Fifth Sunday of Easter, April 24, 2005

Today, I am going to d something I've never done in the thirty years we've been praying together.  I will be quoting a number of statements, which will act as a further pretext for what I want to say about this text.  Here is the first of these quotations:

“True preaching is the fulfillment of that Spirit of Pentecost through which the words of one person enlighten another, each feeling themselves personally called by the word of this sister or brother, and enabled to perceive the divine will in the human.”

This admirable serves as a rubric for all preaching.  So now to the readings.   I am going to take them in reverse order. 

First, another quotation: “The essence of Christianity is not an idea, not a system of thought, not a plan of action.  The essence of Christianity is a person: Jesus Christ Himself.   This can serve as a gloss on the Gospel.”

Note the absoluteness of the claim, whereby every human expression, manifestation is drastically relativised.  To be Christian is thus not fundamentally a matter of allegiance to an institution, to a set of laws, to formulations of belief, but to a person. 

This is a very useful explication of the text from John, which has Jesus saying, ""I am the Way, the Truth and the Light."

What I think and hope to demonstrate in these readings is that, in the Christian community, there is, at bottom, no hierarchical distinction between one person and another, because there is no distinction between each person's relation to Christ.  Obviously people are related differently to each other.  But if the essence of the Christian fact is this Person, and everyone's relation to that Person, and this is reflected in the other readings, then everyone can be equally related to Jesus, and not in some kind of better or worse, more or less fashion.  That is, it is the relationship itself which does not depend on office, or ordination, or consecration or anything outside itself.  It's just person to person.  (Here is clearly a radical equalizing of the status of every Christian.)  I am related to Jesus and, so to everyone else, who is related to Jesus.  We know this clearly from the Gospel of John, which bespoke an utterly democratic "structure."  There is not hierarchy in the Johannine Church: everyone was equally "born again," "from above," "in the light," everyone loved and was loved by God (as Jewish tradition had always insisted) equally. 

This is also reflected in the passage from the first letter of Peter, which says, "we are a royal priesthood, a holy nation."  Please note, this is a universal statement: Everyone is part of this royal priesthood.  There is clearly no priest/lay distinction here, at this state in the evolution of the Jesus movement, and every subsequent development, if it is to be authentically Christian, must build on the foundation of a universal priesthood.   Peter even says it twice: "we are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of His own."   Any further development of an understanding of priesthood, must be based of this foundational understanding.

Here it is important to recall the Judaism had only one, large experiment with hierarchy in its history.  This was during the period of the Monarchy. Solomon, David, and their successors.  The experiment was a total disaster, as the prophet Samuel had predicted, in that the absolute equality of every Jewish woman and man, was violated by the King's abuse of power, making his subjects the objects of his own desires and appetites.  The structure of the monarchy was totally contrary to the understanding of the God Who is always on the side of the oppressed, and Who had no favorites.  We see the fulfillment of this Jewish vision of human relations in the figure of Jesus.

In the first reading from the Book of Acts, we see how difficult it was to embody the radical equality of people which Jesus emphasized.  Early on into this Jewish reform movement which came to be called Christianity, came many non-Jews: the Gentiles.  As happens with all of us human beings, all the time, we feed and attend to those people who are familiar to us.   The Gentile members of the community were neglected, in the most basic way, by being deprived of food.    So a number of Gentiles were given the job of food distribution (the word "deacon" means servant) so that everyone would be fed.  But you'll notice, and this is my central theme, that all these men are not secondary figures to the apostles.  They merely have different jobs.  In any community, this differentiation of function is essential for the integrity of the group: not everybody does the same thing all the time.  The important thing to note is that there is no hierarchical arrangement either suggested or intimated here.

Now, another longer quotation.  "In the context of regeneration, of re-birth and baptism, the language of the Church tradition speaks not only of the Father and of the bothers and sisters, buy also of the Mother of the Church.  This is to remind us Christians that the true dispenser of the sacraments is the "Christus totus," the total Christ, caput et membra," head and members.  That is to say, Christ has taken the believers into himself.  They have become as it were, a part of Him. The Christian life-stream, the space of God that pursues and seeks out each person, penetrates the living faith and love of the Christian community.  And there, where the grace of God finds people, there also is a part of the stream in which Christ remains historically present.  The life and struggles of the Christian community have effectively cooperated.

The point here is that first of all, we are supposed to be, as the Second Vatican Council taught (retrieving this from the earliest tradition) the People of God-this is the foundational reality-- and not primarily, a hierarchical structure.  It is an attempt to reinvigorate the non-hierarchical "royal priesthood" which includes everybody. 

Now, anyone who saw the papal funeral or the papal election could not but be struck by the fact that this was an altogether hierarchical event.   I kept wondering what Jesus, if He would have walked into that setting, would have thought.  He probably would have been scratching his head, saying, "what in the world is going on here."  Let me insist that the Church exists in time and space, and that the Church has always taken on the coloration of the societies in which it has existed.  The society of the Jews was a non hierarchical society, and was markedly different because of this.  Again, God having no favorites was a constant theme of the Hebrew scripture.  The Roman Empire, within in which the Jews existed,  was on the other hand,  intensely  hierarchical. And the Jesus movement, as it moved more and more deeply into that environment, began to take on the institutional character of the Empire.  For example, the word, "pontiff," now attributed to the bishop of Rome, was the imperial title, and meant, “bridge-builder."    "Diocese," was a Roman political term.  In other words, the nascent Church took on the hierarchical shape of an intensely hierarchical world.  And this world perdures in business, politics, academia, etc., to this day.  However, the hierarchical structure is more evident, and more pervasive in the Roman Church than anywhere else on the planet.  The titles, the costumed, the etiquette all bespeak this fact.   

What the Council was trying to get back to is a view of community in which different people do different things, but in which no one can pull rank on anyone else.  The Gospel of Matthew puts it bluntly: among the pagans, the bosses make their power felt by throwing their weight around.  Among you, it must be different, because you are all equal.

One of the most heartening things I heard before the first papal Mass, was a comment made by Benedict XVI: "My governance will be to listen."  Please note, he didn't say, "my governance will be to give orders, and to check on everyone's obedience.  It will be to hear my fellow Christians.  This seems to be a clear acknowledgement of the fact that all of us in the Church are, first of all, and most importantly, co-Christians.  Yet, historically, things have developed in such a way that we have not taken co- responsibility for the Church.  Even more, the understanding that all of us, in our various situations, are to be co-responsible, was taken away from us.  This is surely true for me, and most likely for you, too.  (The Vatican ceremonies I mentioned a bit ago is a great example)  But the question is: what are we called to?

A final quotation:  "It is equally wrong to consider the Incarnation everything, the whole, the Incarnation of Jesus, the total quintessence, and therefore, the end, thus decreeing the Church to be the perfected kingdom promised by God.  It is wrong to consider that which in effect would be a denial of all her eschatological  future.  Her transformation into judgment and end, as well as an attempt, which is also wrong, to foist the Church off as spotless and unimpeachable in this present world.  Such action would be false.  For her divine mystery is a mystery administered by men, and these men who have not yet attained their goal, are the Church.

This is not a generally held view of the Church.  So we cannot say that the way things are with the church, is the way God wants them to be. 

By the way, all these quotations are taken from the writings of a German theologian named Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI.   We need to hear these words, coming as I think they do, out from the words of scripture.  We need to look again at how we understand our responsibility for the Church.  

September 11, 2006