11 But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. 12 For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. 13 And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy.
Peter yielded to pressure - from a pressure-group in Jerusalem. One feels sorry for him. It is not easy to live with pressure groups of various kinds around one, especially if they are pulling one in different directions. A man could become a piece of flotsam on a changing tide if he gave way to all the different pressures. The pressure group at Jerusalem had a lot to answer for, in what they did to Peter. But the fact remains that he did not act according to conviction: he acted to 'keep the peace' - which is what Paul refused to do, when he was at Jerusalem, even for a moment. There are different kinds of compromise that are deadly dangerous to the spiritual life. There is the intellectual compromise concerning which James Denney writes so trenchantly: 'How many are there whose minds have been secretly loosened from what once seemed convictions, who have been intellectually estranged from the gospel, who would create a sensation if they stood up in the midst of Christian worship and revealed their whole thoughts about God and Christ, about Church and Bible, about prayer and sacraments?' There is the spiritual compromise which draws men away from their first love, and makes things like the spiritual discipline of earlier days, and indeed the spiritual practice of earlier days, matters of embarrassment, now that 'other things' have crowded out the earlier priorities. There is the moral compromise by which standards and patterns of behaviour are acquiesced in, accepted and even taken for granted which, even a few years ago, would have been simply unthinkable. This is the kind of challenge that this solemn incident presents to us all.