Word to the Wise
Monday, April 14, 2008 - Monday in the Fourth Week of Easter
[Acts 11:1-18 and John 10:11-18][Acts: "If then God gave them the same gift he gave to us when we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to be able to hinder God?" When they heard this, they stopped objecting and glorified God, saying, "God has then granted life-giving repentance to the Gentiles too."] [John: "I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd."]
The early Christian community had to come to terms with the question of Gentile converts who had no Jewish roots. Prior to the question, the faith of those who believed in Jesus seemed to be simply a continuation of their Jewish heritage with the development of Jesus' life, death and resurrection brought into it. Now there were people who believed in Jesus but had no desire to be a part of the Jewish heritage! The question had to arise! Could God have possibly acted outside OUR expectations and experience? The evidence of faith in the Lord Jesus won the day and "gentiles" were admitted to the community of faith! This community of faith has never been without its tensions and divisions because it has never (despite efforts at historical whitewashing) been uniform in its expression. Uniformity has existed more or less within certain parts of the church, but there are more than 20 "rites" in the church. The first broadscale division occurred with the split in 1054 between the Church in the East (Constantinople) and in the West (Rome). In modern times, Western Catholics refer to all "those people" as the "Orthodox" or (in the case of those united with Rome), the "Eastern Rites," as if they can be lumped into one category! Then came the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century! If "Roman Catholicism" and "Orthodoxy" can be considered diverse, "Protestantism" is even more diverse! And yet all these "churches" consider themselves to be faithful to the Lord Jesus! For centuries this division (if not the diversity) has been universally regarded as a scandal but very little has occurred on a structural level even if there has been a lot of progress on the level of understanding. To oversimplify it, a MAJOR sticking point is the papacy and its style of rule and control. There is a big difference in the understanding of what PRIMACY means. For Eastern Christians, this could means "first among equals," but the style and experience of the papacy in the Western Church has been one of power and "first without equals." Pope John Paul II recognized the problem in his encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, and suggested that there might be other ways of fulfilling the role of primacy granted to Peter. This generated a lot of excited discussion before the Roman folks "circled the wagons" to control the meaning of the text! Ecumenism has a long way to go. The early euphoria and promise right after the Second Vatican Council has disappeared in the face of hard structural and doctrinal differences. Yet everyone in the discussion professes faith in the Lord Jesus! Power, relativism and uniformity can be enemies of unity, but they are hard to put aside when so deeply engrained. We musn't give up despite the obstacles. What the future may hold is ultimately in God's hands and one hopes that present and future popes, like Peter the first pope, don't want to "hinder God!" AMEN
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