2nd Sunday of Easter (27.04.14)
The Beginning Is Actually The End
This earth has known only one perfect community namely, that of Jesus and Mary. By ‘perfect community’ is understood a gathering of humans unblemished by personal sin. With this in mind, how are we to read the Acts of the Apostles’ extract for this 2nd Sunday of Easter (2: 42-47) traditionally called Low Sunday? The question can be extended to cover similar ‘idealised’ descriptions of early Jerusalem Christian life we find in chapters 1-5 of the Acts of the Apostles.
Writers sometimes employ a type of poetic licence, a technique of creating a word-picture intended to encourage their readers to believe that the goal, to which the author is committed, already exists when, in truth, it remains ‘under construction’. It’s called making ‘the beginning sound like the end’. Luke’s depiction, in this Sunday’s extract from Acts, carries the heading “The early Christian community”. A more accurate labelling might be, “This is what I have the hope of you, one day, becoming.”
Luke truly believes in the ideal community he depicts. He composed ‘The Acts of the Apostles’ about fifty years after Jesus’ death and Resurrection; long after most of the originating Jerusalem Christian community had either been martyred or dispersed. Luke correctly believes that God would not have set us an unachievable ideal. That over two thousand years later Christians live their faith in the ideal, though it remains ‘under construction’, exemplifies God’s grace enabling belief in Jesus of Nazareth.
If you contrast St. Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians – also composed some 50 years after Jesus’ death and Resurrection – you will find a very different picture of how that Christian community was behaving. Their progressive fragmentation as a community and from the ‘Christian ideal’ Paul had originally set before them caused Paul to write out of the personal anguish he felt for them. In 1 Corinthians, Paul is attempting to restore their focus. Paul wants them to discern their brothers and sisters in their Eucharistic community as being with them one body namely, The Body of Christ, more evident even than the elements of bread and wine! If I were to genuflect to the Blessed Sacrament and then trample on my brothers and sisters I am desecrating the Body of Christ.
A memory search will likely enable readers of age to recall the long list and categorisation of sins we were taught in school. There were mortal sins we were obliged to confess before we could return to the Communion rail. No mention was ever made, as I recall, of the sin of failing to recognise and accept the person next to me in church as the Body of Christ. Yet, the implication of St. Paul’s 1 Corinthians letter appears to put that sin at the top of his list! For him, such a failure is sufficiently serious to bar a person from the Lord’s Supper.
Among Scriptural scholars there is a belief that Luke, in the Acts extract, summarises an ideal of life in the early Christian community because Christians in the AD 80 period were having a problem recognising themselves, when gathered, as the Body of Christ.
We would be seriously deceiving ourselves were we to believe that this Sunday’s Acts of the Apostles extract represented our parish communities today. Moreover, Christendom’s major divisions – Orthodox v Latin etc. – show the world that the Lord’s intended communion of believers undoubtedly remains ‘under construction’.
Most of us will be familiar with the ‘Doubting Thomas’ part of the Gospel for this Sunday (John 29:19-31). Yet again, it’s a label that has passed into common usage though many will have no idea of its origin! How cruel and unloving it is to confine and condemn a person to one moment/episode in their life. Which of us likes being reminded of our past failures? ‘Doubting Thomas’ became ‘Believing Thomas’ through the Risen Christ but that seems to have escaped history’s attention.
John’s Gospel tells of a seven-day interval between Thomas’ declaration and Jesus’ second appearance. We have no knowledge of what may have transpired in those days. Wouldn’t that community-in-hiding, that still embryonic ‘body of Christ’, have prayed/interceded for their member in distress? Being a Baptised member of that Body of Christ that is the Church on earth calls for constant involvement. There is no place for spectators. St. Paul teaches that those who do not work (read: ‘intercessionary prayer and behaviour in word and deed’) should not eat (read: ‘be Eucharistic participants’).
Reflecting on the First Reading and Gospel of this Low Sunday, we see what we are called to become here on earth (Acts). The process of becoming is strewn with difficulties as instanced in the Gospel. Thankfully we are Sacramentally linked with brothers and sisters who willingly share our journey as do we, theirs.
It’s illuminative that each recent Pope, from John XXlll to Francis, has encouraged the new ‘communities’ within the Eucharistic Assembly that have grown since the Second Vatican Council.
Some are well known, such as Opus Dei, Spanish by foundation, but now worldwide. Perhaps less well recognised is The Community of Sant‘Egidio, an Italian foundation officially recognized by the Catholic Church. It has 50,000 members in more than 70 countries and lists as its main activities: prayer, witnessing to Jesus Christ, caring for the poor, ecumenism and dialogue with non-believers.
Another new growth within the Church is ‘Communion and Liberation’ founded in 1954 in Italy. ‘CL’ sets out to deepen member’s Christian formation enabling them to be co-workers within the Church’s mission to society. Pope Benedict declared that ‘CL’ offers a profound way of life living the Christian faith through spontaneity and freedom that permit new and prophetic, apostolic and missionary achievements.
Another Pope-endorsed development is The Neocatechumenal Way, founded in Madrid in 1964 by two Catholic laypeople, Kiko Argüello and Carmen Hernández, It is known colloquially as ‘The Way’ and is a community within the Catholic Church dedicated to the Christian formation of adults based on the catechumenate of the early Church preparing converts from paganism for baptism. ‘The Way’ also provides post-baptismal formation for adults who are already members of the Church, especially those whose post-Baptismal formation was either curtailed or non-existent. It runs 100 seminaries in various countries and is responsible for hundreds of families who have volunteered to become missionary units living in different cities around the World in small, parish-based communities of between 20-50 people. In 2007 there were around 40,000 such communities throughout the World, with an estimated million members.
These three examples, among others, demonstrate how, as some of the Religious Orders of yesteryear are disappearing, new ways for Catholics, single and married, to live as religious communities are appearing. These new communities don’t live in cloistered seclusion, as did the religious communities of yesteryear. They choose to be involved in the world and be neighbours to the most needy in the world, whatever their need. Today’s First Reading from Acts remains valid as a poetically licenced word-picture of our objective, still under construction. Today’s Gospel shows how there will always be difficulties but we should never give up on working to become the Eucharistic Body of Christ.