Body Of Christ

Peace be to you. After having reviewed the life of our blessed Lord, and also his revelation of himself as the Son of God, and also his bond to the Father and to the Holy Spirit, we now come to the subject of the Church. What do you think of when you first hear the word Church? An institution? An organization? A kind of an administrative body? Well, you are to be very much excused if you think of it that way because it's partly our own fault. It is the way we have too often presented the Church. Now we will talk about the Church in other words, namely in terms of the people of God and as the mystical body of Christ. As we look at history as revealed in the Bible, not as the inspired word of God as yet, but as an historical record, we find that it is God that is always in search of man. It is not man in search of God. Man does seek God, but not with the same intensity with which God seeks man. Just think of how much the thought of man and the love of man is in the mind and heart of God. What is the first reflex thought that we find in sacred scripture of God? Not the first description of him created in the world, but the first thought that he has about himself and within himself. You would almost guess that, well, his first thought would be about his life and his truth and his love, and yet that is not the first thought in scripture. Open Genesis and you will find it. God's first thought about himself is, let us make man. Think of it as if God could not exist without man. God does not need man to complete himself, to fulfill a need, but he needs man as a kind of a gift, that is to say, he must have someone to whom he can show his love. Therefore, the first monologue that we touch in sacred scripture is a monologue of God thinking about man. What are the first dialogues in scripture? The first question in scripture is God saying to man, Adam, where art thou? Man, why are you hiding? Why do you run from me? And the next dialogue is about the neighbor. God says to Cain, where is thy brother, Abel? God is immersed in the thought of man. Here we find the first two laws, really, of God, love of God and love of neighbor in the two questions, man, where art thou, and where is thy brother? Now this was at the beginning of humanity, and we find, therefore, that humanity receives a call from God to intimate communion with himself. God will not let man go, but how does he deal with humanity when humanity begins to multiply? In this way, out of all of the peoples of the world, he chooses one people who are to be what he calls his people. And this group, this corporation, this special people, are to be the means of bringing salvation to everyone else in the world. Now who were his people? His people were the people of Israel. And he called them first through Abraham, then he governed them through Moses, he ruled them through the judges and the kings, he threatened, he pleaded, he coaxed, he warned, he loved through the prophets. And over and over in the Old Testament we find that God, who loves humanity, deals with them through this particular group, and in his own words God says in the book of Exodus, You shall be my peculiar possession above all people, for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a priestly kingdom, a holy nation. And again God speaks and says, You shall be my people, and I shall be your God. And through the centuries these facts stand out. God has a special name for his people. He calls them in Hebrew a Kahal. We will often use that word. It means God's elect, his chosen ones, Israel. The word is used about 200 times in the Old Testament. Later on when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek, that word Kahal was translated by Ecclesia. Ecclesian Greek means church. We get the word ecclesiastical from it. Hence whenever you hear the word Kahal, for people of God, you may think of it in Greek as Ecclesia, or in English as church. That's the first point. Secondly, God always dealt with his people through one man whom he appointed as head and as representative. Abraham at one time, Isaac another, Jacob, Moses, king, and prophets. Thirdly, because Israel was his people, he made a treaty with them, a pact, a covenant, and agreement. This involved mutual obligations. The Hebrew word for covenant is Berith. You've often heard that word. It appears 275 times in the scripture. And Berith means that they owed something to God, and God in his turn would bless them. And as he said, above all the nations of the earth they would be blessed. Abraham was therefore to be his witness that God had placed them in the world, that the plan that he had for the salvation of all mankind would be effected through them. And finally, you heard this when we spoke about all of the prophecies concerning our blessed Lord, and finally that the fulfillment would come the day that Christ himself would appear. This would be the perfection of all of the prophets. This is why the people of God were chosen, to be the vehicle, to be the seed out of which redemption would come to the world. And then finally one day, when the fullness of time came, Christ did appear. And when he appeared, there was fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, or rather Ezekiel it was, who said, I myself will seek my sheep, and I will visit them. So now God appears in the form of human nature, takes upon himself the form of a man. One day, a beautiful woman, a virgin, brought a child to an old man, who