Tuesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s reading from St. Paul to the Colossians is so full of wisdom and encouragement. One can just imagine that the communities all around the Mediterranean to which he is writing would be grateful to receive such words in their times of struggle and persecution. And what of us today? “See that no one captivate you,” Paul writes, “with an empty, seductive philosophy.” One way to interpret these words is to remind ourselves of all of the commitments that may draw our attention away from our baptismal call to bring Christ to the world. But here I propose we continue our parish’s weekend reflection on being the Body of Christ, for it can also be a reminder to not turn the Church into just another club we join or choose not to join. This is indeed a seductive philosophy.
It is not fashionable and it is hardly comfortable to admit that Christ is the center of our lives. It is also difficult to confess that we come to know this Christ through the mediation of the Church. In the midst of both external criticisms and our own frustrations with the messy parts of our Church, we may be seduced into rendering the Church incidental to our Christian lives. But it is in the Church, in the Body of Christ, that we come face to face with the Gospel, so beautifully reiterated by Paul in the same letter: “He brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross.”
The sure way to resist the seductive philosophy of the Church-as-club is to ask ourselves the hard question: how does the Body of Christ actually act in the world outside the walls of the church? If we start each day, each interaction with our neighbors, with such a question, perhaps the Church will cease to be just another weekend activity and will be the place for forming us in Christian charity for being Christ’s Body in the world.
- Katherine Schmidt