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     One of the most difficult social and theological challenges faced by the early Christian community was the widescale Jewish rejection of Jesus and his identity as the promised messiah.  Added to this challenge, however, was the additional challenge that the message was being successfully preached to the Gentiles, people who had little or no knowledge of Judaism.  How could it be that Gentiles could be attracted to the one thing that Jews had hoped for and that the Jews were now rejecting.  St. Paul did not cease being a Jew but he seemed to be a contradiction in terms to his fellow Jews.  His anguish over this can be found in his Letter to the Romans, especially Ch. 11.  The tension between those Jews who did accept the identity of Jesus and continued to live like Jews and those who came to Christianity from non-Jewish backgrounds was finally resolved by compromise about observances.  Paul's rejection of those observances was part of what seemed treason to his fellow Jews.

     Even in our own day, there are those who cannot accept the possibility that Jesus died and rose for ALL persons.  It is this message that Paul preached.  Not everyone would believe in an explicit way and some would reject the preaching (cf. Acts. 17:32-34), but some did accept it.  The mixed bag of the responses, however, does not change the reality and the message.  Christ has died for all people.  What is important for us today, especially in a secular culture that is becoming more and more indifferent to religious belief - like the Athenians in some ways (Acts 17) - is that we live and practice our faith consistently, even when, as now, our leaders and principal preachers seem to have faltered in serious ways.  Their moral failures do not change the message that we are called by our baptism to preach.  God has mercy on all and Jesus is the sign of that mercy.  The Spirit enables us to preach it to anyone who will listen.  AMEN