was in the temple of Jerusalem. The old man's name was Simeon. He had often said a prayer, a prayer that many Jews were saying in those days, because they knew that the time was near for the coming of the Messiah. We already mentioned that Herod, who was not a Jew but an Edomite, was not surprised when the wise man came. He said he would bring gifts, but the gift that he promised to bring was the sword. Now there are some flowers that open only in the evening, Simeon the old man was one of those flowers. And imagine the ecstasy of this old man when he embraced this child, and his first words were, now I'm ready to die. This is the end. This is all I've lived for. And he speaks to the mother, and he says, now notice how he speaks of Israel and the Gentiles. Remember that we said that the people of God were to be a light to all the nations of the world? Now Simeon looks backwards and forwards. He looks backwards to the people of God, of which he was a priest, and he says, this is the glory of thy people Israel, this pain. Then he looks forward. This is the light which shall give revelation to the Gentiles. In other words, he saw in this babe, the maker of a new covenant, founder of a new cahal, he also saw in him a sign to be contradicted by the very people to whom he came to bring salvation. So that this Christ who was born was not, as you see, just someone who came by surprise. He's related to all of the people of God through the centuries. And if you pick up the Gospels and read the two genealogies of our blessed Lord, you will find that in one instance the genealogy of our blessed Lord goes back to Abraham, and another genealogy goes back to Adam. What does this mean? It means that this new head of the cahal, this expected of the nations, this God-made man, this Christ, is related to the people of God who are to be the instrument of the salvation of the world. When in sacred scripture you come to a hearing about our blessed Lord founding a church, or a cahal, or a people of God, you must not think that this is an innovation. Everything that our Lord is saying is related to this people of God in the Old Testament. And see how he sustains that relationship. First of all, he chooses twelve apostles. It is very likely that they were even related to the twelve tribes in some way. Now to those twelve tribes, or rather those twelve apostles representative of twelve tribes, he chose one as his representative. We will find out his name later. Looking back on the old law, he also said, I came not to destroy it, but to fulfill it. So he gathers these new people around himself in order to renovate and revivify Israel, to make a new Israel. And if the old Israel would reject him, he would not eventually reject Israel. The prophet Hosea in the Old Testament and Paul in the New Testament says that we of the new cahal, we the new people of God, are only a branch that is grafted on to the tree. We are not the root. Israel is the root. As Saint Paul foretells the day when the root will be glorified. In other words, it will surpass the Gentiles in glory when Israel returns. When our Lord does come to use the word cahal, he calls it my cahal. I will found my church, my people. The bond that Christ establishes with this new cahal is not a bond of law. It's a bond of love. And the very best moment for establishing this bond was of course where his twelve sat about him in love. And just as Moses often sprinkled blood upon the people as a sign of covenant, so he said he will make a new covenant, a new pact, a new testament. And there will not be the sprinkling of the blood of goats and bullocks and sheep. But he gave his own blood and said, this is the blood of the new covenant, the new testament, the new pact. This is the bond that will unite all of my people together. Now do you see that the church is not an institution? Maybe you've often said I do not want an institution standing between God and me. Well that's right. After all, you have a right to communication with God. But the church is not that kind of an institution standing between you and God. Israel was not between the world and God. Think of the church in somewhat the fashion of a body. Do you ever say, for example as you listen to me, I do not want your lips and your eyes and your hands and so forth standing between me and you. After all, how can I communicate anything to you except by something visible and tangible and carnal? Anything visible that you see about me or will ever see about me is nothing but a sign of an invisible soul. The carnal is the token of the spiritual. So when our blessed Lord came to this earth and took upon himself a human body, he would not say I do not want this body of Christ standing between me and my love of Christ. That's the only way of the incarnation, namely to communicate the divine through the human. The human nature of our blessed Lord, this body of his, was the instrument of his divinity. When therefore our blessed Lord came as priest and as prophet and as king, everything he did was done through the power and the means of the human nature. If you heard our blessed Lord speak on the shores of Galilee, you would not say, oh, it's only a human tongue that is speaking. If he said to you, I am the truth, would you say, how do I know God is speaking to me? That's why he became man. If he said to you, I forgive your sins, would you say, all I see is a lifted hand and a movement of lips? No, his body was the means by which