Series start/ links HERE.

How this is and isn’t important HERE.

4. History’s biggest excommunication?

b) A Story

This is an attempt to put the point of the previous post, along with some thoughts on Acts 2:39, into a story.

Asaph bustled his way to the front of the queue, the six-month old Jeremiah under his arm. His thoughts were largely taken up with the strangeness of what he was about to do. He’d never been an impulsive man, but the Galilean’s words had struck him to the core.

“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

He had found himself one of the throng who cried out, almost in unison, a variety of things that all amounted to the same question burning in their chests:

“What shall we do?”

The momentary silence that followed was ended by the Galilean’s strangely familiar reply. An old answer. And yet new all at the same time.

“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”

It was in one sense just the familiar language of the synagogue, covenant words, almost a quote from the Torah, though somehow fresh and new, like someone had dusted them off and blown away the cobwebs. As soon as he heard them it was abundantly obvious to Asaph that he must obey the Galilean’s instruction, and immediately. He had picked up Jeremiah and joined with what seemed like thousands of others who were flooding to where the rag-tag band of preachers had been standing.

Eventually he found his way to the Galilean, who by now was soaked through from having baptised several hundred already. Asaph was quickly added to that number as, without him even asking, one of the women standing nearby held Jeremiah for him. Then he stood still to let the water drip off him, feeling like he’d done something momentous and wanting to savour the moment. But he was suddenly aware that the Galilean was speaking to him, his accent so thick that Asaph could hardly understand what was being said.

“What did you say?” he said and tried to dry his water-logged ears.

The Galilean, slower this time, though now slightly agitated, said “You can go now, there are others in the queue behind you waiting. Come to the temple tomorrow morning and we can all talk then.”

“But, my son, Jeremiah,” Asaph said with a smile, assuming that Peter had simply forgotten.

“What? Your son? Oh, I see, no… well, things work a little differently now. That’s all Old Israel, we’re new Israel, get it?” Peter gestured impatiently, but Asaph really didn’t.

“How so? Why?”

“We’ll have him in when he’s old enough to understand and profess for himself.”

“But you said, ‘to you and your children’?”

“Yeah, but, not like that, not like this anyway,” said the great apostle. ‘Look, that’s just the way things are now, I haven’t got time to explain.’

Asaph was confused but to be honest this northerner slightly scared him, so he took the small scroll of hieroglyphics they were handing out to all the freshly baptised and made for home. “Perhaps he accidentally spoke from the Torah in a rhetorical flourish,” thought Asaph as he walked along, a bone-dry Jeremiah in his arms. But other thoughts now entered his mind, most of all, how to explain to Mrs Asaph that he’d joined a new adult-only synagogue. That would not go down well.

But the funny thing was, she didn’t mind at all. In fact, in all the decades that followed, neither Asaph, nor his wife, nor any of the other thousands upon thousands of Jewish converts really seemed to mind that much that now the Messiah had come their children were strangers from the covenant of promise where before they’d been its heirs.