Wednesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Collect of Holy Apostles

Lectionary: 385

Jesus summoned his Twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness.  

Jesus named “twelve apostles” to be the foundation for his new congregation. It would replace the former foundation of twelve tribes, descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob/Israel. At the time, that institution of twelves tribes was more mythological than real. Most of those tribes who survived four hundred years of Egyptian bondage had vanished when the northern kingdom of Israel was overrun by Assyria. The priestly Levites and David’s Judahites were the only ones left.

But the twelve apostles would not build a congregation of twelve different Christian tribes. Their mission was “Go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’“

They should collect the scattered descendants of Abraham first who would, with their foundational memories of faith, announce the Gospel to the nations. No one could know Jesus who did not know his ancestors and their history. The gentiles would be a branch grafted onto the tree of Abraham. As Saint Paul said, "Jew first, and then Greek."

Eventually Jesus’s Church would formulate a canon of scripture to resemble that new community. The Old Testament corresponds to its Jewish foundation; and the New Testament, to its new gentile nations. The Christian Bible contains “books” of ancient Jewish documents and more recent Christian correspondence. The New Testament relies heavily on a deep knowledge of Old Testament myths, histories, laws, prophecies, and songs. The story of Jesus fulfills the older text. Hearing of Jesus without a knowledge of the past would be like the proverbial man from outer space trying to understand today’s headlines.

But neither are these testaments self-explanatory outside the Church. The Bible is the Church’s “manual.” On my twelfth birthday my father gave me a “Manual for Boys.” Always eager for books, I dove into it only to discover it was useless to me unless I joined the Boy Scouts. The Bible is equally meaningless outside the Church. Why would anyone care about our history, doctrines, songs, or wisdom without living in Jesus’s house? If they’re looking only for comfort they could read the Koran, the Bhagavad Vita, or more recent poetry like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

The Church is a traditional community with a continuous history from ancient times to the present. We wrote, compiled, edited, published, and interpreted the Bible! We were not founded as an ad hoc committee to address a particular problem and then disappear. A community of faith, we are sinners who confess our fallen nature and admit our inability to save themselves. We begin every liturgy with an admission of sin. We celebrate our heroes and claim our rogues. We share both blessedness and guilt without hesitation for we know God's mercy. 

 

A Veteran, after reciting the Nicene Creed at Mass, recently asked me the meaning of apostolic. Churches of the major Roman cities could name the Apostle who arrived to tell them of the Lord. Despite some differences, these orthodox (apostolic) churches preserved the doctrines of the Apostles, and there was astonishing -- near-miraculous -- agreement among them, as the four gospels demonstrate. 

This "Catholic" -- meaning universal -- Church clung to the traditional doctrines of their founding apostles while heretics speculated wildly with novel ideas. Most heresies boasted only of a single congregation in one city. Because their teachings were based on their human opinions, they agreed on very little; and their founders created churches only in their image and to their liking.

Two millennia later, the Catholic Church still clings to the Apostolic tradition, even as some screwballs call themselves "other Catholic churches." There is and can be only One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.