Together As One

A survey of  1,300 young people  in  Metro Manila  aged  13 to 19  revealed that only  36 percent believe that in Holy Communion  we receive the body of Christ. Eleven percent  believes that the sacred host is  just a  symbol of Christ, while an overwhelming  49 percent  said that the host is simply a reminder of Christ’s self-giving love.

Of the  84 percent  who  professed to be Catholic, 82 percent knew  that  going to Mass on Sundays and Holydays of obligation is a  serious obligation. Yet, only  13 percent of the young Catholics said that they  went to Mass every  Sunday.

What is the reason  for the problems the  Church is facing in a Catholic country like ours? Some people say, “If you want to have a  meaningful encounter with God, do not look for it in the Roman Catholic Church. There you have the  laws and rules  that  imprison, structures that suffocate, all sorts of  intermediaries  between you and God: dogmas,  priests, Mary, and Sacraments…”

Today’s readings suggest something quite different.

First, suppose we could travel back to  Jerusalem after Jesus had risen  from the dead. Jesus has returned to his Father  and has  sent his Spirit upon the disciples. And now  the first Christians begin to live the Christ-life, the life of  oneness with the risen Lord. How do they live it? Does each one build his own little log cabin in the desert, each undisturbed by doctrine, each a private worshiper on a kneeler made for one?

Listen to the account in the  Acts of the Apostles  (2:42): “They devoted themselves to (they persisted in) the Apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, the breaking of the bread and prayers.”   Four aspects to their experience of God:

The Apostles’ teaching. The apostles’ teaching was  everything Jesus has taught. All he had said to them, all that the Holy Spirit brought back to their memory. For the first Christians,  to listen to the Apostles’ teaching was  to listen to Jesus’ teaching: “He who hears you hears me” (Luke 10:16). To hear the word was  to experience God.

The fellowship. What did  fellowship  mean? Luke tells us a bit later; “Now the company of those who believe were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things, which he possessed was his own, but they had “everything in common”  (Acts  4:32).

There was an amazing  solidarity  in the Jerusalem community. Luke calls them simply “believers,” because their  oneness  had a  material component, which was  expressed in the day-to-day life  of the community; “There was not a needy person among them. For as many as were possessors of lands  or  houses  sold them, and  brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet. And distribution was made to each as any had need.”

They shared who they were,  and  they shared what they had. Not only because  “the other” was human. More importantly, because  “the other” was Christ.

The breaking of bread. Not just a happy meal together among the friends of Jesus to recall the table fellowship Jesus had enjoyed with them. Still more significant was  the Supper of the Lord. I mean what St. Paul writes: “I received from the Lord what I delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread… broke it and said, ‘This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”  (1Cor 11:23-24)

“This bread which we break,”  Paul asked, “is it not a communion in  the body of Christ?” (1Cor  10:16). Communion in the body of Christ! Here was  new  and  incomparable experience. Communion was  not a theological thesis. To break bread was  to  “taste,” to  encounter  the  God-man. Here they  experienced God’s presence, as the disciples had at Emmaus: “They recognized him in the breaking of the bread.” (Lk 24:31, 35)

The prayers. Not just prayers in closed privacy. Over and above that,  the first Christians prayed together. They recalled the promise of Jesus: “Where two or three are gathered in my name,there am I in the midst of them.” To pray was not only to acknowledge sovereign Majesty, to pray was to enter the presence of God. To pray was  to experience divine presence. As a  simple old laborer put it long ago, “I say nothing to Him, and He says nothing to me; but I look at Him, and He looks at me.”

What the  Jerusalem Christians  are telling us is that  where they experienced God, where they discovered Christ; not  by a  me-and-Jesus spirituality, a personal relationship indeed, but through a community, with  a community, in  a community.  The  word of God, solidarity  in soul and possessions, fellowship at their own table and the Lord’s, awareness of God’s presence everywhere  – personal contact,  yes, but  through the mystical body of Christ and his Eucharistic body.

This brings us to  doubting Thomas, an interesting guy with some hang-ups. Why wasn’t he around when Jesus first appeared to the eleven? What made him so skeptical and hard to please when trusted friends like Peter, James and John told him, “We have seen the Lord?”  We do not know.

What we do know is that the doubter  uttered  the most perfect affirmation of Christ’s nature in all the Gospels: “My Lord and my God,” an  act of faith  for  Thomas as for us, a  gift impossible without God’s grace. Such faith is  an experience  - personal, of course – a one-to-one experience of God. But notice  –  the experience took place in the midst of a community  of disciples, who had journeyed to Jerusalem with Jesus, had shared his Supper, had watched him die from near and afar.

What do I hear the early Church and the Apostles Thomas saying to you and me? They stress two profound realities: 1.)  Christian life  and community, and 2.) Christian faith are a religious experience.

Christian Life is life in community. We begin with the fact: Here we are, baptized, like the Jerusalem Christians, into a community, a people.  “You are the body of Christ,”  St. Paul proclaims, “and individual members of it.” This is  not an imposition.  It is a  privilege, a  grace.

Why am I not Misuari, Qaddafi, or  Bin Laden?  I do not know. For some reason known to God alone,  I am loved. Not because I am  naturally lovable, irresistible even to the Holy Trinity,  but simply because God wants it so. As  Teresa of Avila  put it,  “God loves everybody, but He has His friends.”

But  life  in the  community  demands  love in community  – in the very  four areas the Jerusalem Christians prized: a)  Far from despising doctrine,  we ought to cherish it. for the Apostles’ teaching is simply  Jesus shaping a community mind, shaping it to his own mind; b) Far from frowning on fellowship  as somehow Protestant, we should see it as  inescapably Christian, for fellowship is a  sharing of who we are, a sharing of  what we have that lighten the burden of those who experience so much of  Christ’s crucifixion, so little of  his resurrection; c) Far from making the table of the Lord a private party, in the breaking of the bread we too must be  broken,  to be  given, as Jesus was given, to a broken world; d) Far from imprisoning our prayer  within our closet or even our heart, we must  plunge into the  prayers of the community, the  people’s prayerfulness, ceaseless  awareness of God here present in our gathering together, here present in the  preached word, here present in the  broken bread.

A second profound reality:  Christian faith is a  religious experience. It will no longer apologize for our faith, to appeal to it uncomfortably, when a clever debater has you in a corner. Our faith is a  thrilling thing, not because it furnishes us a pocket of answers but because  it makes for experience of the living God.

Our faith is like Thomas’ faith, is  a living faith when  “My Lord and my God” is the  flaming response of our whole being to the  risen Jesus  present before us, around us, within us. When it means,  “I love you, Lord, with every fiber of my flesh, every stirring of my spirit.”

If our  faith is alive, we will  touch the risen Christ as Jerusalem’s first Christians touched him. In his  word  and in our  fellowship, in  his flesh  and in the  Our Father  we  raise to God hand in hand –if our faith is alive.