I want us to look at this controversy. It is a controversy about racial reconciliation. This was indeed one of the presenting issues at stake in this dispute. But behind that, there is a deeper foundational cause. We must get to the root of that. A lot of our problem in dealing with racial reconciliation in our country today, and in our churches today, stems from our dealing only with the symptom and not with the cause. Galatians confronts us with the cause.

There are five parts to this story. You can think of this as a drama, if you wish, a play in five separate acts. So follow this drama as it unfolds.

Act I: The Background

The background has to do with the fact that Christianity was cradled within Judaism. Judaism was a religion beset by a double hatred: the world hated the Jews, and the Jews hated the world. If you do not believe that, just read any of the pagan authors that we think about when we think of the intelligentsia of the Roman Empire. Cicero, for example, spoke of Judaism as a barbarous superstition. Or Cassiodorus, the great historian, who said that the Jews are the “vilest of people.” There was anti-Semitism in the ancient world. There was prejudice against the Jews on the part of the Greeks and the Romans. This attitude was deep and it was lasting, and it showed itself in all kinds of ways.

But there was also a prejudice, or at least a simmering hostility, on the part of the Jewish people against the Gentile world. Many of the rabbis interpreted the covenant with Abraham as a social contract according to which any kind of contact with a Gentile was automatically a sin. You could not walk down the road with a Gentile without committing a sin. You certainly could not eat with a Gentile without committing a sin. If you were an observant Jew of the strictest kind, you were even forbidden to help a Gentile mother in childbirth for, said these rabbis, “You are only bringing another Gentile into the world.” The Gentiles, they said, had been created by God for only one purpose, and that was to be fuel for the flames of hell.

You know what a prejudice is? A prejudice is a judgment you make about somebody before you really know that person. We do this all the time in our culture. We form judgments about people without any real, deep, lasting knowledge of them. We stereotype them. This kind of stereotyping happened on both sides of the divide between Jews and Gentiles. There was mutual loathing and ridicule between Jews and Gentiles in the first century. That is part of the background of this conflict that we read about in Galatians 2.

To summarize this very briefly: it came to focus on three issues. One was days (when you worship), another was diet (what you eat), and the third was a distinctive form of body piercing (circumcision). Days — which days you should set aside for religious observance; how you observe the Sabbath; what you can do and cannot do on certain days. Diet — what kind of food you can or cannot eat; kosher/non-kosher; or even more important, and more to the point of Galatians 2 — with whom can you eat such food? Days, diet, and a distinctive form of body piercing, which was required as an essential rite of entrance into the covenant people of God. These were the three issues that separated Jews and Gentiles in this early Christian community.

Jesus had already broken through some of these barriers. We all know Luke 15, right? It is a wonderful chapter that contains within it some of the most beautiful stories Jesus ever told: the three parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. But how does it begin? Luke 15:1, “Now the tax-collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus but the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered saying, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”