How do we live out
holiness in the context of community?
Already in the
Torah, God is preoccupied with the holiness of community. In the Book of Leviticus, God instructs Moses
to tell the whole Israelite community
that they shall not bear hatred for their brother or their sister in their heart. Instead,
he says, You shall love your neighbor as
yourself. To follow the precepts of
the Lord, to participate in the life he calls you to, is to be holy, and these
particular precepts tie us to our community in the most significant of
ways. God calls us to a holiness firmly grounded in the context of community. In
Psalm 103, the psalmist understands all of the blessings he has received – pardon, healing, redemption, kindness,
compassion, mercy and more – within the context of community. To know that God loves us and blesses us allows
us to love God and to love all: this is
the essence of community.
If Leviticus says
we are to find holiness in the context of each other, then Paul’s statement to
the Corinthians – you are the temple of
God and the Spirit of God dwells in you – explicitly equates the people
with the body as a whole; to destroy the temple would be to destroy the bonds
of community. And our identity comes
from that context of community:
community belongs to Christ and Christ to God. It’s not up to one or the other to consider himself wise, but for all to
belong to each other, even those who seem to fall outside the limits of what we
define as our community. If we follow the dictums of Jesus in
Matthew’s Gospel, we are to love our
neighbors but also our enemies! We must bring grace where there isn’t
any; we must bring good where there’s evil, rather than increase the evil in
the world. In the context of community,
such attention to grace is absolutely necessary. If we are, as Jesus states, children of our heavenly Father, we know
the infinite love that is ours; to know that infinite love should engender the
same love in us for others – all others.
If God cares about our enemies so much, loving them as he loves us, who
are we to do anything differently?
Community, Jesus is saying, is always bigger, greater, larger than our
narrow confines – and in it, we are called to be holy, perfect, just as our heavenly
Father is perfect, in love.
This post is based
on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source:
www.wordclouds.com
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