Mission to Israel, Peter to Rome, And Jesus’ Speedy Return?
March 2009 (revised July 2010)
Mt.10,5: Do not make your way to gentile territory, and do not enter any
Samaritan town; go instead to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.
Mt. 24,34; In truth I tell you, before this generation has passed away, all
these things will have taken place.
Mt.24,36: But as for that day and hour, nobody knows it, neither the angels
of heaven, nor the Son, no one but the Father alone.
Gal.2,9: And when they acknowledged the grace that had been given to me, then
James and Cephas and John, who were the ones recognized as pillars offered
their right hands to Barnabas and to me as a sign of partnership: we were to go to the
gentiles and they to the circumcised.
Romans 1,15: I have an obligation to Greeks, as well as barbarians, to the educated as
well as the ignorant, and hence the eagerness on my part to preach the gospel to you in
Rome too.
I have wrestled with the issue of why and how Peter went to Rome (no one disputes that he did). We suppose, with hindsight, he did so to pastor the universal church and gentiles there. But how could this be after he and the rest of the ordinary course apostles were told specifically by Christ to only go to Jews in Israel? It is more likely he went there with the intention to evangelize fellow Jews and take care of faithful Jews of the diaspora (1Pt.1,1), more in keeping- sort of- with Mt.10,5. But Paul was clearly more called there than Peter! And yet, and still, Rome became the place out of which issued the great treatise brilliantly uniting gentile and Jew into one gospel people (1Pt.5,13).
But I don’t want to jump too far ahead. The apostolic mission to the Jews in Israel likely also corresponds with the statement by Jesus that he would not tarry in coming back, presumably because the fire of Pentecost would help the apostles spread his gospel so quickly that all Israel would accept or reject the gospel in their lifetimes.
To these questions we are required to add the Jerusalem agreement per Galatians 2,9 (above, and Acts 15), and the fact that Acts 28,22ff depicts Paul’s arrival in Rome (to spread the gospel to gentiles- verse 28) as the culmination of his life and the Book of Acts, and the introduction of the gospel there in Rome.
Acts 28,28 also epitomizes the apparent agreement between Peter and Paul: “You must realize, then that this salvation of God has been sent to the gentiles, and they will listen to it.” Pagans were Paul’s lot (but see also Acts 8,14 where Peter is praying that water baptized Samaritans get the Holy Ghost not long after the first Pentecost).
Interestingly, Peter is not primarily remembered by history for his more probable Jewish mission than his eventual combined mission in Rome. He is in fact most specifically remembered for his constitutional treatise about how non Jews by their faith and God’s Spirit became part of "a chosen race, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people to be a personal possession to sing the praises of God who called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were a non-people and now you are the People of God; once you were outside his pity; now you have received pity.” (1Pt.2,9-10)
Here we have arguably the most radical and majestic universal theology of the entire Christian message by Peter regarding folks to whom he was not sent!
What happened? Well Jesus didn’t come back on the timetable he stated (Mt.10,34). The Father is the only one who knows the day and hour (v. 35). Apparently the Father decided to give the fig tree (10,32), that is Israel, more time to bud, perhaps because the initial and sustained anti Nazarene persecution in Israel was so strong that the ordinary course apostles led by Peter didn’t have the chance to adequately spread the gospel to all the towns of Israel, before they got run out of town after James was killed (in 62 AD?).
Whatever the motive of God’s tarrying, and one day is as a thousand years per 2Pt.3,8, Peter was not there in Rome (sent or not) to bring some of the faith to the empire as we moderns surmise, to establish Christendom, or any vague idea of “Christianizing” the empire (which is, as far as empires go, an impossibility).
Instead, God’s mission in Rome was one of protecting the base of Jewish believers and to call non Jewish folks out of the morals and religion of empire and into the fulfilled faith of Israel: 1Pt.4,3: “You spent quite long enough in the past living the sort of life that gentiles choose to live, behaving in a debauched way, giving way to your passions, drinking to excess, having wild parties and drunken orgies and sacrilegiously worshipping false gods.”
By the gospel being spread in Rome these pagan gentiles were constituted as part of God’s new faith Temple-people (1Pt.2,5) which will one day include the saved of Israel, after they see and hear the gospel better the second time (Rev.11,2).
So what can we conclude about the Matthew 10,5 charge to the ordinary course apostles to stay in Israel, but Peter going to Rome, and Jesus’ delayed return. Well, they are likely connected.
Thus, two thousand years of history, and Acts 28 (Paul's clear mandate to Rome) and the present Spirit of God, and the unfinished biblical promises of geographically reuniting (Jeremiah 16,15ff.) and evangelizing (Rev. 11) Israel suggest:
1. The gospel didn’t get preached in Israel to God’s satisfaction and according to Jesus' mandate, and thus God showed mercy to his fig tree, his turtledove who he holds incredibly dear, thus the tarrying (Acts 9.31ff does suggest that the apostles worked in churches in Judea, Galilee and Samaria, but Acts is largely silent about how thorough the mission inside Israel was);
2. Peter and the others left their mission charge of Israel, Peter for Rome and others elsewhere, to take care of primarily Jewish Christians, and those gentiles who were willing to join the universal Christian community that was, at first, primarily Jewish;
3. God used both Peter’s and Paul’s mission service in Rome to call gentile folks out of the paganism of the empire and into the fulfilled universal faith-Temple of Israel.
4. While 1Peter was likely written in Rome (1Pt.5,13), the letter adresses it's reader-hearers as "elect sojourners" or "aliens in the dispersion" (1Pt.1,1), that is, in a distinctly Jewish geographical term. This argues that Jerusalem, or Zion (not Rome), was to always remain in the mind of all the faithful (Acts 15) the center of God's universal and final church consisting of both faithful gentiles and Jews (Isaiah 66,18ff; Rev. 19,17ff, Revelation 20-22).