Gal 3.28 — Old Time Religion??
One of the guiding principles which Blessed John XXIII wanted Vatican Council II to implement was the concept of resourcement, viz., going back to apostolic sources. How do contemporary Catholic patterns and traditions replicate the vision of the earliest apostolic communities.
Jesus’ first followers of Jesus called themselves several names, such as the “solidarity” (ha Echad), the “way of the Lord” (ha Derek YHWH), the “Messianists” (in Greek, Christianoi).
One way that we can self-identify is the Jesus Movement in Armonk. With God’s Help, this simple title re-enforces Who is the basis of our movement, Jesus the Lord. With God’s Help, we try to view reality with what we call “Jesus lenses”, viz., as Jesus views it from His perspective. Needless to say that Jesus frequently sees things differently than we do. He calls us to holiness (integrity) in all our relationships with one another, with God, with our planet, with our cosmos.
One religious sociologist suggested that there is a trajectory in which any movement needs to be aware. First, there is the man (for us, God- man), who envisions a new worldview, an alternate worldview to the System, conventional wisdom. Jesus calls it the Kingdom of God. Second, the (God-) man establishes a movement that shares and spreads the new worldview. Third, the movement can develop into a machine, that seeks to operate more efficiently. Fourth, if the movement-machine forgets the vision of the (God-)man who established it, then it ultimately becomes a monument or musemn, a curiosity or an antique.
We hear a very early baptismal hymn today as our second reading from St Paul’s letter to the Galatians. He was writing, probably in the early 50’s of the first century, AD, and he was quoting a baptismal hymn that the Jesus movement in Galatia already knew well. “For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is 1) neither Jew nor Greek, there is 2) neither slave nor free, there is 3) neither make and female, for you are all one (cf. above ha echad) in Christ Jesus.
We know that in the first century, the pressing question was the first part of the baptismal triad. Thirty years ago, Fr Raymond Brown and Fr John Meier wrote the classic, Antioch and Rome in which they showed that there was a clear pluralism of biblical responses on how the Jesus-movement fit into the mother religion of Judaism. This became particularly an acute question when non-Jews (Gentiles) started to outnumber Jews who were the core of the Jesus-Movement from the beginning. Biblical theologians think that part of the growing resentment between Jews and Christians grew from the fact that many of the Christian converts had formerly been Gentile participants in Jewish synagogue liturgies and that the Jesus Movement was poaching from these “God-fearers” as they were called. It became apparent that Jews and Christians were moving in different directions.
However, Christians, by and large, lived with little qualms of conscience about the second part of the triad. It was really not until after the French Revolution (not the Declaration of Independence) that Christians questioned the morality of slavery. Among Christian groups it was the Quakers, who saw the inconsistency between a so-called Christian society tolerating slavery and inequality. Most baptized could not envision a world without slavery, so entrenched in the system. It boggles the minds of many that our ancestors thought nothing of slavery as a moral question.
It was only in the twentieth century that the third part of the triad has come under scrutiny. Church and state both ponder the question of the role of women in the world. The implications are still to be considered.
As we hear today, the baptismal hymn, already known and sung in Galatia (present day Turkey) a mere twenty years after the death and Resurrection of Jesus. St Paul presumed that people knew the words that he was quoting and the consensus is that the vision represented by the Galatians baptismal hymn would be considered radical (the etymology of the word “radical” is the Latin “radix”, which means root, not revolutionary). The hymn challenges the movement the and now to focus on the God-Man Whose vision we share and not allow the machine to become a monument!
We consider the length of time in which humanity has been evolving. At least 100,000 years ago, our ancestors, cavemen and women made of stardust, had brains clearly human. The System only begins to record human history about 5,000 years ago. We limit human history when we stick to the System’s sense of time. Humanity has existed a lot longer than the System.
The Jesus Movement believes that the Incarnation of the God-Man is a culmination or breakthrough moment in creation. If the Creator is Love, it is logical to think that in love, the Creator would want to be united as fully as possible to the Creation. If the human, indeed, is the pinnacle of creation, then the Franciscan tradition teaches that God would have become human, even if our first parents had not committed the original sin of trying to be like God, viz., a control freak. Adam and Eve have many descendents!
The early Jesus Movement saw itself as a “transition team” from the System to the vision of the Kingdom of God, not the kingdom of gold. In 2013 years hence, in 4026AD, the Jesus Movement will look back at us in 2013 and probably ask how do their ancestors in 2013AD took so long to recapture the vision of our ancestors in the Galatian baptismal hymn. How might we answer? 062313AD jfq
