Love Struggles for Primacy in the Church

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hat happened to the standard (love of neighbor) set by Jesus as the identifying hallmark for his followers?  The law of loving others was replaced early in the Church’s history, but a contemporary illustration will help us understand exactly what happened.

Peter Hebblethwaite, in his biography, Paul VI – The First Modern Pope, relates the following: In July 1967 Pope Paul VI welcomed the Ecumenical Patriarch, Athenagoras II, to the Vatican. “Paul insisted on no title other than the primacy of charity.” In his comments “Paul quoted his patron: ‘Be eager to give one another precedence.’” (Romans 12:10). “Among Athenagoras’ suite was the Metropolitan Meliton, his chief theologian, who dangerously remarked, ‘Paul VI has made the papacy out of date,’” meaning that Paul had changed the primacy from the papacy back to love.

One can easily imagine the consternation those remarks brought to members of the curia for whom the primacy belonged to the Pope – and derivatively to themselves. The incident was among other omens of the coming Vatican retrogression from the advancements made at the Second Vatican Council.

The example is poignant in that it illustrates the placement of primacy by members of the Church’s purple culture onto a particular person and not on the intention and purpose of the “way” movement begun by Jesus. Loyalty to monarchical personages had long before assumed the priority over love of neighbor. To maintain this altering of primacy down through the centuries, practices were introduced that in effect supported this substitution of the true primacy. Chief among them were laws promulgated to change the spiritual focus of members. No longer were we freed from laws as Jesus and then Paul declared, but were subjected to ever increasing obligatory practices.

Even non-obligatory practices were exalted and substituted for response to God in place of love of neighbor: devotions to saints (a number of whom were designated as patrons, converting heaven’s culture so that it replicates the patronage system of the purple culture), the rosary, pilgrimages, etc. Bishops, drawing on their own need for admiration, presented God as demanding attention rather than a God who loves and nourishes. Christ present in the Eucharist has been presented as one there to be acclaimed rather than as someone there to nourish our journey. All of these practices are good and valuable only if they contribute to our ability to love our neighbor. If they don’t, they are at best irrelevant. If they are substitutes, they totally miss the mark.

Resource: 

 

Hebblethwaite, Peter, Paul VI – The First Modern Pope, Paulist Press, 1993

Freedom in Love: A Challenge for the Church

T he ability to love others for their own sake is a unique human freedom from self.  It is true human freedom.  We can gauge our ability to love, our inner freedom, by the markers that Jesus outlined for us.    To the degree that we are under the control of anger, self-deceit, envy, fear, greed, gluttony, lust, pride or sloth, loving others can only rise to a minimum level if at all.  If we love only those who love us, we are still at a minimum level of ability.   If we love our neighbors, strangers and foreigners, we go up a level. If we continue to love and forgive those who have hurt us, we move up again. If we achieve the ability to love an enemy, to forgive and do good for an enemy, we are at an upper level. And if we achieve the ability to lay down our life for any of the above, we could not be more free. At that point we are truly the fullest image or expression of God that we can be. At that point we are fully human. We then love as God loves us. It follows that to love our neighbor IS to love ourselves IS to love God. HOW DOES CHURCH FIT INTO THIS PICTURE?  Church is a happening. It happens when people love each other, when they reach to be their best selves by loving.  Jesus did not start a church. Jesus started a movement. At first it was called simply “The Way.” He wanted people to love each other.  The word church has come to have many applications: 1. As an institution (The Lutheran Church, The Catholic Church). 2. As prelates or leaders who define meanings (as in “The Church Says.”) 3. As a building. Church is none of these in its real meaning. Nor is church a juridical construct, a system of rules, or a collection of beliefs, a credal ID tag. Church is not people bound together by utility. What creates church is love. Church is the community that love puts together and holds together.  When a religious leadership puts itself ahead of Jesus’ purpose and portrays ‘membership’ or ‘loyalty’ as the true mark of being Christian, they have left Jesus by the wayside. If the Church community decides to insert a leadership, or useful buildings, or particular practices, those additions must all serve and promote the community by being in the service of love.  So, we can extend our list of simultaneous happenings. Love of neighbor IS love of self IS love of God IS to create Church. It’s that simple! But it is only a blueprint. Love still has to be lived, and we should not confuse simple with easy. The climb to the top of love’s freedom is laden with obstacles and difficulty. More on that next time. Do you think that our bishops look upon the Church as described above?   Resource:   Called to Freedom, by Stephen Boehrer

Religious Laws and the "Unclean" Jesus: A Heritage Neglected

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fter revealing God as one who loves us unconditionally, Jesus invites us to love God in return by loving our neighbor, not to earn salvation, but to respond naturally to God’s great love.  “By this will all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”  This law of love is attested to in all four gospels and in Paul. But, love of neighbor is not a command hurled at us from above. It is law only because, written in our hearts, it says: if you would be yourself, your best self, love your neighbor. Instinctively we know this to be true. Throughout all of our history mankind has recognized that the hero, the best anyone can be, is someone who puts his or her life on the line for others. True religious response to God calls for nothing more or less than putting ourselves on track to become our best selves. I can only show love to God by loving people.

