Holy Community.

        The Gospel of Saint Matthew is known as the ecclesiastical Gospel. It was the most popular Gospel in the ancient Church because of its usefulness, particularly its systematic arrangement of Jesus’ teaching in several long discourses such as the Sermon on the Mount (chaps. 5-7). It is also the Gospel which explicitly uses the word ekklesia — Church (Mt. 16:18; 18:17). The great commission (Mt 28:18-20) with which we began itself testifies to the ecclesiastical character and consciousness of the Evangelist Matthew. For Matthew’s community, Christ’s commission to make disciples of all nations certainly implies that the new converts were to join the Church of Christ about which the Lord had said the gates of hell would not prevail against it (Mt. 16:18). The manner of making disciples — baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as well as teaching them all that the Lord had commanded in the Gospel — underscores the reality of the Church and its task of evangelism. The disciples are not merely to announce the gospel and move on, but to baptize and teach in order to form and build up the Church of Christ. The great commission connects Trinity, Church and evangelism. And the connection is not only ethical, a matter of ethical obedience to Jesus’ teaching, but also sacramental, a matter of a new life transformed and sanctified through Baptism, a life of holiness appropriate to the new creation in Christ. Holy Trinity and holy community are intimately connected and serve as closely related sources evangelism.

        The relationship of the Holy One of Israel with His people, defined by mutual love, fidelity and holiness, has deep roots in the Old Testament. The idea of biblical revelation as such carries with it the presupposition of the creation of a faith community that receives its identity and vocation from the gift of its knowledge of and relationship with the holy God. God’s call of Abraham created not only a relationship with Abraham and his immediate clan, but formed a permanent covenant commitment with Abraham’s descendants according to the God’s promise: “I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you” (Gen. 12:2). And again: “I will maintain my covenant with you and your descendants after you throughout the ages as an everlasting pact, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you” (Gen. 17:7). God’s personal self-disclosure established a deep and personal relationship with Abraham and the people of God, a relationship by God’s free and elective grace, based on divine love. And God’s purpose was universal: that God’s people would be a light and a blessing to all nations. The story of Moses and the liberation of Israel from Egypt recapitulates God’s purposeful will to liberate his people in order that they may serve him, the Holy One, as a holy people. We read in Dt. 7:6-8:

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen

you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the

face of the earth . . . because the Lord loves you, and is keeping the oath which

he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand,

and redeemed you from the house of bondage.

The Old Testament prophets were severe critics of Israel’s violation of the covenant of mutual love and fidelity, a violation which reached its profane zenith in both idolatry and flagrant injustice among God’s own people. The result was divine judgment and national catastrophe with the destruction of the Temple and the exile to Babylon. In those days, the Prophet Ezekiel proclaimed a dramatic vision of God’s holy presence, the shekinah, departing from the Temple and leaving the people unprotected. Yet Ezekiel, as much as the Prophet Jeremiah (Jer 31:31-34), envisioned not the obliteration of the covenant but its renewal in God’s time. In the words of Ezekiel speaking as the mouthpiece of God:

I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among

the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations will know

that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my

holiness before their eyes . . . A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit . . .

and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances

(Ez. 36:23,26-27).

The concept of holiness includes not only the element of distinctiveness and separation from all other nations by means of God’s election, but also the element of sanctification, being blessed and guided by the numinous presence and power of a holy God who demands covenant fidelity and loving obedience to his laws.

        The saving work of Christ, His life, death and resurrection, is to be understood in the same context of covenant, liberation and holiness. On the night of his sacred passion Jesus, while at table with His disciples, looked back to the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel and fulfilled them. With certain solemn words and actions He inaugurated the renewal of the covenant. He said: “This is my body . . . This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many” (Mk 14:22-24). The tradition of the Last Supper serves as the sacramental basis for the renewal and deepening of the covenant between God and his people. We have now a new Moses, a new Exodus, a new covenant, a new people reconstituted around the person and the saving work of the Son of God.      Saint Paul’s account of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Cor 11 shows that it was already a firmly established institution traced back to the Lord himself: “I received from the Lord what I handed to you that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed took bread . . .” and so on (1 Cor 11:23). The Lord’s Supper as the corporate sacramental basis of the new people of God is also clearly evident in 1 Cor 10:14-22 where Saint Paul compares the sacred meal of the Christians to those of the Jews and pagans. He writes in part: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:16-17).

