law keeping: eating and drinking together identify people (in this case as specially chosen witnesses; 10: 41), and is a means of establishing the eschatological community. Sharing food and drink is a serious religious engagement: it can join Jew with Jew, Jew with Gentile, and the disciple with the Lord.

When Peter had finished his speech, the Holy Spirit fell on the group – much to the surprise of the six Jewish-Christians (11: 12) that had travelled with Peter – and so it was evident that ‘the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles’ (10: 44–45). Then the household was baptized, and Peter and the other Jewish Christians live as guests in that Gentile household (10: 48). But such radical action demands a reckoning and so the story now moved back to Jerusalem (11: 1) where Peter gives an account of what has happened by retelling the vision of the sheet full of animals offered him as food (11: 5–10). This retelling repeats the message that all is created clean and so should not be called common (11: 9) and so there is no basis for the objection made against him that he should not have eaten with the uncircumcised (11: 3). Eating together is seen as responding to the divine initiative and to establish a bond that is more profound than circumcision: indeed, eating ordinary food – for no food is common or unclean – together forms the actual bond of the ecumenical community of the risen Christ.

Trances, Voices, and Angels

One of the most significant features of the whole story is the density of divine interventions – in one form or another – that characterize the story. It might be objected that such miraculous elements are found throughout Acts – the ascension of Jesus into the clouds (1: 9), the destruction of Ananias and Sapphira (5: 6 and 5: 11), the vision of Stephen (7: 55), or Paul’s handkerchiefs (19: 12) – but not with such connected frequency. Indeed, the web of references to ‘other worldly’, and the repetition of these references, suggest that Luke wants us to be more aware here than elsewhere of the ‘other worldly’ nature of the task of the apostles and the churches.

The first ‘event’ is the vision of ‘an angel of God’ – as ‘a man in dazzling clothes’ standing ‘before him’ ‘in his house’ given to the Gentile, Cornelius. This ‘holy angel’ (10: 22) then speaks to him with his message that God has seen his righteousness. We are told this in Luke’s voice from his perfect knowledge as the all-seeing narrator (10: 3–7); then it is repeated by the messengers, as a report of an event, for Peter’s benefit by the messengers (10: 22); then it is repeated by Cornelius himself in oratio recta which re-affirms it and shows that he has understood its full import (10: 30–32); and then we hear it a fourth time: when Peter in his own voice repeats Cornelius’s account (11: 13–14), and thus affirms to ‘his’ narrative audience that this vision has divine credentials. This angelic visitation is thus one of the most attested events in the whole story of Acts.

The second ‘event’ is the trance and vision of Peter where he hears a voice that comes from heaven (10: 10–6). ²⁰ Having been given the story in Luke’s voice as narrator, it is repeated for us, almost verbatim, as Peter’s own experiences (11: 5–10). From the audience’s perspective this not only allows Luke to repeat the key message, but within the logic of the narrative allows him to present Peter ‘owning this vision’ and so all that is implied in it and all that Peter will infer from it. Moreover, we the audience have already been given an advantage in understanding in comparison with the disciples in Jerusalem in that Peter has already narrated this as an action of God in his speech to Cornelius’s household when he said that ‘but God has shown me that I should not call anyone common or unclean’ (10: 28).

The third ‘event’ is when the Spirit speaks to Peter about the messengers and how he is to react to them. This is told to us, first, in Luke’s voice (10: 19) and then we hear Peter’s recollection of this (11: 12) which makes explicit what is implied in the Spirit’s message when it is told to us by Luke. Through this rhetorical device we do not merely have to take the divine decision on Luke’s authority, but we have Peter openly declaring that the Spirit told him that he was not to make a distinction between Jew and Gentile. And practically, this meant that he was not to make such a distinction at table – which is the very action that has prompted an accusation against him (11: 3) and this defence.

The fourth ‘event’ is that ‘the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word’ (10: 44). This is then acknowledged – and so repeated – as a fact by Peter (10: 47), then recalled in Jerusalem (11: 15); and repeated yet again as part of the overall conclusion of the story (11:17-8). We, the audience, can be under no doubt that this whole sequence of events begins with God, and not with a human situation (contrast Mark 7: 24–30), is made explicit in its significance by prophetic means, and that it is to be considered significant in memory through its multiple iterations in the narrative.

So why has Luke used so much repetition? This pattern of repetition allows his audience to hear the story at three levels. Most simply we have the account of the narrator, Luke, coming directly to us as a series of connected details set in a temporal sequence over a matter of days that we are simply expected to appreciate as historical facts. Within this narrator’s level, the repetitions are set merely as recollections, at specific points, of earlier events in the sequence. Then, secondly, we have the direct testimony of the characters in their own voices as they declare the ‘other worldly’ acts of which they are witnesses. This is their declaration of the works of God, and on the basis of their witness we, the audience, are expected to affirm the veracity of the details of the story. The third level is the act of repetition itself, which takes historical form in the recollection by Peter when he has returned to Jerusalem, and this is presented as being ‘read into the record’ of the whole church. Thus the repetition, most significantly in Peter’s ‘orderly [kathexés] account’ (11: 4) as we find it in 11: 5–17, is the formal ecclesial memory of an event of revelation. Once this ‘orderly account’ is received, it is accepted by the church as the will of God made manifest (11: 18). Meanwhile, the audience hearing this are expected to realize that they too must acknowledge the story and hold it as part of their own memory as disciples.

