Today’s readings: Acts 15, 1-2.22-29; Apocalypse 21, 10-14. 22-23; Jn 14, 23-29.
The development of Church doctrine was always a debated issue. Our tendency is to perceive doctrine as unwavering, rigid, defined once for all. That was a Catholic myth debunked by John Henry Newman when he wrote An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Just as each era has new ways of understanding, so too must the Church always change in its understanding of faith and morals.
In John’s gospel we read how Jesus gave his peace to his disciples, a peace the world cannot give. His peace was not a soft one, putting the Church in its comfort zone, away from turmoil and conflict. It was more a peace of internal stability, guaranteed by the gift of the Spirit, and that was to safeguard the community of the disciples from fear and from being troubled in the heart.
From then on the Church was to be in the power of the Spirit, journeying towards the whole truth and bold enough to take risks in the face of change and challenges. The survival of any organism depends on its capacity to cultivate creativity and innovation in its internal structure. In fact, throughout the times, the more the Church turned itself into an organisation, the less it manifested itself as a living organism empowered by the Spirit.
This is the openness we read about today from Acts when Paul and Barnabas in Antioch were recruiting Gentiles into the Christian faith. This gave rise to conflicts in the community. There were Christians who were disturbed by innovation and they found it too unsettling to depart from their traditions.
Paul was already arguing vehemently that in the Jesus mentality, obedience to the law was no longer the main criterion to be saved. This has always been pivotal in understanding rightly and deeply what faith in Christ Jesus is about. Jesus himself established this from the very beginning in his Sermon on the Mount: You have heard what was said of old. But now I say to you…
The Council of Jerusalem, as recounted in Acts, was an important milestone in the Church’s journey in the first century. It launched the Church to the future, for the rest of time. For the Church that should have been a point of no return, inaugurating the so-called time of the Spirit, as promised by Jesus, the guarantee of stability in change.
Paul was so to say the first to launch Christ from within the precincts of the Jewish faith to the broader pagan world. This has remained ever since the challenge facing the Church in the flux of time. This transpires also from the reading of John’s Apocalypse, with his vision of “the holy city coming down from God out of heaven. I saw that there was no temple in the city since the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the temple, and the city did not need the sun or the moon for light, since it was lit by the radiant glory of God”.
Given the basic importance of the temple in the Jewish religion, given also the centrality of the temple as we understand the faith even in our frame of mind today, John’s vision sounds very unsettling. But that is the shift we all need to go through in the maturity of our faith, passing from a religion of exteriority to the essentials of a deep faith where God is the focus and the Spirit is the force.
The Church is called to be a sign and a mediation of the gracious and loving divine self-communication to the world. If such loving grace were limited to the confines of a temple religion, or of the Church itself, that would be a betrayal of its own mission. We need to remind ourselves that one of the key concepts of Vatican Council II 50 years ago was precisely that the Church is a pilgrim church, a Church on a journey.
The label ‘pagan world’ in the first centuries of Christianity stood in stark contrast to the Christian world. It had its negative connotations, and openness to that world on the part of the apostolic Church was daring, indeed very missionary. It is with the same boldness that today we are being called to look out there, to let go of a religion which has turned into an end in itself, and to trust the Spirit, who will keep reminding us of all that Jesus stood for.