Some Christians act as though Christianity is merely a philosophy or spirituality. We read the Bible and we glean from Jesus instructions about how we should live. I once had a rabbi tell me that if it was absolutely proven that Moses never existed it would not chain his faith. His faith is rooted in a book of law, the Torah.
Christianity is different. Our faith in not rooted in a book but in a person, Jesus Christ. Our faith is rooted in historical events: his passion, death, and resurrection. We believe that through those event God opened the way to salvation for humanity. Take away those historical events there would be no Christian faith.
Because ours is an historical religion, we should not be ignorant of our history. Not just what is in the Bible but how the Holy Spirit has guided the Church since.
In our first reading today we hear the story of how the Spirit led to the rise of the Church in Antioch. How it became the cradle of Greek-speaking Christianity. It was at Antioch that Christianity as we now know it took shape under the guidance of St. Paul. It was in Antioch that the word Christian came into being.
Too many Christians think only of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem, the cities of Hebrew Christianity. But the vast majority of us are the children of Greek Christianity, Gentile Christianity. There is a reason our New Testament is not in Hebrew but Greek.
As we study the early history it is important to note that the Church did not spring up in a random fashion,with groups of people forming their own communities and choosing their leaders. The Spirit guided the formation of the Church, and like the story of creation itself there was order in the formation of the Church, so that the link to the Apostles was always maintained.
Sometimes we get the urge to take out our Bibles and jump straight from the Bible to the 21st Century, as if the Bible were only a book of moral principles. The Bible tells only the beginning of salvation history, the earthly life of Jesus and the beginnings of the Church. To be truly Christian is to hunger to see how the Holy Spirit has guided the ongoing formation of the Church, century by century.
