Unity and Diversity

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  A buzzword these days is “diversity.”  And while people can associate the socio-political term with some level of mistrust, when it comes to diversity in the Catholic sense, we need not fear.  We don’t fear diversity, because it is also bound up with unity.  And this connection between diversity and unity bases itself in the Most Holy Trinity, who is both One God and Three Divine Persons.
    While not directly pointing to the Trinity, it intrigued me that St. Paul, in the epistle we heard today, kept going back to threes: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and “Who is above all, and through all, and in all.”  Again, this is not to equate the word “Lord” with the Father, “faith” with the Son, and “baptism” with the Holy Spirit, nor any individual Person with being above, through, or in all.  But there is something providential as God inspired St. Paul to write in a way that points to the oneness and threeness of God.
    Beginning with God’s oneness, His unity, we even get a glimpse of this in the Gospel.  When asked about the greatest commandment, our Lord replies with the second half of the shema, one of the great credal expressions of Judaism: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.  Therefore you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.”  The unity of God forms the foundation of the commandment to love God.

   The diversity, if you will, of God, started to reveal itself most clearly in the Incarnation.  We can look to the Baptism of the Lord, when the voice of the Father spoke as St. John baptized our Lord, and the Holy Spirit hovered over our Lord in the form of a dove.  Time and time again, our Lord claims authority which only God could have, especially seen in the power of forgiving sins.  And in the Gospel of John, the people almost stone Christ, which makes him ask, “‘For which of these [good works] are you trying to stone me?’”  The people reply, “‘We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy.  You, a man, are making yourself God.’”  And at the great commission at the end of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Christ commands that his disciples to baptize “‘in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’”  
    Certainly, this believe in our Triune God developed over the centuries after the Ascension and sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Indeed, the word Trinitas, Trinity, was only first coined by Tertullian, who died in the year AD 200.  Creeds would follow from Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon that would clarify how we understood our one God as well as the Trinity of Persons.  But the kernel of the truth of our belief in who God is was present from the beginning.
    So, when it comes to the Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, we see both unity and diversity operating, just as unity and diversity are attributes of God.  There is one God, but the Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Holy Spirit, nor the Holy Spirit the Father.  There is one Church established by Christ, but that one Church has different expressions across the world with different gifts and charisms.  The temptation is to overemphasize unity or overemphasize diversity.  But that would be like excluding either the Three Persons in favor of one God, or excluding the oneness of God in favor of the Three Divine Persons.  But the truth is not expressed fully when one or the other is excluded.
    So for us, God calls us to profess, though one baptism, one faith in the one God.  To reflect the unity of God we hold fast to what God has truly revealed as necessary for salvation, including those statements codified by Ecumenical Councils and Popes, as well as the teaching the Magisterium.  To vary in professions of the divinity of the Son or the Holy Spirit tears away from the unity that God desires for His Church.
    On the other hand, there are diversities in practices of how we live that faith out that vary place by place.  St. Monica struggled with the fact that Romans fasted on Saturdays, while the Milanese did not.  St. Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, said that when he was in Rome he fasted on Saturdays, but when in Milan, he did not.  Liturgically, from the beginning, there rose up legitimate differences in how the followers of Christ, united in one Church, worshiped.  While most of the Roman world spoke Greek, and so Greek was likely used in many of the earliest liturgies, Latin was introduced not too long after Christianity ceased to be a persecuted religion.  Maronites, the Catholic Rite (R-I-T-E) based in Lebanon, still uses Aramaic, as it has from the beginning, the language our Lord spoke, in at least part of its liturgy.  And as the Gospel spread, the Mass came to be celebrated in various languages, though each language was often codified and does not always match the current way that same language is used (e.g., Slavonic versus Church Slavonic).
    But this variety of languages and rites resembles Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit gave the Apostles and disciples the ability to speak in different tongues so that those who had gathered in Jerusalem for the feast could understand the preaching of the Gospel.  Still, while the languages were many, the faith they professed was one.
    So, as Catholics, we can welcome diversity in a Catholic sense, because it is also connected to a unified mission and proclamation, mimicking the way that our one God is also Three Divine Persons.  In the Mystical Body of Christ, we need not all have the same task or vocation, any more than all our body parts need to be the same.  But those diverse body parts do need to work together for the proper functioning of the body, and so the diverse members of the Church need to utilize their gifts and talents in a unified way for the proclamation of the one Gospel in the one Church that our Lord founded.  May we, the diverse members of the Mystical Body of Christ, be held together for common purpose by our Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Understanding the Deeper Meaning

 Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

One tradition that exists in law enforcement is challenge coins (it’s also a military tradition).  A challenge coin is just a coin that has some representation of a unit or a department on it.  We don’t quite use challenge coins in law enforcement the same way that the military does (which often has an effect on whether or not you’re paying for your drinks).  But it’s a way to honor a person by sharing a part of the unit’s history.  As an example, about a year ago was given a challenge coin from the State Police Emergency Support (ES) Team (most people would think of it as a SWAT team) that honored the last ES Trooper who died in the line of duty.  This was an amazing gift which I treasure because it honors one of the ES team’s members who gave his all.
    But if you are not aware of that tradition, you may think the challenge coin is simply a nice, little knick-knack, but nothing more.  If you don’t know the background of the challenge coin, you may not give that gift the same importance that someone who knows what’s going on would.
    As we continue our Gospel readings on the Eucharist, we hear that the people do not understand the deeper meaning behind the miracle of the loaves and fish.  The people were amazed at what happened, but their understanding was limited to the physical reality that they sensed, rather than the metaphysical reality that required going beyond the simple five senses.  Jesus even tells them that they are looking for him simply because they liked eating the bread and fish, not because of a deeper faith.  And then Jesus uses that to springboard to teaching about the true bread from heaven, which is not an “it,” but a “who”: Jesus Himself.  
    For followers of Jesus, this problem of not getting the deeper meaning still exists.  It exists in a particular way among those who are not Catholic nor Orthodox.  So many Christians see Communion as simply bread and wine.  Yes, it has been prayed over; yes it is a reminder of Jesus’ presence, but they stop at the level of their physical senses.  But sometimes even Catholics forget, or perhaps were never taught, that the Eucharist is not bread and wine, though it retains those physical properties, but truly Jesus–His Body and Blood.

We, as Catholics, believe that a valid priest of Jesus Christ, who was ordained by the successors of the Apostles (the bishops), and who follows the prayer of the Church, intending to do what the Church intends to do, by the power of the Holy Spirit changes the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, not just for the time of that prayer, but as long as the bread and wine have those physical properties that are proper to bread and wine.  It looks like bread and tastes like bread, but it is no longer bread.  It is the Body of the Lord.  It looks like wine and tastes like wine, but it is not longer wine.  It is the Blood of the Lord.  
    This wasn’t some new invention of the Middle Ages, either.  St. Paul talks about partaking in the bread and cup as a sharing in the Passion of the Lord, which is what the Eucharist is: our participation in Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice.  St. Ignatius of Antioch, who died around AD 107, says that the Eucharist is truly the Body of Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, and a descendant of King David.  St. Justin Martyr, writing slightly later, says the same thing.  So, too, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, in the fourth and fifth centuries (respectively) say that the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Christ.
    It wasn’t until the eleventh century that controversy really arose about the Eucharist, and whether or not it was the Body of Christ.  Quickly, the Church re-iterated that it was, and solemnly proclaimed it in a the Fourth Lateran Ecumenical Council in 1215, using the word that has been codified: transubstantiation.  While this teaching was rejected by the Protestants as they sprung up in the 1500s, the Ecumenical Council of Trent reaffirmed the perennial belief that the Eucharist is Jesus, not just a reminder, not just a symbol, but truly our Lord’s glorified Body and Blood.
    That, of course, affects the way that we treat the Eucharist.  If it really is Jesus, then we are extra-careful with it.  We use precious metal to hold and house the Eucharist.  We do not give it to those who do not believe what we do, which is why Protestants and non-Christians cannot receive the Eucharist–they don’t believe what we do about the Eucharist.  Before we receive, we fast (currently the law is that we fast from all food and drink except water and medicine) for one hour before we receive Holy Communion.  And as we approach the Eucharist, we do so with profound wonder and awe, knowing that we are receiving, on our tongue or in our hands, the very same Lord who was born of the Virgin Mary, and who is now seated at the right hand of the Father.  We dare, only because He commanded us, to receive the King of Kings into ourselves.  We dare because He told us we needed to receive Him to have the spiritual strength to follow Him.  
    As a sign of our respect and reverence our hands should be clean if we receive in our hands.  And the Church invites us to bow before receiving the Eucharist (though some genuflect or kneel down).  The point is that we want to show reverence for the divine encounter we have, an encounter with God that is the closest we can get to God on earth; greater than even the best sunrise or sunset, or the best musical composition, or even the love of a spouse, or whatever other way the we might encounter God.  Nothing even comes close to just how truly awesome the Eucharist is.  St. John Vianney, the priest, said, “What the Angels behold only with awe, the radiant splendor of which they cannot sustain, we make our food, we receive into us, we become with Jesus Christ one same Body, one sole Flesh.”  He also said, “If we truly understood the Mass, we would die of joy.”  
    May we truly recognize that the Eucharist is not bread and wine, but our Savior, who chooses to humble Himself and make Himself vulnerable to us.  May we value and treasure the Eucharist as the greatest gift we can receive here on earth, because it is already a foretaste, a preview of heaven!