Customary Background

Luke’s story presupposes that the issue of how disciples eat with one another is one that he considers of importance. Apart from what he tells us in the story about hesitations among Jewish followers of The Way about eating with Gentiles, we have some other hints that throw light on the story. ²¹ The Didache assumes that Gentiles can become part of The Way of Life, and also that with regard to food regulations people should do what they are able to do (6: 3), and so, by implication, everything less than the Torah is to be seen as a concession. As such, it can be seen as an expression of Jewish Christianity, ²² such as we see in Peter at the time he went into the ecstasy (Acts 10: 14), his somewhat startled companions (10: 45), and, more explicitly, his Jerusalem accusers (11: 3). That such a customary background as we find in the Didache is the setting for Luke’s story is made more plausible, not only because of the way Peter behaves in Simon the Tanner’s house, as noted above, but also in the fact that Peter is praying at the sixth hour, while Cornelius is praying at the ninth hour – such a pattern is consistent with that prescribed in Didache 8: 3. ²³ However, there is a hesitation in the Didache in that it assumes that only those who are already baptised can join in the meals of the community (9: 5), and it would be anachronistic to think of these meals as distinct ‘eucharistic meals’ separate from other community meals. ²⁴ Moreover, the boundary between those with whom one could and could not eat are well patrolled in that the next comment in the Didache is: ‘Remember what the Lord has said about this: “do not give to the dogs what is holy”’ (9:5). ²⁵ This implies a world of holy and common, clean and unclean, insiders and outsiders. ²⁶ This is the precise set of assumptions among disciples of Jesus such as Peter and his Jerusalem accusers which the story in Acts 10–11 is meant to undermine as baseless. To many early communities – such as those represented by the Didache – eating with outsiders was still problematic, and something that could only take place after their repentance and baptism. Within the Lukan story we have the possibility that righteousness and the Spirit are there already, that God shows not partiality, and that no one is to be called unclean – and so, presumably not referred to as a ‘dog’ – and so the final community is established in the act of communal eating.

Contemporary Implications?

One of the most bitter ²⁷ divisions in Christianity today also concerns with whom one can eat one meal in particular: that of the Eucharist. This prohibition on shared eating and drinking does not – and this would shock both the formulators of the Didache and Luke – concern non-Christians but those who are Christians (their baptism is not in doubt) but not ‘with us’ in some shape or other. The usual justification for this refusal to make ‘others’ welcome at ‘our’ table (recall Acts 10: 23) is that one cannot eat together at the Eucharist as part of a process toward unity, but only after some juridically-perfect unity has been achieved. This position – which de facto then perpetuates senses of exclusion, reinforces division, and sets a premium on discovering further elements of disagreement – is seen as based in the divine nature of the commensality involved, and the detailed rationale to support it varies little whether it emerges from Roman Catholic ²⁸ or Orthodox sources. ²⁹ But before proceeding further along this line of thought, there are two preliminary questions needing attention. First, to what extent can we see a real connection between the meals being mentioned in Acts and Eucharistic eating (then or now)? If it is the case that the meals in Acts a simple an expression of general hospitality – and for all concerned the Eucharist was something distinct – then seeking to any implication from Acts for Eucharistic practice would be little more than drawing a pious moral, however apposite, rather than arguing a case from relevant precedents. The second issue is that of the significance of any one historical situation to inform us in another, contemporary situation. For many, this second issue hardly arises: if the first issue can be answered satisfactorily, then Scripture qua Scripture can be seen as normative practice; but such an appeal, if made, still leaves many questions unanswered and so an attempt to sketch another hermeneutic is in order.