        Similar sacramental aspects of participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, and therefore of renewal and a life of holiness through freedom from the powers of sin and death, resonate in what Saint Paul has to say about Baptism in Rom 6. By being baptized the Christian participates in the death and resurrection of Christ as saving events. The Christian thereby dies to the old nature under the power of sin and rises to a new life of righteousness empowered by the Spirit. Saint Paul’s whole theology of the Church as the mystical body of Christ, in which there is no Jew or Gentile, no slave or free, no male or female, is sacramentally rooted in Baptism and Eucharist, the communal liturgical acts which incorporate and transform believers into Christ’s holy body.

        However, the holiness of the community should not be narrowly conceived as dependent on the sacramental acts alone. For in fact and by virtue of the gift of the Spirit, the entire community, whether in the context of worship or not, is the temple of the Holy Spirit and should function by the leading of the Spirit in all aspects of ecclesial life. The Apostle Paul viewed his missionary work as a ministry of “a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:6). The reality of new creation in Christ took hold among men and women of faith in such a way that they themselves, in the words of Saint Paul, became a living “letter from Christ . . . written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Cor. 3:3). In other words, the return of the shekinah of God, the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, was not a return to the physical Temple of Jerusalem but to the community of God’s people who now formed the new, living temple of the Lord. Saint Paul asks: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? . . . For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are” (1 Cor. 3:16-17). It is this awareness of the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit in the community, the source of its holiness, which motivates St. Paul to call time and again for appropriate holiness of life among Christians, whether in matters of sexual purity (1 Cor. 5:1,6-8; 6:18-20), or disputes among Christians who file lawsuits before secular courts (1 Cor. 6:1-11), or manifold other aspects of daily conduct (Rom. 14:13-17; 1 Thess. 4:3-8).

        In this context, we would be amiss not to mention the First Letter of Peter and its vision of holiness associated with baptism as new birth. The Letter of Peter combines the baptismal base of newness of life as well as the wider call for holiness of life. Both aspects are closely connected to the eternal election and saving action of God expressed in trinitarian language. The Christians are “chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood” (1 Pt 1:2). The imperishable gift of new birth, achieved through the death and resurrection of Christ, is received through the living word of God, the Gospel, as well as Baptism (1 Pt 1:3,23; 2:2;3:21). The essence of pastoral exhortation is to live out God’s gift in holiness of conduct. “As He who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Pt 1:15-16/Lev. 11:44-45). Having tasted the kindness of the Lord, and having been cleansed and sanctified by the Spirit, the Christians are to come “to that living stone. . . and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pt 2:4-5).

        In a magisterial work on biblical prayer entitled, They Cried to the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (1994), Patrick D. Miller includes a section on “The Trinitarian Character of Christian Prayer” (pp. 314-321). Miller defines the specific character of Christian prayer, and for that matter the nature of all Christian existence, by reference to the Trinity as the center of Christian life. The key to the new Christian identity and self-understanding is Christ Himself in His status and saving function. According to Miller, Jesus’ ministry is summed up by the filial relationship of Jesus with the God of Israel. While the God of Israel remains the same central subject of prayer and life, it is the unique Son who addresses God as Father and also teaches the disciples to do the same (Mt. 6:9-15; 11:25-30). By virtue of their faith and union with Christ, Christians are made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ, and joint heirs of God with him. Thus the Christian community has its being in relation to Jesus Christ and shares with him the filial relation to God. Every facet of our relation to God, every blessing and every benefit, happens through Jesus Christ who lived and died as God’s presence among us mediating every dimension of our life and death with God. But the filial relation is made effective through the power of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies all aspects of existence. “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit Himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:15-16). It is the Spirit who actualizes the gift of adoption, our participation in Christ’s filial relation to the Father, and therefore our family status in the faith community as the people of God. Accordingly, all aspects and dimensions of Christian life are related to God as Trinity. Just as all blessings come from the Father, through the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit, so also every human word or action is offered to God the Father through the Son and in the Spirit.  In Christian life and thought, Holy Trinity and holy community belong together.