Dear Sisters, dear brethren in Christ, what does it mean to belong to the Church? The Church is that which, according to Christ’s own words in the Gospel we have just listened to, ‘is gathered together into His name.’ This is what our Lord actually says: not, gathered in my name, but into my name, though it is a distinction which at first sounds odd in English.
So, when we come together into Mass, we are being gathered into Christ’s name. But what does it mean? Christ’s name is the source of His power. Remember how after the day of Pentecost, Peter and the other apostles were able to go out among the people of Jerusalem and even further afield and do wonderful deeds ‘in the name of Christ’. When a cripple was begging at the gate of the Temple, Peter said to him, ‘gold and silver I do not have, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus, walk!’ Peter and John were arraigned before the Chief Priest and the Sadducees on the charge that they had been forbidden to preach in the name of Christ, and after they were punished by flogging, and the same command not to preach in that name was repeated, they went out rejoicing to have suffered on account of His, that is Christ’s, Name. When Paul met some believers in Ephesus he found that they had only been baptised by John the Baptist, and so he baptised them into the name of Jesus, and they then immediately received the Holy Spirit.
When we were baptised, we, too, were baptised into the name of Jesus. Now you may be thinking, but weren’t we baptised in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Yes, we were, and so, presumably, were those Christians at Ephesus, since it is not in accord with our Lord’s command at the end of the Gospel to baptise ‘in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ So what does it mean to be baptised into the name of Christ?
The name of Christ is His power. It is that by which Peter and the Apostles worked many wonderful miracles. These miracles were signs of God’s healing and saving power at work through the prayers and hands of His servants and ministers. It is this that we are baptised into – this power, this personal presence, Jesus Christ our Lord and Head. So, when our Lord says to the Apostles today: ‘whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’, He is giving them His own power, His personal power, His presence through the invocation of His holy and powerful name. This is what it means to belong to Christ in the Holy Church, to be baptised into His name. The Apostles were all given the same ultimate authority to bind and loose, which you may remember we heard Jesus give to Peter in person in the Gospel only two Sundays ago. When Christ Himself forgave sins, He did that which the Pharisees rightly saw as belonging solely to God. And that is what loosing involves: the power to loose sin and to set free those imprisoned by its addictive and binding strength. But Jesus did not only forgive sins, loosing the sinner, but He also gave the same power, the same authority, to the Apostles. The same loosing was also what Peter and John did to the beggar at the Temple gate, who was loosed from his affliction and made to walk, just as our Lord had so often loosed people from both sickness or disability and from sin.
Now we who have been baptised into His name are members of the same body: the Body of Christ. That is what it means to be the Church. And that is why Mass is central to what we are; we gather together week by week on what we rightly call the Lord’s day to celebrate His mystical Body and to receive His sacramental Body in Holy Communion. Then we are united to Him and in Him. Then it is that He tells us that ‘if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.’
Now there is a difficulty about what our Lord says here. I am sure that all of us know of times, probably many times, when together with other Christians we have agreed to ask God for something and have not received what we asked for. How can Jesus say, ‘when you ask anything it will be done for you by my Father in heaven’? This is a saying of our Lord’s which is just as difficult as another one: ‘if your faith were the size of a mustard seed you could say to this mountain, ‘be uprooted!,’ and it would be moved.’ These sayings may seem to us puzzling. But of course they cannot be false, since every word our Lord ever said is truth. Still, they are an example of our Lord’s way of saying something striking in order to make us stop in our tracks, a kind of exaggeration to force us to think about things we either take for granted or get wrong about God.
So what does He mean? He goes on to say these very consoling words: ‘for where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.’ We ought to reflect often on these words. It is a great and extraordinary thing to realise that our Lord has indeed promised to be here in our midst when we are gathered together in His name. His word is truth. When He says, ‘I am in your midst’, He is here. When He says, ‘this is my Body’, it is Himself in person whom we adore and receive.
But to return to the question, what does He mean when He says ‘if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven’? One thing we must recall is that He Himself prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane to be spared the chalice of suffering, and His prayer was not answered in that way. Was the prayer then refused by His Father? No. It was necessary that Christ should suffer and so bring about our salvation. Only by His death could He rise to new life, and only by rising could He prepare the way for us to share in His resurrection. But even before that resurrection, even now, He comes to us and prepares us for the future He intends to share with us, He is in our midst when we come together most of all in the Mass and comes into us most of all in Holy Communion.
It is then that He opens us up to the Father in the light of the Holy Spirit, so that we can learn how to pray. For, as St Paul teaches us, the Spirit comes to help us in our weakness, because we do not know how to pray as we ought to, but the Holy Spirit will do so on our behalf with what Paul describes as sighing or groaning that surpasses human language. This is what our Lord means by praying together in His name. It is this prayer which the Father grants, because it is the prayer of the Holy Spirit who knows far better than we ever can just what it is that is necessary for us to attain our salvation, and the salvation of those on whose behalf we might also be praying to God. This demands the exercise of our faith, the faith of which our Lord speaks as being like a mustard seed. This faith is not an attitude of our mind, nor something that is generated by ourselves alone, but is instead a gift of God given to us at our baptism into Christ’s name. That faith must be nurtured and exercised like a muscle which is given to us, but which we must exercise so that it may do what it is intended to do.
Prayer is the voice of faith, the muscle God has given us to pray for what we need to enter into Him, to be united to Him. Prayer is answered by God when He pours out on us all that we need to be made one with Him. Being a member of the Church means being united in the Holy Spirit who prays in us in ways that surpass our understanding. The Spirit so shapes us through His presence in us that we become filled with the likeness of Christ, so that, as the Preface today beautifully puts it, ‘God might love in us what He loves in His Son’. This is what it means to be members of Christ’ body, it is to be seen by the Father just as He sees Christ His Son. This is what it means for us, to receive from the Father what He wants to give to us just as Christ Himself receives what God gives.
Make A Comment
Comments (0)