31st Sunday

31st Sunday

Eucharist celebrated together

Mal. 1.14-2.2, 8-10; 1 Thess. 2.7-9, 13; Mt. 23,1-12.

It's been said that the biblical message is explosive. If you read Paul with a kind of a fresh eye, a sense of novelty, of enormous power, almost leaps off the page. He says all kinds of extraordinary things: we are a new creation; the past is in the process of dying now, something drastically new is happening in the world. And some people have said that the history of the Church has been in large part, a process of defusing the explosion. We see it going on now. We see it even in the New Testament. Paul will say in his letter to the Galatians... that in Christ there is no longer this kind of social hierarchy. Male, female. Jew, Gentile. Slave, free. And then we have, 50 maybe 60 years later, the pastoral letter....let a woman learn in silence with full submission.

What's going on there? Clearly there is a kind of domestication of this radically new suggestion that all the social divisions, which organize society were to be dismantled. A since some of these Christian women were apparently putting this suggestion into practise, were seen as dangerous. And so, smart money says "Cool it ladies." And that's pretty much why we get all these injunctions to modify, if not to tame and defuse, the gospel.

It's very hard to sustain the radical novelty of Jesus for all kinds of reasons. That's why it's interesting to hear this prophetic voice from the Hebrew scripture, Malachi, and then to hear it echoed in the remarks of Jesus, both of them people, lay people. They stood outside the religious bureaucracy. And the target of their criticism was evidently the priesthood. You've corrupted the covenant of Levi. Why? Because you've shown partiality in your instruction. Turned away from "the way".

Then, here's this lay person, Jesus, making all these statements in this passage from Matthew about nobody being seen, in any way, as better than anybody else.

Regarding this passage from Matthew. A little history is important here. I think we can get to it by looking at the word "church", "ecclesia" in Greek. It is, as I said a couple of weeks ago, a translation of the Hebrew "qahal" which means "the assembly". God creates this people by assembling them. And "ecclesia" means simply to be called out and the caller of course is God. Those who are called constitute this assembly.

The word has a fascinating history in the New Testament. Paul uses it regularly, talking about house churches which would have consisted of 15 - 20 people who met in someone’s living room in Rome or Corinth. But as I said, the only Gospel that uses the very term "ecclesia" is the gospel of Matthew. What I'm getting at is this. Paul's understanding of "ecclesia" is sharply different from Matthew's. That's what we need to look at today.

If you know the Pauline literature at all, several things are clear. Paul, until the day he died, expected the imminent return of Jesus. (We don't know how old he was when he was killed. Perhaps in 65, 66....before the year 70 in any case.) So, how were these communities that he founded to operate? Again, we have ample, ample indication from the Pauline letters as to how he saw them put together. They were "organised" charismatically. The Greek word "charisma" simply means "gift". And so Paul says God is going to endow people with specific gifts. The gift is not a kind of stable thing. It's the ability to act in a certain way always on behalf of the community. The gifts are always the gifts of the spirit and the spirit is the enlivening power of God. The point of all these gifts is always for the sake of the community. So that we see, even in that famous passage of first Corinthians where he talks about speaking with the tongues of men and of angels, that was to be done out of love, for the community. Otherwise it was useless.

What was going on in the Corinthian church, of course, was that people were saying - well, I have this gift of the spirit and this clearly makes me better than those people who don't have this particular gift. The letters of Paul is replete with his idea of the church as the body of Christ in which all members function for the sake of the other. Anyone particular function supplemented, complemented the other. Some are prophets, some interpreters of tongues, some apostles, some administrators. All these gifts were absolutely for the sake of the whole which was the body of Christ, or the Church as Paul understood it. And that's crucial.

Alright. The gospel of Matthew was probably written 20 years, maybe longer, after Paul's death. What had intervened? Jerusalem had been destroyed by the armies of Rome. And this Jesus movement was still seen as a Jewish sect. Furthermore it dawned on people, especially on the people for whom the gospel of Matthew was written, that Jesus was not going to return right away and therefore they were going to need an organizational style or principle other than that of the Pauline churches, the charismatic one. There began an institutionalization of this movement. So we had people having specific offices. Later on, in the pastoral letters, we even see job descriptions, so much has this been solidified.

Whatever happens whenever you get organization? There's always the danger of the abuse of power. Always. It comes with the territory. And so Matthew reacts to this development: - Listen, you are all students. There's only one instructor. You're not going to be called teacher, instructor, father. In other words, the carryover from the Pauline church is an absolutely egalitarian model for the church. Matthew was moved to add all these corrections because people were beginning to throw their weight around as this group became institutionalized, bureaucratized.

Okay. But Matthew’s fundamental understanding was the same as Paul’s. We're all even Christians, in the great phrase of Caryl Houselander, We're all "even Christians".

