Are You Among “The Company of Jesus”?
The true inwardness of the Church is reflected, not in the Temple, which Christ said could be destroyed without loss, and not in the synagogue, which He seems to have abandoned with deliberate decision, but in the sending out of the Seventy.
The Church is intended as a concrete answer to the prayer that laborers be sent forth to the harvest. The Company of Jesus is not people streaming to a shrine; and it is not people making up an audience for a speaker; it is laborers engaged in the harvesting task of reaching their perplexed and seeking brethren with something so vital that, if it is received, it will change their lives.
– Elton Trueblood, The Company of the Committed
After an early-Acts healing in the Temple
While Peter and John were still talking to the people the priests, the captain of the Temple guard and the Sadducees moved towards them, thoroughly incensed that they should be teaching the people and should assure them that the resurrection of the dead had been proved through the rising of Jesus. So they arrested them and, since it was now evening, kept them in custody until the next day. Nevertheless, many of those who had heard what they said believed, and the number of men alone rose to about five thousand.
Next day the leading members of the council, the elders and scribes, met in Jerusalem with Annas the High Priest, Caiaphas, John, Alexander and the whole of the High Priest’s family. They had the apostles brought in to stand before them and they asked them formally, “By what power and in whose name have you done this thing?”
At this Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke to them, “Leaders of the people and elders, if we are being called in question today over the matter of a kindness done to a helpless man and as to how he was healed, it is high time that all of you and the whole people of Israel knew that it was done in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth! He is the one whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, and it is by his power that this man at our side stands in your presence perfectly well. He is the ‘stone which was rejected by you builders, which has become the chief cornerstone.’ In no one else can salvation be found. For in all the world no other name has been given to men but this, and it is by this name that we must be saved!”
When they saw the complete assurance of Peter and John, who were obviously uneducated and untrained men, they were staggered. They recognised them as men who had been with Jesus…
– Acts 4:1-13 (Phillips)
Artwork: “The Harvesters,” Léon Augustin Lhermitte
