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The gap that exists Feast of Christ the King |
Today, the feast of Christ the King, we are confronted with this extraordinary passage from the Gospel of Matthew: the judgement scene. Why is this passage so crucial? Because it is illuminative of the whole meaning of the Christian enterprise. What it also does, is to give content to Paul’s remarkable image of God being all in all. God is all in all when we human beings are, before anything else, aware of the suffering of our co-human beings. An extraordinary image. If you notice, there is no orthodoxy test, there is no measure of anything except the need of our co-human beings and our capacity to respond to that, before and above everything.
This fills out a claim made a theologian friend of mine. And I think she's dead right when she says that Christianity, before it is anything....before it is a system of beliefs, before it is a moral code, before it's a way of behaving or a pattern of administration .... Christianity, at absolute base, is a vision. Christianity is first of all a vision of human possibility. Moreover I think it's reasonable to say that the vision is not self-generated. Now the Buddha would say that life is suffering but where does that vision take people? The vision of human possibility that Jesus offers is different. It is to galvanize us into some kind of action.
If we go to the Hebrew scriptures, out of which all of this comes of course, where are the visionaries? They are the prophets. Those extraordinary men and women who believed that God had illumined them so that they could see the world as God saw it. So we get, over and over in all the prophets, this visionary quality of religion. Before it is thought, before it is behaviour, it is first of all vision. In other words, what Christianity involves is a conversion of one's imagination because it is precisely in one's imagination that visions find a home. And the vision, of course, is that of these totally porous human beings who leak into each other's lives.
An important footnote. Why does Christianity not work? It doesn't of course. We didn't need Karl Marx to point that out or Freidrich Nietzsche. Why does it not work? I think there are lots of reasons why it doesn't work. But I'd like to suggest, in terms of this visionary quality, why it does not work. I think that we human beings in the course of organizing this vision, instrumentalizing (to use that barbaric term) this vision, functionalizing this vision in terms of structure, codes of behaviour or dogmatic systems... bury the vision. I think we do it for a variety of reasons. Some innocent, some not so innocent. But, certainly, this much is clear. When we do instrumentalize the vision of Jesus, in terms of parish organizations, church hierarchy, or the code of canon law, the thing that they all have in common is that they are all in our control. We can take parish surveys, we can count heads, we can number and categorize sins. We can manage all that. We make the vision manageable. Why? Because we human beings are so insecure it seems to me that we need to do that to make sure that we are all alright.
One of the striking things about the recent agreement, 500 years late, signed between the Lutheran Church and the Roman Church, is the reassertion that God saves us, by God's self, and not by dint of our effort. Salvation is by faith, which of course, is absolutely fundamental to Jewish thought. God is the Saviour. We do not have to do anything to please God. Yet, we are so incredulous about that, that we think we have to keep measuring up. Am I alright? Am I doing it alright? Is this dogmatic formulation going to be alright? I think that's one of the reasons that the vision becomes blurred. Reduced often enough to something that is the very opposite of what it was intended to be in the first place. This is very important for us to know on the Feast of Christ the King.
What next happens if we seriously entertain this vision of human existence, is that what grows out of that, essentially, is a sensibility. In other words, as I put it last week quoting Comblin, the Belgian theologian: as soon as the poor become visible to me then I've heard the gospel. So, to be a Christian is to be sensitive to the reality of those people. Voiceless. Invisible. They constitute the majority of the people on this planet at this moment as a matter of fact.
Again, please note, there are no laws, there are no orders, there is no rigorous expectation in here. It is all very fragile, which means that we have enormous responsibility in the face of all this. But then, once one begins to seriously think about the kind of sensibility that would enable me to go through life not thinking about bottom lines, other than the needs of my co-human beings. If that were to become the true bottom line of my life, or is to be, if I believe in the vision, then what immediately comes into consciousness is the gap that exists between this vision and my sensibility, and the alternate vision of reality as presented by Jesus out of his own Jewish heritage. Maybe that's a further reason why we figure that we have to manage this: because we cannot stand that tension, that gap
All of which gives rise to the last and most salient aspect of the Feast of Christ the King. This feast engenders, if it engenders anything authentic, it is hope. Not a content-less hope but a hope in this God who does envision us. Hope in the voices of prophets like Jesus, Isaiah and Paul.
Let me break off for just a minute to quote something that one of the greatest Pauline scholars writing today said. The Pauline churches, as Paul thought, operated by reason of the gifts of God; charisms. The two top ones for Paul, although he said they were all necessary, were prophecy and teaching. The prophet is the visionary. The prophet is the one who constantly revised this vision. James Dounn says, Paul ranked prophecy above teaching, which is the second great gift. Teaching preserves continuity but prophecy gives life. With teaching a community will not die, but without prophecy it will not live. So, it is hope in those prophetic voices of the Hebrew scripture, of the New Testament, of our own time. These give content to our hope precisely because they absolutely and indisputably demonstrate the gap between our reality and the vision to which we say we subscribe. That gives us the real grounds for hope.
And finally having that vision, we have all kinds of interesting consequences. We have criteria for judging everything. Everything in the world. In our ourselves, first of all, in our church, in every institution which can abet, distort or obstruct this vision. That, I put it to you, is also a major part of hope
One theologian, who like most academics, uses language very badly, described hope in this way. Hope is the positive non-acceptance of the unfulfilled present. I do not suggest you set that to music. But what she was getting at, and I wish she were more poet and more prophet, is precisely to be able to live in the gap. To know we are only safe when we live in that gap between that vision and that sensibility and how we really operate. Anything short of this is not Christian. So, we can co-opt a statement made by no less redoubtable an intellectual of this century than Albert Einstein who said that imagination is more important than knowledge. He said that as a scientist. For us would be Christians, it has enormous significance. Christ is King in so far as Christ determines the shape of our imagination and engenders the sense of the gap and draws us to himself and to each other.
