In our rush to pray for the world, in evident opposition to the final teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ, these two sentences have been obscured by neglect .... which is why I repeat them so often.
Yes, I am familiar with the Beatitudes and in particular with the Dominical teaching,
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.... pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you,
that you may be sons of your Father in Heaven. (Mt 5:44-45) |
To sort through this apparent contradiction, let us focus on the second half of the previous sentence: in order to become sons of our Father in Heaven. As we have pondered many times in this religious house, the Beatitudes are the "Proverbs of Heaven." Anyone who seriously commits himself actually to live by them will either be forced to admit that it cannot be done or perseveres until the life they demand destroys him .... at least destroys his earthly person. Certainly in the West, Francis of Assisi is a prime example of the latter. He lived the Beatitudes boldly and exactly until they used him up, dying with the wounds of Christ etched upon his body at about age 33. The great example, of course, for all people in all places in every era is the Fool on the Hill, Who was obedient to the Proverbs of Heaven to the end. For He was and is the Son of our Father in Heaven. the Only-begotten Son of God.
Am I saying that we must commit ourselves to be destroyed by the world in order to become sons (or daughters) of God?
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So when Jesus heard these things, He said to him, "You still lack one thing.
Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." |
A nun of this Hermitage did precisely this. She walked away from all that she had: her home, her career as a Registered Nurse, all her possessions and just showed up one day in Haiti eventually becoming part of the Franciscan community there. Another sister at the Hermitage, also a member of that Franciscan community, did all of this at age eighteen committing to a life of intentional poverty, chastity, and obedience. Now in her mid-seventies, she perseveres in the life of the Kingdom, continuing to honor the religious vows she made so long ago. Both of their journeys have been ever upward and ensconced in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Today, the Hermitage rejoices to be under the omophorion of (no one less than) Metropolitan Hilarion, First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (Moscow Patriarchate).
Our ground of being as Christians is the Church. This is the "gathering" (the Greek word is εκκλεσια / ekklesia ) of those "whom You have given Me, for they are Yours. And all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine, and I am glorified in them." These are the ones for whom Jesus prays. And these are the ones in whom the Father and the Son are glorified, for glorifying God is the Church's vocation.
At the point of His Ascension to the Right Hand of the Father, the Lord provides us with something that is fitted for the broken world: not actual Crucifixion like that borne by the Son of God nor the intentional self-annihilation of a Francis of Assisi, but something fitted for the whole: His Catholic Church. The Greek is κατα `ολον / kata holon, "according to the whole." His Church will lead us away from the world urging us to fix our hearts upon the Proverbs of Heaven. His Church will guide us upward to His indefectable Kingdom, where the Beatitudes are the natural atmosphere of life. His Church will surround us with a cloud of witnesses trodding this sure and holy path. His Church will nourish us in mysteries and with palpable sacraments that protect us and strengthen us and help us to persevere, with their supernatural properties, attaining to Divine life: sonship or daughtership of our Father in Heaven.
At the point of His Ascension,
which we celebrated only three days ago,
He utters these last words,
pledging His prayers for the Church,
and for her alone:
"I do not pray for the world."
Today,
we honor the Church
and particularly
the first meeting of all the parts of the Body of Christ
in the persons of 318 Bishops
convened by
the Emperor Constantine
at the First Ecumenical Council,
one of the great feasts of the Church.
Let us go back and trace the path that led up to this moment. Jesus has gathered His disciples near foremost pagan religious shrines. As they sit facing the Lord, they see the imposing Grotto of Pan behind Him to the right and the enormous Temple to Augustus Caesar soaring up to the sky to the left. He asks them at this place of power (by the pagan estimate), "Who do you say that I Am?" Here is the question, the question that confronts all who meet Him: "Who then is this?" At His mastery over the winds and the sea,
| .... they feared exceedingly, and said to one another, "Who can this be?" (Mk 4:41) |
| .... all the city was shaken, saying, "Who is this?" (Mt 21:10) |
This is the always the question: Who then is this? Certainly, for everyone who claims to be Christian, this question lies at the heart of everything: of our faith and the question that defines the Church. The answer, offered by Andrew: "We have found the Christ!" (Jn 1:41) and by Simon-Peter: "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God" (Mt 16:16) form the foundation of all that we call the Kingdom of Heaven, Whose manifestation on Earth is the Church:
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On this rock, I will build my Church.
