Grace Presbyterian Church, Montclair, New Jersey

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Pastor's Pulse

by Paul Leggett, Pastor

Hypocrisy in the Body of Christ

June 2007

“And the other Jews joined Peter in this hypocrisy, so that even , Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.” – Galatians 2:13

If there is one criticism leveled at Christians more than any other it is the charge of hypocrisy.  No less a figure than Peter was guilty of it in Antioch.  This is not Peter, the uncertain fisherman who had denied Christ almost twenty years earlier.  This is the mature Peter, the great preacher on the Day of Pentecost, the leader of the church in Jerusalem.  This is the same Peter who had said defiantly to those who ordered that he stop preaching in the name of Jesus that, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29).  This is the Peter who said to the Gentile Cornelius that God shows no partiality and proceeded to welcome Cornelius into the household of faith.

In Antioch there were a number of Gentile Christians who did not observe the holiness code in the Law of Moses.  Peter had no difficulty eating with them.  Yet when a group of Jewish believers from Jerusalem came to visit, Peter drew back and would no longer eat with the Gentile Christians.  Other Jewish Christians including even Barnabas, the leader of the church in Antioch, followed his example.  Finally, Paul confronted Peter and the rest of them with their hypocrisy.  Paul tells them bluntly that their actions were inconsistent with the Gospel.

How did this happen?  How could someone of the stature of Peter fall into this hypocrisy?  We don’t have a specific answer beyond the fact that even Christians continue to struggle with sin in this life (I John 1:8).  The most likely explanation is that Peter was acting out of fear, not fear of the Gentile Christians in this case, but rather fear of his own reputation with the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem.  At the time of the conversion of Cornelius, Peter had been criticized about his eating with Gentiles (Acts 11:1-3).  This may well have been a vulnerable point with him.

The issue of bringing Gentiles into the early church was the most divisive event of the apostolic era.  It is grounded in a fundamental fear or suspicion of the “other.”  It is (sinful) human nature to feel threatened by people who are different from us.  A key theme of our just completed Missions Conference was the “global church.”  We are called to be multi-cultural and multi-ethnic (Rev. 7:9).  Failure to come to terms with this reality makes all of us hypocrites when we speak of the “Body of Christ.”  The body, of necessity, is made up of many different parts.  Yet it is one body (I Cor. 12:12-13).

Let us pray that the Lord keeps us from hypocrisy.