he made himself applicable to us. And therefore the best way to understand that the church is not just an institution is to understand it somewhat in the fashion of the body of Christ. And that's the way that St. Paul understood the church. And that's the way we have it in sacred scripture. Our blessed Lord all through the Gospels is saying that he's going to establish a new body, a new God, new people of God. After all, when people are united for a given purpose, they are a body. Now, our Lord did not use the word body precisely because his own physical body was before everyone. He used the word kingdom because that was a word that the Jews could understand. But when St. Paul was talking to the pagans, he had to use a word which was more understandable by them, namely the body. But our Lord communicated exactly the same idea. He said that the new people that he would communicate and unite with himself would be related to him as branches and vines. He said, you are the branches. I am the vines. And the truth that he had, he said he would give to them. My truth I give to you. My power I give you. And also he communicated the power to forgive sins. So our blessed Lord said that he would develop and form a new body which would be very small at first like a mustard seed and then grow and spread throughout the entire world. But what was the nucleus of this body? Well, we've already hinted at that. The nucleus, the raw material of this new body was the apostles. Now just as my own human body, for example, is made up of millions and millions of cells and yet it is one because vivified by one soul governed by an invisible mind presided over by a visible head So all who later on will be incorporated into this new body of Christ will be one because vivified by one soul, the Holy Spirit governed by an invisible mind, Christ in heaven and presided over by a visible head namely the one whom Christ chose at the beginning to bear the keys of this kingdom. Therefore this body of Christ is to be the prolongation of his incarnation. Our Lord was to grow and expand very much like a cell. We sometimes think that a church is formed by all of us coming together and saying, oh let's get together and form a church just like we form a tennis club. That's not the way the body of Christ was formed. People of God were not formed that particular way. God's power was in the midst of his people. Even your human body when it began to be was not formed that particular way. It was formed from cells of life and those cells expanded outward. So this body of Christ doesn't grow like a house grows by the addition of brick to brick and door to door and wall to wall. It grows like a cell. First there is this divine life that came to this earth namely God in man. It starts with the humanity of Christ, this body of his. Now he said he's going to form this new body. It will not be a moral body or a political body so he has to give it a new name and the name that has been given to it through the centuries is mystical to indicate that the unity that binds it together does not come from man. It comes from his spirit, from himself. That was why there had to be a Pentecost to put a soul into this body as we will see a little later on. Now these twelve apostles that our Lord gathered to himself were very much like the chemicals in the laboratory. They were very individualistic. They were very much like, as I say, the hydrogen and phosphate and sulfur in a laboratory. In fact we have in the laboratory 100% of all the chemicals that enter into the constitution of a baby. Why can we not make a baby? Because we lack that vivifying, unifying power which is a soul. And so the apostles were disparate, disconnected, disjointed. They could not form this body of Christ. They could be formed only by Christ sending his spirit into them. And as through the physical body of our Lord it was God who taught, it was God who governed, it was God who sanctified. So through this new body of Christ, his church, his new cahal, his new people of God, the new Israel, he will teach, he will govern, he will sanctify. This is the church. You see it's a long way from an institution. Sometimes I pick up the Acts of the Apostles and read the story of the conversion of St. Paul. Now St. Paul was a member of the old cahal, old Israel. And he therefore would not accept the revelation of the new cahal and he started to persecute the church. The time is well within ten years after the ascension of our blessed Lord into heaven. That's very important to remember. Now the church is beginning to spread through the entire Roman Empire. And Paul decides to go into Syria and to persecute the church there in Damascus. By this time the early members of the church were very much disturbed by this learned cahal, for that was his Jewish name. I'm sure that many members of the church in those days must have prayed to the good Lord that he would send a good coronary thrombosis to Paul. And they must have said, Dear Lord, send us someone to answer Saul. He heard their prayers. He sent someone to answer Saul. He sent Paul. That was his Roman name. So on his way to Damascus the light shined round about him. He's thrown from his beast. And he hears a voice saying, Saul. Saul. Why persecutest thou me? Me? Me? Me? Why does our Lord say that? He's in heaven. How can anybody persecute him? No wonder St. Paul asks, Who art thou? And our Lord asks, I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.