What Did Christ Leave Us?

Many historians have noted that Christ did not write any books or leave written instructions about how He wanted His Church to be run.  He did not write a systematic theology to explain the Faith or anything like The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Plato left lots of writings for his followers and of course Moses left us the Torah, given by the hand of God to direct what Israel was to believe and how they were to worship and live.  Not so the Lord Jesus.  He walked through Palestine teaching, healing, and doing miracles. He was arrested and crucified, raised from the dead and ascended into heaven yet in all His time with us He left no systematic explication of doctrine.  His ministry lasted only about a year or so (calculations differ) and if you were on extended Sabbatical at the University of Alexandria doing your M.Div.. right after the time John the Baptist started his ministry you would’ve missed the whole thing.  So: what did Christ leave His Church?  Nothing.

       Well, not quite nothing.  He left us three things:  a bath, a meal…and a clergy.  And of course after His ascension He sent the Holy Spirit to guide us.

       These things are significant for they reveal the essence of the Church and what it means to live as a Christian.  The bath is baptism called “the bath [Greek λουτρόν/ loutron] of rebirth in Titus 3:5 and “the bath [Greek λουτρόν] of water in the Word” in Ephesians 5:26.  (Some render this bath of regeneration a “laver” which sounds much more stately but it really just means a bath.) It was through this bath wherein the Name of God was invoked that one became a Christian, experiencing rebirth, sonship, and the forgiveness of sins. It was through this bath that one was united to Christ and became a part of His Body, the Church.

       The meal was the Eucharist.  In the first century the reception of bread and wine was part of an actual meal, an evening supper— probably received as the climax of the meal.  By the power of the Spirit and in response to the command of Jesus given at the Last Supper, this bread and wine became the true Body and Blood of Christ for the meal was an anamnesis of His sacrifice, the means by which His unrepeatable Sacrifice was present and effective in their midst. Partaking the meal was the means by which the baptized disciples of Jesus were reconstituted every week as His Body and remained united to Him (see 1 Corinthians 10:17).

       And then there was the clergy— i.e. the Twelve, the undisputed leaders of the Church, the authoritative witnesses to Christ possessing His full authority.  There was an old Jewish saying: “a man’s sheliach [i.e. his ambassador] is as himself”.  The apostles were the sheliachim of the Lord.  The Lord said so Himself: “He who receives you [i.e. the Twelve] receives Me and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me” (Matthew 10:40). After Pentecost the Twelve functioned as leaders of the Christians in their weekly gatherings and they ordained other men to function as leaders in their place after they had left town (see for example Acts 14:23).

       So, we have these three gifts: the bath, the meal, and the clergy.  Together they constituted the components of a family.  One entered the family through receiving the bath; one stayed in the family through gathering every week for the meal; and one grew in faith in the family through the teaching and leadership of the clergy.  This differentiated the followers of Jesus from anything else in their world.  Romans might join a collegium (a kind of club based on shared interests); individual Greeks might subscribe to a philosophy (such as Stoicism) and try to live according to its teachings and ideals or they might be initiated into one or several of the so-called “mystery religions” seeking union and eternal life from a deity but none of these were quite like the Church of Jesus Christ.  The Church was (and is) unique.

       What is the significance of the fact that Jesus left us a bath, a meal, and a clergy?  Several things.

First it means that salvation is not a strictly individual matter but is corporate to its core, for these things unite us to a family.  Embracing a philosophy, joining a collegium, or being initiated into a mystery religion were all individual matters— you might feel a sense of kinship with others who had done the same thing but at the end of the day these did not impact your basic identity. 

It was otherwise with Christ’s gifts:  taking the bath and sharing the meal and following a clergy meant that you were now not just an individual but part of a body and this meant that you shared the same identity with others who had taken the bath and shared the meal.  That is because those things united you to Christ with a union so deep and basic that you became one spirit with Him (1 Corinthians 6:17) and therefore shared the same sort of union with your fellow Christians. 

That is what St. Paul meant when he said that Christians were “members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25) and what Christ meant when He said that His disciples were one with each other in the same way that He and the Father were one (John 17:22-23). One’s identity was now rooted in Christ and therefore with His other followers.

Secondly, it meant that that the gap between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and the physical (something basic to Judaism and to all religions) had been bridged.  Or, to put it more precisely, that heaven and earth, the spiritual and the physical, had been fused.        

In the ancient world it was assumed and was axiomatic that the physical and the spiritual were not only separate but were incompatible.  The Gnostics made this incompatibility the cornerstone of their thought which is why Gnosticism was so popular.  The Christians declared that this incompatibility had been overcome in Christ— perhaps not surprisingly since Christ was both 100% God and 100% man in one person. 

So, the Christians said, if you want to experience the divine and spiritual reality of the new birth, you did something as human, workaday, and common as taking a bath.  If you wanted to receive the forgiveness of sins that came with being united to Christ’s Body and Blood, you did something as human, workaday, and common as having a meal.  There were other human, workaday and common things as well: if you wanted to experience the divine power for healing your body, you were anointed with oil, which is something everyone did every day (see Matthew 6:17 and James 5:14).  Calling these workaday things names like “Holy Baptism”, “the Holy Eucharist” and “Holy Unction” can hide from us how the Lord chose common physical activities to be Spirit-bearing instruments of divine power.  (One could also mention icons in this.)  The bodiless God who came bodily for our salvation chose to use such bodily and physical things to save us.  That is why St. Leo the Great said (in his sermon on the Ascension) that “our Redeemer’s visible presence has passed into the sacraments”.  Since God became incarnate our spiritual salvation is now relentlessly physical.

Finally, this also means that our salvation is now communal— that is, hierarchical.  We are part of a family and all families have heads (i.e. leaders) and members with different roles.  This is clear in biological families:  dad is the head of the family, ruling it along with mom.  Grandpa is respected as a source of wisdom and history as the grandma, each having their own unique contributions.  Uncles and aunts have their different roles.  Big brothers and big sisters have different roles than little brothers and little sisters.

In other words, “even as the body is one and yet has many members and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ…for the body is not one member, but many” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 14). 

This means that 1. every member of the church has a different and valuable function and 2. there is hierarchical leadership in the church.  The church is not a democracy or a free-for-all, but a family with a head.  That is why we are told “obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account” (Hebrews 13:17).  Sometimes this can be difficult, given both the stubbornness of the human heart and the errors of the leaders, but it remains our task nonetheless.

A bath, a meal, and a clergy—in other words, a family—these are the gifts Christ left with us.  We might have thought He should’ve left us more, such as a book of Ikea instructions called “How to Assemble and Run a Church” but He did not.  He did something better:  along with these gifts He sent us His Spirit, to guide, instruct, correct, and strengthen.  And (as anyone who has struggled with either Ikea instructions or a book of systematic theology can attest) this is much better.

      Personal Note: There will be no blog post next week since I will be on vacation and away from computers. I will return Oct. 10. Please say a little prayer for me as I travel. Bless you!