God Show No Partiality - Reflections on Acts 10: 32-43, Year C, Easter
by John C. Holbert on Friday, February 28, 2025
This remarkable passage from the story of Acts is one of the central implications of the biblical story of Jesus’ ministry: in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Messiah clearly “God shows no partiality” (NRSV), or the phrase in Acts 10:34 may also be translated more literally “God is no respecter of appearances.” The more literal reading derives from several texts from the LXX, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. In 2 Kings 3:14, the prophet Elisha states that he has no preference either for king Mesha of Moab, king Jehoram of Israel, or king Jehoshaphat of Judah; the NRSV translates the difficult Hebrew, “I would give you neither a look nor a glance,” implying he will not make a choice between them; in other words, he shows no preference. Also, in Lev.19:15, in a passage concerning appropriate moral behaviors, we are warned, “You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great.” In other words, like God, we must not show partiality or judge on the basis of appearances. Most directly, Deut.10:17 states clearly, “YHWH your God is Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribes.” Acts 10:34 bases Peter’s growing conviction that, in fact, God does not judge anyone by appearances on these biblical foundations.
Peter has already begun to realize that the Judaism in which he has been raised is in serious need of reevaluation and correction in the light of the work of Jesus Messiah. Earlier in this same chapter, he has experienced an alteration of his views concerning what he, as a Jew, may eat. In a divine trance on a roof in Joppa, Peter sees a huge blanket filled with all sorts of animals descending from the sky, and is commanded by a voice to eat any and all of them (Acts 10:13). After responding that he would not do so, saying, “I have never eaten anything profane or unclean,” the voice replies that he is not to call anything God has made unclean (Acts 10:15). Paul makes precisely the same claim, using the same words in Rom. 2:11. There will be, the apostle says, “glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek (i.e. Gentiles). For God shows no partiality” (is no respecter of appearances).
The radicality of these scenes cannot be overstated, nor can their implications be denied. In a time when religious institutions are riven with deep disagreements concerning all manner of theological and moral questions, both Paul and Peter, at the very heart of our Bible, realize that the divisions they have been raised with and have practiced must now be reconsidered and eventually discarded. The early rejection of the Gentiles from the realm of God’s new world in Christ must itself be rejected; the story of Peter’s engagement with the Gentile Cornelius and his household and his acceptance of them into the community of the early church are powerful evidences of God’s fuller embrace of those formerly thought to be excluded. And Peter’s willingness to eat what his Jewish tradition had always and plainly said was unclean, profane, suggests with clarity that “God is no respecter of appearances.”
Those of you who have been reading my essays for many years, either now under the umbrella of the Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence, or under other past locations on the internet, know well that I am an ordained United Methodist member of the clergy. And I hope you also know that for nearly all of my ministry, I have railed against those members of my denomination who have rejected faithful Christian people from membership in the community of clergy and, in some cases, denied membership in the denomination at all, given their sexual orientation or gender identity. Indeed, one of the reasons for the recent split of the denomination had to do with the conviction among those who called for such rejections that the Bible does not accept such same-sex relationships and thus cannot allow any such people full acceptance as United Methodists. I have long said they were mistaken, and among the passages of the Bible I often used to make my claims were Acts 10 and Romans 2. I remain thoroughly mystified that anyone who takes the Bible seriously, after reading Acts 10, could ever exclude anyone from full acceptance in the church, including from its clergy. I am, of course, thrilled that the UM denomination finally expunged from its Book of Discipline those hateful words rejecting some persons from our church, but I am also sad that so many of those who had sought division in the church have now succeeded. My own brother is now a member of a Methodist church that chose to leave the UM orbit.
On this glorious day of the celebration of resurrection, the certainty that life, in the end, conquers death, that death is not the final word, let us also celebrate the certainty that God is no respecter of appearances, that there is, in the end, nothing in the way we dress, the way we live, the ones we love that can separate us from the vast and unbreakable love of God in Messiah Jesus our Lord. Happy Easter!