And the gates of Hell will not prevail against it. (Mt 16:18) |
The rock, of course, is not the person of Peter .... though the Apostle Cephas (Aramaic for "rock") is most certainly a living stone built into a spiritual temple as he affirms of himself (1 Peter 2:5). After all, only five verses later in Matthew 16, the Lord dismisses Peter as being more a stumbling block than a foundation stone:
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But He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me,
for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men." (Mt 16:23) |
And this is the point, for the rock of foundation that Jesus has in mind consists in "the things of God" and not "the things of men." This was the Master's statement in the first place:
| "..... flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father Who is in Heaven." (Mt 16:17) |
And what is revealed by the Father in Heaven? What is the great revelation to the world for all ages? His Son, Who founds the Church upon living stones, human stones, who, therefore, are unsteady, changeable, and in need of nurture and guidance, such as
"Know God!" is a Divine Command which Jesus issues again and again, which we explored just last week and heard in today's Gospel lesson.
Each of the five points with which we began — Believing, Understanding, Receiving, Embracing, Trusting — commits us to this course. And it is given to the Church to define these terms for us. A cloud of good witnesses has preceded us: the Twelve; the Seventy Apostles; and their disciples, the Early Church bishops. Theologians call this agreement among them the Patristic consensus, the agreement among all the Fathers. And this is what is meant by the fourth-century Gallic monk St Vincent of Lerins, when he wrote,
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Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken,
that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. (Commonitory) |
This is known as the Vincentian Canon, one of the great cornerstones of the Church. This consensus, being incommensurately holy and the sure bulwark of our salvation, has been understood from the beginning to be infallibly taught, expressed in the third century by St Cyprian of Carthage:
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Extra Ecclesiam, nulla salus.
Outside the Church there is no salvation. |
Observing today's feast, we celebrate this sure truth. Not an invention on the American frontier midst a feverish crowd in a tent that will disappear tomorrow, where instant results are the whole point. Not an outpouring of protest from a sixteenth-century merchant class wresting secular and religious control for itself. Not the bitter fruits of a maverick Patriarchate inebriated on newly acquired intellectual technology. But the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, taught by the Master, affirmed by many (and chosen) witnesses, protected by the martyred lives of the Apostles and saints, and transmitted with great care by bishops who understood (and understand) the sacred vocation of preserving the faith. Not .... "Let's try this. Let's try that. Maybe this will bring the people in." The sacred vocation of preserving the faith. The great examples of this vocation to preserve are, of course, the Ecumenical Councils.
The timeline for convening the First Ecumenical Council makes one's head spin:
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306
Roman armies in York (Britain) proclaim Constantine as Emperor
followed by his immediate declaration of religious toleration there 313 Constantine issues the Edict of Milan granting religious freedom in the Western Empire 323 Constantine extends religious toleration to all subjects of the Roman Empire 325 Constantine convokes the First Ecumenical Council of 318 Bishops |
The timeline is important, for its perspective reveals something far greater than specific heresies or the particular steps taken to amend or annul them. We something far greater: we see the first gathering of the One Church. She is called the Ecclesia, the "gathering." I do not slight the general crisis of Arianism, which, theologians tells us, was the reason for the Council of Nicaea. But no heresy, however great, could compare with history's first meeting of the Bishops of the Catholic Church — a name declared matter-of-factly in A. D. 110 by St Ignatius of Antioch (Letter to the Smyrnaeans), a disciple of St John the Theologian:
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`ε καθολικε εκκλεσια
the Catholic Church |
Soon, dissidents and their followers would assert that they are "the Catholic Church." As the Beloved Disciple wrote,
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They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us,
they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us. (1 Jn 2:19) |
Consequently, an additional, indispensable name became necessary: Orthodox, meaning "right belief" and, by extension, "right glorification" of God.