So, addressing the first issue, what possible connection has the shared meals described in Acts with the ritual event in contemporary Christianity variously labelled ‘the Eucharist’, ‘the Lord’s Supper’, ‘Mass’, ‘Holy Communion’, or whatever? Until quite recently – the late 1970s – such a question would have had a definite answer: ordinary eating, even though it might be an expression of fellowship and have a ‘blessing’ at its start, was one thing; the ‘Lord’s Supper’ as a deliberate fulfilment of a dominical command ³⁰ was quite another. Ordinary meals were meals, whereas the Lord’s Supper was a theological event utilizing the form of a meal. This interpretation was, in effect, little more than the retrojection of much later church practice into the earliest period: just as their meals and a church-based ritual were quite distinct so too was the practice of the earliest Christians, and evidence that seemed to challenge that neat distinction between community meals and celebration of the Eucharist such as references to ‘the Agape’ in Jude 12 or the fact that the blessings over loaf and cup in the Didache were clearly for use at a real meal were either sidelined as irrelevant ³¹ or deviant. ³² However, one of the most radical developments in the study of early Christian practice in the last few decades has been with regard to their meal practice and its centrality in their community life. ³³ The result of this scholarship – and it forms the paradigm within which this article is written – is that we cannot imagine ‘meals’ and ‘Eucharists’ and then think of them being somehow ‘combined’ or ‘blended’ in early practice, ³⁴ but rather must look on such distinctions as later historical developments. Thus the task is to appreciate the meal practices (in all their diversity) of the Jesus movement, knowing that this was a significant part of their discipleship (as witness for example in the number of meal stories about Jesus that they recalled) and something they held to be distinctive about them as a community (as witness Paul’s concerns about the meal practices in Corinth). ³⁵ In these meals the celebrated who they were, they recalled their memories, ³⁶ , the heard the kerugma, ³⁷ and offered Jesus’ blessing of the Father over a loaf of bread which was broken and shared and over cup of some liquid – we have evidence for the use of water as well as of wine ³⁸ – which was then shared. It is against such a view that we have to read all the references to meals from early Christianity and so the radical distinction between ‘the Last Supper’ (itself a later construct which was read in particular accounts) and the other meals of Jesus, the miraculous feedings, and references to food as in the Bread of Life material in John’s gospel – about which there was endless debate in other exegesis as to whether it was relevant to the Eucharist or not – disappears. All these memories have to be read in the context of the meal experience of those who recalled, valued, and transmitted those stories. ³⁹ From this perspective, the meals being discussed – and the boundaries they imply – in Acts 10 have to be seen as part of his contemporaries’ concern with meal-sharing as part of their discipleship. Since it is a legacy of that concern that produced the specifically ritual meals, with their token sharing of food, that is called the Eucharist, if early practice has any relevance to the practice of modern Christians, then those meals are Eucharistically relevant. So now we must turn to the second hermeneutical questions.

To suggest that practices of the early churches are a norma normans for all subsequent Christian practice – despite the fact that this is a claim that most churches have frequently invoked in the past – is neither practical (for we cannot recreate the social world of the first centuries) nor theologically justified (for it would be tantamount to a biblical fundamentalism with all its problems and faults). On the other hand, given that Christians today continue to read texts such as Acts and to value them as their precious common memories means that we do not simply consign them to the past as prologue. In this case I would propose a rather simple hermeneutic: given that we make sense of our present in retrospection and recollection, we look to the past as a kind of wondrous ‘mirror’ – one where we sometimes find a reflection in concerns and patterns of behaviour and sometimes we find a distinct lack of reflection. In each case, the action of approaching the mirror is important in that it allows us to evaluate our own discipleship within our own situation. It could be that we are acting in virtually the same way as those we read about in the past; and this very lack of difference is the problem because the external situation has changed; or it could be that we are struck by the differences and these call us to question again our own assumptions even when we have set great value on them. ⁴⁰ It is in this latter manner that I suggest that contemporary concerns about sharing the Eucharistic meal, and the boundaries that are so often applied to its sharing, may gain insight from looking at an earlier set of concerns about meal sharing (and as we have seen, this involved what we would call Eucharistic meal-sharing) and boundaries. The earlier practice is not being presented as ‘this is what is should be’ but rather as posing a set of important questions for today which have a right to be considered in both theology and practice precisely because these memories, contained in Acts, are part of the formal memory of churches today in that they hold them as part of their canon and read them at their gatherings. Hence that memory of meal sharing and boundaries can be a meaningful part of any contemporary discussion of Eucharistic sharing and boundaries.

So it is possible look at meal practice in the churches then and today and see how they relate and reflect one another; and that is the process that beckons us now if the case of Acts 10–11 is seen within this then – now process of reflection. Whatever way one responds to that reflection, it is always interesting to bring to attention alterative ancient views of matters that concern us especially when they come from such figures of authority as an evangelist or from a text that is claimed unambiguously as part of the canon or from a memory that is directly linked to no less a figure than the apostle Peter. At the very least, to those who hold that their position is unalterable because of its grounding in tradition, history can provide a counter-indicative fact that undermines any claim to doctrinal unanimity on a matter! So what do we see in Acts 10–11? Simply this: eating together at a common table is basic not only to the baptized but to all humans who fear God (10: 2). Eating together cannot just be seen as celebrating the bonds of the ecumenical – in both senses of the term – community of the risen Christ, but is part of the process by which this community is bought into being in the actual historical situations in which disciples find themselves. Moreover, the welcome to outsiders to come and share our table is part of the invitation that the disciples of The Way offer to all human beings who seek God and act uprightly. And, as part of our Christian memory, this story does not claim ‘apostolic authority’ but as Luke relates it with visions and voices: it claims to be part of a specific revelation of God to the church so that it could fulfil its mission of witnessing out to the end of the earth (Acts 1: 8 and 13: 47). In sum, it serves as a call to churches that do not practice inter-Christian commensality to ask themselves whether they need to rethink in the light of the gospel – that is, the revealed good news which we proclaim – what is the fuller significance of Christian sharing at table. ⁴¹