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…â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
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.