Friday of Fifth Week of Easter

Today's Scripture

Today's scriptures highlight authority and its role for Catholics. Some Christians criticize Catholics for having a system involving bishops, cardinals and the pope. Some Christians go so far as to suggest that even having clergy is a backward notion for Christians at all. After all, some say, if the idea is to love each other as Jesus says in today's gospel (John 15:12-17), can't we do that without a pastor or a pope 'telling us what to do"? Moreover, for those who find the idea of authority for Christians reprehensible, they find support in some of Paul's letters particularly in his letters to the Galatians where he emphasizes freedom and the fact that he has the gospel from God, not from humans (1:12).

Today's scriptures name reasons for having right authority, however, and are some of the basis for why Catholics have the doctrine of apostolic succession. In today's gospel, Jesus gives actually a rather difficult teaching: to love each other as he loves us even to the point of laying down our lives for our friends. Sometimes when we focus on the idea of the gospels being about love, we sugarcoat that love, making it out to be daisies and rainbows, and constant feelings of happiness. Sometimes too, people will shorthand today's gospel reading by saying that what Christianity is really about is love, and that all we need to make the world go around is love.

This is true, but with some pretty serious caveats. It is certainly a compliment to be named as Jesus' friend, as he suggests in today's reading, this is no easy life that we are in for. As many Christians have experienced over the centuries, this is a life that may well lead to persecution, hardship and death in the name of love. Moreover, what kind of love is this that Jesus asks of us? This is no mere emotional feel-good feeling of a moment, this is no tingly sensation. This is a lasting lifetime commitment with a cost.

Indeed, in the face of this kind of hard, costly love, how will we know whether we are loving rightly, whether we are truly being Jesus' friends? It is so easy to believe that each one of us is really Jesus' friend and yet, the experiences of the apostles themselves (Peter, with his three denials, comes to mind) should make us aware of the fact that it is very easy to deceive ourselves. We need our communities of friends to help us love better. We know this in our own everyday experiences, in fact: I ask for advice on raising my children, on dealing with a friend's grief, on being a good wife, from many, many people that I trust. It is the same for Christian life: I seek out the advice of people who have lived the Christian life well from the Christian community's point of view: saints and ordinary Christians alike.

But then the question comes, how do we know that we are receiving good advice?

Indeed, this seems to be exactly the situation in which some early Christians find themselves in today's first passage (Acts 15:22-31). Some well-meaning missionaries have gone out to some communities and told those communities to live strictly according to Jewish law. You can look through the book of Exodus and Leviticus to get a sense of how difficult that would be, especially for some of these early Christian converts who were not raised in Jewish households. The apostles, the people that Jesus himself gave authority but who also take their authority "in agreement with the whole church", realize that this is an untenable situation. So they send out some missionaries to give the people much simpler rules about how to live. They will not need to follow the whole Jewish code of slaughtering meat and keeping kosher, they will only need to avoid meat sacrificed to idols; and they are allowed to marry (they do not have to remain single, nor must they only marry Christians), they must just have lawful marriages. As Paul will say to the Corinthians, it is better to be single and it is better to marry another Christian, but these are not outright prohibited. The use of proper authority here allows for the developing early Christian movement to become different from its Jewish forebears and to welcome people from many cultures. Each time those cultures have been welcomed, church authorities have grappled with and continue to grapple with helping people learn to love in a recognizably Christian way, but in a way that allows them still to be "themselves". This both unifies the church and allows for its immense diversity.

That unity and diversity are centered in one person, Jesus Christ, from whom we get the apostles and apostolic succession. From a Catholic point of view if we did not have those authorities, stretching all the way back to Jesus' own words, we would be in danger of belonging to the "Church of Me" rather than the "Church of Me and You." I am not saying it is a perfect system (and I do not think Jesus thought it would be perfect either), but I think Jesus in his wisdom knew that having one billion little "Churches of Me" would not be able to adequately represent his Body or the unity and love that he preached. Rather he knew that we needed to be all in this together and that that meant some would need to have voices of authority represented in the clergy. Based on today's account of the church "being in agreement" with the apostles, that also means that all of us together are responsible for seeking to live Jesus' words of love and be examples for each other.

- Jana M. Bennett