Cornelius, Peter, and the Work of the Spirit

One of the enduring challenges of ministry with young people is the frequency of the ‘basic’ questions. 

Maybe that sounds counterintuitive. But my experience has been that, with kids, it’s almost always easier to answer complicated questions than straightforward ones. In other words, it’s much easier to detail our church’s teaching on the Eucharist than it is to answer something like, “If God is all-powerful, then why do bad things happen?” But that’s the gift that our young people bring to us—they constantly re-center us around the most fundamental questions of our faith, demonstrating that the greatest wisdom often comes from the places you least expect it. 

We see the same sort of principle at play in the story of Cornelius the centurion, which we find in Acts chapter 10. Scripture describes Cornelius, a military commander in the Roman army, as “a devout man who feared God, who gave alms generously and prayed constantly.” Through a series of visions and divine interventions, Cornelius meets the apostle Peter and, along with his household, is baptized into the new Christian movement. Today Cornelius is often called the first Christian among the Gentiles.

Cornelius is an unexpected figure for scripture to lift up as a paragon of faithfulness. As a Roman soldier, Cornelius is a representative of the empire, the occupying force that had oppressed the Jewish community of the New Testament period. And yet it is through the faithfulness of this man Cornelius that the church comes to accept Gentiles as full members of the Christian community.

On its face, this story appears to be about several things: food laws, Peter’s epiphany, Cornelius’s faithfulness, and the expansion of the community to include Gentiles as full members of the nascent Christian church. And the story is about those things, in varying degrees. But my sense is that it is primarily about the work of the Holy Spirit. Here we see the Spirit calling to Cornelius, teaching Peter, and most essentially, drawing the two of them together in the formation of a new Christian community. In different ways, both Cornelius and Peter were faced with the most basic question in the Christian life: will you follow the Spirit’s leading even when you can’t see the road ahead? Will you entrust yourself to God for the journey toward unknown vistas? 

The Spirit was stirring in both Cornelius and Peter, prodding them gently toward something new. Through the Spirit, God was inviting both of them, one a Jew and the other a Gentile, to embrace a wider vision of what the new Christian community could be. It would have been easy to get tripped up along the way with all of the questions they faced about law, custom, and religious identity. These issues were complicated and important. But they faded away when the more fundamental one emerged: will you respond to God’s leading through the Holy Spirit?

This is a familiar theme in scripture; God often invites people to begin journeys without indicating just how things will end up. This means that teaching our kids to discern the leading of the Holy Spirit is one of the most important tasks of Christian education. This is difficult to sketch in terms of program planning, which is sort of the point; as Jesus says in the book of John, “The spirit blows where it will.”

So how then to teach this crucial concept? Any meaningful attempt will have to start not with information but with the cultivation of spiritual practice. We must always be on the lookout for God’s invitation to us, in prayer and through the words and deeds of others. The visions that lead to the unlikely meeting between Cornelius and Peter both start with prayer and are followed by the courage to take a step in faith, to follow where they perceive the Spirit to be moving. It’s a simple concept, but one which we spend a lifetime learning. To paraphrase the anonymous old quote, “The journey from the head to the heart is the longest one there is.” 

So what might it mean in your context? How are you on the lookout for the Spirit’s work, in your life or your church?