Who do we think we are?

To begin to understand who we are as the Church, we begin with something very obvious: we are human beings!

What gives us our particular identity is that we are human beings in explicit contact with Jesus Christ.  This does not make us less human but more human! 

The followers of Jesus are called to live whatever their life presents them with but to do so in relationship to Jesus Christ.  Following Jesus does not lift people out of the ups and downs of life but asks them to live them in a new way.  Christianity is not “the opium of the people” as Karl Marx would have it, but we are called to live our real human lives following in the way of Jesus.  

This means that we can find in the communities of the Church whatever we can find among human beings.  We can find the sufferings and the joys, the accomplishments and the failures, the good times and the hard times.  We can find the goodness that is in humanity and we can find the sinfulness that is in humanity.  We can be built up and encouraged by what we find in the Church and we can also be scandalised and at times shocked by what we find in the Church. 

The Document of Vatican II on the Church in the Contemporary World puts this clearly: “The joy and the hope, the anguish and the grief of the people of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and the hope, the grief and the anguish of the followers of Christ as well.  Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts.  For theirs is a community composed of human beings, of human beings who, united in Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit press on towards the kingdom of the Father and are bearers of a message of salvation intended for all human beings.”

What makes us specifically who we are is having an explicit relationship to the Lord Jesus.  We are a people who listen to his words and whose attention is called to his actions and to his death and resurrection.  We are called to live in dialogue with his words and his actions, we are called to let him gather us together around his table as he gathered people during his earthly life.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin

Published: 12 July 2024