BUT, WHAT IS LOVE? Jesus by his example, and philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle define love for us. To love is to be for others for the other’s own sake.

We look to Jesus for our lived example. Jesus wanted to free people from religious laws, many of which were actual obstacles to loving. In the religious culture of Jesus’ time there existed a whole range of laws that covered nearly every moment of people’s daily lives. Should anyone violate one of these laws they were considered unclean. They required purification before they could again be considered clean and allowed once again to associate with the clean people. A lawbreaker was sent out, ostracized, kept out of law-abiding society until he or she had gone through the purification requirements.

Jesus broke these laws with total abandon. He violated the hugely important Sabbath laws. He defended his disciples for plucking and eating grain on the Sabbath. He healed people on the Sabbath. These were grave violations of the Sabbath law, and Jesus was unclean because of it.

There were laws about washing hands often each day, and laws about what you could or could not eat. Jesus summed up his response: “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” He didn’t worry about these laws, and was unclean because of it.

In that culture you were not permitted to touch or associate with anyone considered unclean. Jesus did. He touched and healed the outcasts: lepers, the blind, the lame, a hemorrhaging woman. He ate and drank with the outcasts, the despised tax collectors, the wounded. And he was unclean because of it.

Jesus lived in a patriarchal society where women were practically invisible, or who left the men unclean by association. Jesus’ association and friendship with women made it clear that women were equals to men in His kingdom. And he was unclean because of it.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and Levite didn’t walk past the wounded man because they were mean and uncaring. They walked past him because their laws said they would be unclean if they touched him. And, who did Jesus point out as being a good neighbor to the wounded man? A Samaritan, a foreigner, an unclean person.

For pointing out the unloving nature of their laws, the religious leaders eventually took their clean revenge and had Jesus killed.

Have you ever noticed that our bishops love laws whose only purpose is to control?

 

Resource: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time by Marcus J. Borg. HarperCollins, 1995.

Jesus' Love: A Standard for the Purple Culture

        

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e need to establish a standard before we go further, a standard by which we can measure the purple culture and the dictates that emanate from that culture.

        

I suspect that many of us older people have or had an image of God imprinted on us that saw God as an avenging, punishing, hellfire-threatening God. That God is dead. He/She does not exist and never did. Isn’t it some species of blasphemy to paint attributes on God that we would find unacceptable in our next door neighbor?

        

But how does a person look through the everyday tragedies that surround us and find a loving God? We all sense how difficult it must be for many people to find a God of love through a prism of pain, suffering and privation. I believe, however, if we listen quietly to our personal experience, we will find the measure we seek in Jesus.

Jesus was, in his life and in his dying, the revelation of the character of God. Jesus did not die on a cross to ransom us from a devil, as the metaphor of St. Paul would have it. Nor did Jesus die to satisfy some demand of justice on God’s part as retribution for Adam’s sin, as theologies from the eleventh century onward would posit. The sole mission that Jesus had was to show God to us, and our salvation flows from that.

Jesus was an intimate of God. He called God Abba (Daddy). He said to his apostle, Phillip, “If you see me, Phillip, you see the Father.”

What God is revealed when we study Jesus? He loved his neighbors, and they included the outcasts, the untouchables, the maimed, foreigners, prostitutes, rogues, tax collectors, and the invisible of his time, women. He healed anyone who needed healing. More important, he ate and drank with them. He lived at their level. He was one of them, an absolute egalitarian even with those at the bottom rung of society. For his efforts and for directing religious expression away from laws and ritual, he became a threat to the religious leaders of his time and to their privileged status. They had him killed. So, for loving others he died, and in dying showed the full passion of God for us.

It is not possible for a human to comprehend a love greater than that of one who lays down his or her life for others. But that is exactly what Jesus did in his living and in the dying his living led to. For speaking the truth, for naming the self-serving hypocrisy of religious leaders, he was killed. His death is as God-revealing as was his teaching. His death reveals a God who, in terms of human understanding, is someone who lays down his life for us. God is someone who loves each of us to the limit of our ability to understand what love is.

That’s the Gospel! That’s the Good News! That is the rock core of what Jesus was all about.