The poet T.S. Eliot once said, “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
Today’s scriptures profoundly express that truth. Paul and Barnabas understood that. Jesus clearly understood that. The proof that the disciples finally came to understand that is the Book of Acts from which we have been reading and always read daily throughout the Easter season each year.
It is the definitive history of the acts of the apostles, acts that led them into danger day after day for the length of their days. Acts that got Paul stoned by the stirred up crowds or mobs, and left outside the city for dead, only to be later surrounded by the disciples upon which he got up and went right back into the face of danger.
Paul continued to risk going farther and farther, baptizing more and more, and returning again to Iconium and Antioch, the cities from which the Jewish leadership had come to stir up crowds against Paul and Barnabas.
Nothing seemed able to stop Paul from preaching and winning over many Gentiles to Christ, and sharing the Good News that was always better than the bad news. Paul was living proof that once overcome with love for the Christ and his word, one could always go farther than one could ever have imagined!
No doubt, the disciples clearly had received from the Christ himself the love and the peace that he had promised to give them. In Jesus’ own words, that peace was given them —
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.”
Then — and perhaps even now, 2,000 years later — little of that made clear sense; not until that peace of Christ was given, but also received.
And as Jesus was proclaiming his love for the Father and the Father’s love for himself, once again he was giving them and us the way, the truth, and the life.
Paul and Barnabas, the disciples, and the church of the Acts of the Apostles received that peace.
They received the Spirit — especially at Pentecost; but then again and again and again as they opened their hearts and their lives to the Christ who promised and delivered with the words —
“I am going away and I will come back to you.”
And it is still happening as he promised. All we have to do is to open, to ask, and to receive!
