In a Nutshell
Christians need to know about the birth of the church and that is why we read the story of how Jesus continued to teach and work after the Holy Spirit was poured out.
Questions
Were the Apostles heroes?
Were there writers called by God to write accounts of Jesus' work but who decided, as in Jesus' parable, to bury their talent and leave it in the ground? We can say, with all reverence: God only knows. But what we do know is that God's Spirit has preserved the four gospels and the Book of Acts for us. The Holy Spirit was poured out upon those who believe and this prompts the preservation of this story, to do so truthfully and with gratitude so that new generations can hear and understand the good news. That has also been the motivation for Hints and Hunches. We have in these writings what we need to know for our salvation. We have enough to go on to understand the ministry of Jesus, and to hear His call: repent and believe! We read how He accomplished what His Father had sent Him to do and we ponder the earliest believers as they confronted, lived with and overcame problems they couldn't avoid. We live in their debt to a considerable degree. This is the story to be read with deep thankfulness.
What we have does not tell us all that went on. If the writers of the gospels had tried to do that they would never have told the story. A story teller has to select the important bits or else a story wouldn't get written. Think about this: we know very little about Jesus' boyhood and his teenage years. James and John, the sons of Zebedee, were Jesus' cousins, and of course they would have known what went on in Jesus' youth. But the Gospel writers don't seem very concerned about those facts. What they give us instead is an account of Jesus' work. What He did. What He said and taught. They tell us of the Office Bearer, the Son of Man, the One Promised, who Moses said would eventually come. They tell us about His disciples, the ones He called His friends. When He began telling His disciples the stupendous news about who He was, and what He had come to do, it was not as if He was saying that being a child and growing up and playing in the streets of Nazareth and Capernaum was not important. It is important. Important enough for God to have sent His Son to do those things too. Because of that we now have a deep sense of the true value of the things we do at every stage of our life: games, work, friendships, buying and selling, sitting out under the stars, fishing in the lake, sitting in the synagogue, whistling a tune … all these intensely human activities are what God Our Father has created us to do. The Angels gasped when the Son of God himself as a young boy played tiggy and marbles, learning to sing and play the tunes on his stringed instrument. These things were also part of the life of Peter and Paul and the other Apostles. They were called to be God's People, people who did people-things, fished, got married, worried when the wife's mother fell ill and so on and so on.
After He had returned to His Father's side, Jesus poured out His Spirit, and the Apostles knew for certain what their work was and set about doing it. At first it seems they saw their task as setting up a Jerusalem synagogue, but in time, as the movement developed, they still had to ensure that the work Jesus had given them to do would carry on to the ends of the earth. Interestingly, the preaching and teaching work of the Apostles was separate from the work of caring for the widows, but the work of the seven for the rest of their lives, as well as for Paul and the others, still involved making sure that the Good News about Jesus was not only about caring and sharing, but was caring and sharing, in which all disciples all were 'in it all together'. Luke tells us how the Holy Spirit guided the Apostles in Jerusalem to endorse and support the wonderful work He was doing, first through Paul and Barnabas and then through Paul, Silas and Timothy and no doubt there were other developments taking place, of which we have no written record, in which the Apostles and others were fulfilling their vocation in other ways too.
The Gospel went on to Rome eventually but as we have noted that was not because Rome was so important. That was because the Gospel was given to the Apostles to take to the ends of the earth. The seed had to be broadcast, and continued to be broadcast, in all directions. Empires come and go; even the American super-power of today will not endure for ever. But it is the Gospel of Jesus Christ which has to be heard in all the world by all the world's peoples. It is often difficult for the citizens of large empires to understand the gospel as God wants it to be grasped. Such citizens often have an inner conviction that Rome or Constantinople or Paris or London or Washington or Beijing must be the centre of God's Kingdom. But after the Holy Spirit was poured out, in Antioch as well as at Jerusalem, the Apostles knew they were on a continual learning curve, coming to understand that Jerusalem, the Holy City where Jesus was tried and crucified, where Jesus rose from the dead, near to where he had left His disciples to ascend to God's right hand, where the Holy Spirit was first poured out, even Jerusalem had to fit into God's timetable. God's timetable was not fitting in with Jerusalem. It was the other way around. The followers of Jesus found then and still find, sure encouragement as they look for that new and holy Jerusalem which comes down from God out of heaven (Rev 3:12, 21:10).
Friendship can be a very complicated thing. I suspect that the split between Paul and Barnabas was not because they had grown apart, but because they were very close. And in that situation, Mark was also a part of their close friendship and their understanding and misunderstanding of each other.
Paul tells us that he had to give Peter a very stern talking to at Antioch, when Peter acted insincerely by giving the visitors from Jerusalem special attention and keeping his distance from Gentile believers. This was another of those heated confrontations but Peter took the hint and afterwards he and Paul were able to work together very closely. Peter found some things that Paul wrote difficult to understand, but Peter also knew that Jesus had remained loyal even when Jesus showed he was not at all happy with what Peter had said. Besides, Peter had denied Jesus but did this stop Jesus from working with Peter? No. Jesus made Peter into a loving and caring leader among the Apostles in Jerusalem. But Jesus' friendship with His disciples was not something that depended on the disciples. Jesus worked with His disciples in every age and so we can say that He has made us His friends, friends of God Almighty, members of God's own family.