Guest Blog by Catherine Little
Read: Acts 13
How often do we think about people who are different?
As we read through Acts there are many occasions when Paul separates the believers into two groups – ‘Fellow Israelites and you Gentiles who worship God’ (Acts 13: 16). I wonder did the apostles think in terms of ‘Them and Us’ or was it enough that everyone was a believer.
Paul was saying this because there was a difference – some people were Jews, some were Gentiles. By Chapter 13 Paul has started on his Missionary Journeys, he is going to new places and bringing the story of Jesus to parts of the Roman Empire for the first time. Paul is breaking new ground.
When did you realise that there was a Them and an Us in Northern Ireland? For those of us who can remember before the Good Friday Agreement and paramilitary ceasefires the Them and Us created scenarios in our wee country that we don’t want to go back to. I grew up knowing that I was in a minority on the school bus, knowing that there was a difference, knowing there was Us and there was Them but I probably thought this was the same everywhere and not a particularly unique to Northern Ireland thing.
I studied Modern History and Politics for my degree and I took a module called Deeply Divided Societies where we looked at South Africa, Israel / Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, and Northern Ireland as our case studies. For the first time in my life I realised that I was living in a deeply divided society – perhaps that penny should have dropped much earlier!! Studying Politics at Queens definitely augmented feelings of Them and Us – my first Politics module was called ‘The Politics of the UK and Ireland’ – you can imagine how the seminar about the British Monarchy went!
In our world today we don’t have to watch the news for long before we hear of Them and Us stories whether that is Republican or Democrat, Armenian or Azerbaijani or maybe even the Haves and the Have Nots. Them and Us stories happen everywhere.
When Paul and Barnabas were preaching in Pisidian Antioch they shared that ‘everyone who believes is set free from every sin’ (Acts 13:39), they broke the Them and Us of Jew and Gentile – and because of that the Word of God spread, the church grew, and people literally all over the world have heard about Jesus.
It didn’t come without cost though – Paul and Barnabas were stoned, ill-treated and persecuted – the first Christians confronted with a new Them in opposition to Us. How then are we as Christians to live in a world where others might differ from, disagree, dismiss, demean, and in some parts of the world, persecute, us? Perhaps given the political events of the past week, in which in some quarters the battle for Presidential power was a battle between the liberal or secular Them, and the religious Us, we might do well to recall the response of Abraham Lincoln when asked how he might destroy his enemies. His fabled reply was simple:
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
Jesus bridged the divide between Jew and Gentile to reconcile us to God and one another. He crossed the chasm between God and humanity that we might become a friend of God. Might we extend the same love to Them that may not be Us?