Over the centuries those who "went out from us" would include whole jurisdictions of the Church. The list of schismatics is brief but notable:
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431
the Assyrian Church
451 the Oriental Church 1054 the Roman Patriarchate re-branding itself the Roman Catholic Church 16th century a dissident group within the Roman Church defined by Protest (called Protestants) who rejected mystery, seeking the rationalism of their period, called "empiricism" |
The Church's vocation is to safeguard Truth. The horizon of white-hot change and intellectual innovation is the domain of science, not religion. In the material world, we rightly countenance all advancements in knowledge to be partial, fragmentary, and temporary. The duty of the scientist is to overturn the provisional truths of the past. In the fields of medicine and physics, to name but two, what we believed in the 1940s, represented as "scientific truth," had more in common with the ancients than then with scientific orthodoxies of the twenty-first century. Think about that .... this is nearly within the span of our lives.
These are "the things of men," which Jesus mentioned right after He uttered the words, "On this rock." The things of men are doomed to error and confusion, such that men proudly proclaim them in one century and then are mocked for believing such poppycock in the next.
By contrast, "The things of God" (that other phrase Jesus used when he set His rock) are unchanging. They have been revealed and delivered once and for all (Jude 16:13). They are Revelation from God. Their acceptance is a matter of Divine Command. To slight them in any way is to reject God. And as the Son of God says,
| ".... if you do not believe that I Am He, you will die in your sins." (Jn 8:24) |
To believe that He is God means that we must also believe and obey His teachings and commands. These are not optional. And foremost among His teachings is the Church He founded in A.D. 33. His Church will lead us to all else. Our claim to knowledge of God is made possible only by and through the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, guarded by the Apostles with their lives and faithfully taught by her bishops from the first century to the present day. Consider the logic of the great feasts: the Lord has departed (last Thursday). The general pouring out of the Holy Spirit has not yet occurred (next Sunday). We are alone and unsteady. It is the Church, commemorated today, which is our stronghold and our redoubt, our only sure remedy.
It will not do to strike out on our own after God. It will not do to follow ancient religious forms outside the Church or to languish in excommunicate or vagante phony churches. Our wonted consumerism will not do, shopping around, trying various offerings. Such conduct is an affront to Heaven. It were as if you were presented with a magnificent gift on a great occasion, looked it over, and said, "Well, I think I'm going to wander downtown and look through a few other shops." An affront to Heaven.
The Lord God has given His Church. She is changeless being founded in truth, not subject to innovation or the latest scientific advances. And she shall remain changeless till the end of the age, thanks to the stern and courageous bishops who protect her, vouchsafing for us a miracle: this ancient treasure, pristine and undisturbed in her faith and worship.
I say these bishops are "stern"? The day I was ordained a priest, I was told, "And you can be unordained rapidly." And I have been amazed (especially coming out of the Roman Communion) to see how many priests have been deposed for failing to live to the standard of the Church (none, I should add, for reasons to do with sexual misconduct). Priests deposed .... because they were not living up to the high rigor of the Orthodox priesthood. Thanks be to God!
Either we are in, or we are out. There is no part-way or neutral position. Lukewarm will not do (Rev 3:16).
As the Lord prepares to ascend, He bestows these last words:
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Now I am no longer in the world, but these are in the world,
and I come to You. Holy Father, keep through Your Name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are. (Jn 17:11) |
All are invited. All are welcome. Each one of us is a first-class citizen of this blessed country. No one has been left out. But we must choose to be among that One — the One Church indivisibly united to the One God. This is the true meaning of
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Ut Unum sint.
That they may all be One. |