And then, of course, comes Constantine. Two hundred years later with the Edict of Milan, Christianity is legitimated. Christianity is made the official religion of the Empire. And not surprisingly, Christianity takes on the political structure of the Roman Empire. So there is now talk about dioceses, which is basically a Roman political term for a certain jurisdictional territory. We talk about the Bishop of Rome as "Pontificex Maximus" - the great bridge builder. This, of course, was an imperial title, i.e. given to the Emperor. The colouration of the Constantinian church began to resemble, very much, the colouration of the Roman empire which was a starkly hierarchical world. In other words, that the bureaucrats, the priests, the elders, the bishops, began to constitute a caste in the church. Indeed, I grew up in a Roman church that was built on the caste system.

Let me go back. Why was the Bishop of Rome considered primary? Well, there are certainly indices, in the gospels of Matthew and John particularly. But the famous line from one of the

fathers, was that the reason that the Bishop of Rome could take primacy was "i propter majorem caritatem". That's the Latin phrase that was used. "Because of the greater love flowing from the episcopal see of Rome." And that was the Roman claim to primacy. And so we have this terrible, conflict. We have Roman political structures, yet we have the residue of Paul's own understanding and Jesus' own understanding of the Christian community. It is absolutely clear to me that Jesus had no intention to erect a caste system in the church. Absolutely none. And yet this is clearly where we are, even though we all are all brothers and sisters.

Let me offer another term that may be helpful here. It is the word "authority". The Oxford English Dictionary offers as its first definition of the word authority: The power to enforce obedience. No surprise here. That's absolutely familiar. Somebody who is the boss can enforce his or her will, have other people do, willy-nilly, what the boss wants. Clearly a Roman model... an imperial model of the understanding of authority. If you look at the Latin word from which authority comes, the fundamental root is the verb "augere". What does it mean? To help to grow. Now this sounds suspiciously like the authority of Jesus. Sounds suspiciously like the authority of John XXIII. What was his authority? Was he in fact authoritative in the world? Far more than any pope of my memory. I grew up under the autocrat Pius XII. We now have John Paul II. Clearly he is making his power felt in any number of ways. In other words, the caste system again operates. But what of this notion of authority as that which makes to grow? How do you make to grow? Not by having the power to enforce your will but by nourishing - by giving people room and space. and looking at them in their humanity rather than as functions. That's the only notion of authority that is Christian. That's why the Gospel of Matthew is saying that among the pagans those in authority make their power felt but among you it must be otherwise. Among you the first must be the servant of all. We have in the gospel of John Jesus exercising authority by washing the feet of the disciples.

What are the implications of all this? I'd like to suggest two very important ones. They're interconnected. One is that the only real church of Jesus Christ is a repentant church, as the Pope is now reminding us with the coming of the new millennium, that the only real church of Jesus Christ is a repentant church.

Now what does that mean? It means first of all that it's a free zone. It's where people can get together and don't have to pretend that they're better than they really are. (And that's what repentance means.) This explosive novelty, which is part of the whole Jesus business, is supposed to be the characteristic of the Christian church. It is the experiential base of the Christian life is people feeling liberated. Clearly there are few things so liberating in life as to be able to peacefully admit one's own weakness and fallibility to another. And that's what repentance means first of all. But, there are further implications. It means that we are not a triumphalist church. We are not a self-congratulatory church.

But it's not only the repentant church, it's also a Eucharistic church. And essentially so. The word Eucharist embodies the word "charis" from which we get the word "charisma", from which we get the word "gift". And Eucharist simply means "thanksgiving". Therefore, the only real church is a group of people who can get together in gratitude with each other, for each other. That alone is the real church. It is essentially a Eucharistic church. The only way we can be brought to gratitude is precisely by being together to remember this man who says - this is my life for you. My body and blood. Everything that I am.

Now this is very difficult for us to grasp because religion has become highly privatized. Richard Rohr, for instance, the great spiritual director has pointed out that Christianity has for many people in many ways simply has become another form of therapy, of self-improvement. The evidence for this I think is undeniable and obvious. But one can understand why this is so because, if the church is not a repentant church, then I am necessarily thrust back on my own resources. Self-improvement and auto-therapy or me and my guru become absolutely essential. But please note – this is at the cost of community.

The Church is Eucharistic in the sense that it is Mass centred. It is a group of people who are ready to listen to the memory of that man and to be grateful. Therefore all the accoutrements of the Liturgy – music or the absence of it, vestments, "ambience" – are to be judged by the extent to which they express and expedite that depth in people from which gratitude comes. Like the Church itself, the furnishings of the Mass are not there for their own sake.

We are either Christian together, or we are not Christian. We are Christians as repentant community, as celebrating our own sinfulness freely, openly with each other in the memory of this man. The heart of the reality is gratitude. Eucharist celebrated together. That and only that makes us Christian. It is difficult to devise Liturgical forms that express and convey this gratitude. Even more difficult to bring them off. It is certain however, that sheer energy, excitement, sense-stimulation enthusiasm won’t do it; can’t do it. They may even make inaccessible the depths from which gratitude comes.

To repent. To tell the truth to ourselves. To let us tell the truth about ourselves to each other. That's why we're here. And nothing else justifies this assembly. Nothing.

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