Bound in Love

The readings today give us an opportunity to think about the Church: to think about what it is, how it works, and what it does. The Church is the mystical body of Christ, as St. Paul explains to the community in Corinth.

From the Creed we profess as Mass, we know the Church is the communion of saints. Some of those saints are already in Heaven, while some are on their way after death, and some are still here on Earth fighting the temptations of the Devil.

All of us enter the Church through baptism. In baptism, three wonderful things happen. We are freed from Original Sin, which means our lives do not have to be separate from God. We are also cleansed of any actual sins, so we are restored to right relationship with Him. We are commissioned as priest, prophet, and king, so we have a role to play in God’s family.

God’s family is organized into different functions with different duties so that the family can grow. St. Paul uses the imagery of a body because there are many parts to the body and they have different functions. Those differences in function do not translate to any difference in importance. St. Paul notes that some parts are considered more or less presentable, but that’s not the same thing as being important.

In the same way that the hand is not more important than the foot, no role in the Church is intrinsically more important than another role. A deacon or a priest is not more important than a layperson and vice versa. A rich person is not more important than a poor person, and vice versa. An immigrant is not more important than a native, and vice versa. God does not care how tall we are or how heavy we are; he wants us to love and respect each other without preference or partiality.

The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council described the Church as a sacrament. It is a sign to the world of a reality greater than the world. It should be the means of grace seeping through the world even if the world does not admit it needs God’s grace. The universal call – the call shared by the entire Church – is to bring holiness to our fallen world.

The Church is the organized family of God. In an organized way, we all contribute to that universal mission of holiness. This has always been the case for God’s people. Our Old Testament reading comes from the period when the Israelites were returning to Jerusalem after the long Babylonian Exile. Already we see different roles and responsibilities. Ezra is a priest. He reads from the book of the law and explains what it means. Priests were trained in those days just as they are now, so there was a specific role for the ministerial priest like Ezra back then just as there is for Fr. Neil today. The presence of ministerial priests does not in any way detract from the importance of our common priesthood received through our Baptism.

Within the church, we have different roles and responsibilities, but those roles are not the source of our dignity. Our dignity comes from being a human person and an adopted son or daughter of God through baptism in the life of Christ. Like the parts of a body, the parts of the mystical body of the church are inextricably connected. The hand is distinct from the foot in the human body, but they are part of the same body. You and I may never attend Mass in Rome, Italy, or even Rome, Georgia, but we are connected to both.

When the body is in danger, the hands and the feet are also in danger because they are part of the body. Likewise, threats to the church affect the entire church and all its members. Just because the threat seems to be remote or distant to our particular role, it is still a threat to the entire body.

Those threats could be external to the body or they could be internal, perhaps like a disease or an infection that is harming the body from within. We know from the words of Jesus Christ that his Church is protected from real error by the Holy Spirit, but it is always under attack from the forces of darkness. All of us have a responsibility to grow in understanding and knowledge so we can help defend and protect the Church from these internal and external threats. Here in the parish we offer many programs of faith formation to equip us all for the important role of defender of the faith.

Because we know Jesus founded the Church, and because we know the Holy Spirit protects the Church from serious error in serious matters, we can be confident that when we speak with the Church we speak rightly.

The church is the source of our authority, which we see in both the Old Testament reading and the gospel. The whole community gathers under the leadership of Ezra the priest to hear the word of God — the written Scriptures — and have them explained to them. It says, “Ezra read plainly from the book of the law of God, interpreting it so that all could understand what was read.” We are today doing the same sort of thing in this homily. But just as the parts of the body must remain connected to and coherent with the entirety of the body, any homily you hear preached from a pulpit needs to remain connected to and coherent with the body of the Church’s teachings.

The gospel today is a couple of verses from the very beginning of the gospel of Luke, and then we have the scene in the synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus proclaims his new role in the Church. Luke explains why he is writing his gospel. He is writing his gospel to have an orderly narrative of the events that have been handed down from the eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. That is the Apostles. Luke doesn’t pretend that he is somehow getting dictation from God. He admits that he is organizing in the written word the oral tradition that has already been handed down.

It is ironic that our Protestant friends who rely on the Bible alone – what is known as sola scriptura – have to read around the plain text of the Scripture in Luke’s gospel to avoid proving our teaching of sacred tradition and sacred scripture. From this passage and others in the New Testament, it is clear that Sacred Tradition precedes Sacred Scripture in time. That also makes common sense: one learns important lessons from a teacher and then decides to write it down. And Luke admits this as he opens his gospel.

The second vignette from Luke’s gospel is an example of how one’s role in the church might change. Here, in the synagogue at Capernaum, Jesus goes from regular layperson sitting in the pews to preacher and healer and ultimately priest-victim on the Cross at Calvary. There was a day in Fr. Neil’s life when he went from “Neil” to “Fr. Neil,” and his role in the church changed.

We should all be open to the possibility of different roles in the church. We who are parents of young men should pray to be open to letting our sons respond to the call of the Holy Spirit and enter seminary even if we had always envisioned them as lawyers or airplane pilots. As parents of young women, we should pray to be open to their call to religious life even if we really want grandchildren one day. As young men and young women, we should pray to be open to God’s call wherever it might lead, rather than announce our plan and demand his endorsement of that plan. Married men who think they might be called to be deacons should reach out to our pastor and be open to a new role in the Church.

We are all in this together. The Church relies on the principle of solidarity, that we share in a universal call. We are here to help each other. The Church relies on the principle of subsidiarity, that we will offer help when asked for it by someone who has gotten himself stuck. Returning to the analogy of the Church as body, the hand reaches down to scratch the foot when the foot asks for help for the itch that is bothering it. But until then, the hand does its own thing and lets the foot do foot things.

As members of Christ’s mystical body, our lives are a wonderful blend of taking care of our duties while always being in tune with the needs of others. God gave us gifts and he wants us to use them. God gave us eyes to see the gifts he has given to others, and he wants us to support them. God gave us ears to hear his voice, and he wants us to use them and respond to his call. Everything God gave us he gave us to support us in our universal mission of sharing the Life of Faith inside and outside the Church.

In the sacrament of the Eucharist, he gives us the grace to be a sacrament to the world. Let us receive his grace and then go out and share the good news as his Church.