The Wrong Sort of People (gasp!)

31 March 2026  Isaiah 49:1-6

Tuesday of Holy Week

“I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6)

The scandal of Jesus the Nazarene was very often the company he kept – tax collectors, women of casual virtue, Samaritans, and on occasion (gasp!) Gentiles. He excused his choice of seedy company, saying that the righteous have no need of mercy, but sinners (Matthew 9:12), which struck His critics as cavalier rationalization and led to calls for His arrest. Jesus replied with one of His most stinging rebukes: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit” (Matthew 21:43).

One of the questions we should be asking ourselves today is, “Where is the next Antioch?” Where is the next place that is going to be a lap ahead of everyone else and accomplish the feats of evangelization that the rest of the Church will have to race to catch up to?

It is a little ironic that one of the first scandals of the earliest Church was, once again, the whole matter of appeals to “the wrong sort of people.”

After the stoning of Stephen (Acts 7:54-8:1) and the persecution of Christians it caused, many believers scattered, some as far as Antioch in Syria, where they began to proclaim Jesus, and some of the people who were attracted to their preaching were (gasp!) Gentiles. So many Gentiles wound up believing the gospel that word got back to the apostles in Jerusalem, who promptly dispatched Barnabas to see what madness was going on up in Antioch. Barnabas saw that the faith of the Gentiles was the real thing, and made a decision that quite literally changed history. With breezy laconicism, we are told, “So, Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul; and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch” (Acts 13:25-26). Saul of Tarsus, of course, became Paul the Apostle, Antioch became headquarters for the Gentile mission, and the history of the world was changed forever. Antioch sent Paul and Barnabas on the first of three evangelistic journeys, and Paul never lived in the Holy Land again. The Jerusalem Church hustled to catch up to Antioch’s new mission, and never quite did. In time it faded into obscurity, and Christianity, led by Antioch, began its march across Asia Minor, across Europe, eventually across the Atlantic Ocean and every other ocean of the world.

The Church filled up with (gasp!) “the wrong sort of people.”

One of the questions we should be asking ourselves today is, “Where is the next Antioch?” Where is the next place that is going to be a lap ahead of everyone else and accomplish the feats of evangelization that the rest of the Church will have to race to catch up to? It might be a parish or a diocese, but just as likely it could be a school, or even a neighborhood – anyplace where there is a critical mass of believers who are evangelically motivated to find bold and novel ways to talk about Jesus, believers who are less concerned with “the wrong sort of people” and more concerned with (gasp!) being the right kind of witnesses. The future of the Church, unlike what we are very often told, is not children and youth, but new Christians. That has always been the future of the Church.

Antioch understood that. The next Antioch will, too.