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People of God |
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The ecclesiology of Vatican Council II centers on communio – the vital union of each member of the Church with Christ and of all with one another in Christ. As a more concrete way of expressing this communio, the Council dwells on the expression “People of God.” “People of God” recalls the whole history of salvation, the record of God’s care for those he has created. The result of original sin was not only that each one was estranged from him individually but that human beings lost their natural solidarity among themselves and became fundamentally dispersed. God wished not just to save them singly, or one by one, but to gather them together into a chosen people and lead them – united under leaders designated and given by him – to the promised land (CCC 781; Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, 9). The Jews in the Old Testament are a figure of the Church as the new chosen people of God, open to all mankind. “The gathering together of the People of God began at the moment when sin destroyed the communion of men with God, and that of men among themselves. The gathering together of the Church is, as it were, God’s reaction to the chaos provoked by sin” (CCC 761). Vocation and Mission of God’s People • “People of God” emphasizes the pilgrim vocation of this new chosen people, their eschatological destiny as they make their way through human history toward the promised land. It suggests the particular joy that should be theirs at being summoned and gathered together by God and belonging to him, with special claims on his love and guidance and mercy. It stresses the calling addressed to each Christian to share in a common endeavor, the radical equality of Christian dignity, and the rights and duties as well as the distinctive graces of each one. To understand this biblical expression properly, it is important to realize that the emphasis is not just on “people” but rather on “God.” What matters is God’s choice: that the people are God’s. It is he who calls them together, leads and saves them. One becomes a member of this people not by physical birth but by being “born again,” through God’s grace given in Baptism (cf. CCC 782). It would be a radical misunderstanding of the biblical expression and of Vatican II’s intention in using it, to suggest that the Council thereby wished to introduce a more “democratic” notion of the Church, a Church where power would ultimately and properly derive from the people. The Church, hierarchical by constitution (cf. Lumen Gentium, 18-29), is a people gathered under God. Authority (rather than power) or jurisdiction exercised within the people comes “from above” (cf. Jn 19:11); in its fundamental aspects it can only come from a divine commission. One is encouraged to live a faithful Christian life by one’s consciousness of the privilege and dignity of belonging to God’s people: “The state of this people is that of the dignity and freedom of the children of God” (Lumen Gentium, 9). This consciousness helps one to exercise freedom so as to remain within that people as a living member. Human weakness leads us to commit sins; if these are serious, the consequence is that, though still within the community of God’s people, we are no longer living with its life. Nevertheless, we can always return to that life by Penance (consider the Prodigal Son: Lk 15:11-24). Heresy, however, and dissent, too, if truly radical, rupture our living communion with Christ and his members, and involve self-exclusion from the People of God (placing a person in a situation of “ex-communion”). The growing loneliness that many people experience today, even in the Church, is ultimately due to a sense of not belonging to a people, of not feeling the strength of common values and a common inheritance, of not having learned to rejoice in the grace and truth of Christ. “The sons and daughters of the Church, the children of this new people, rejoice in the King, in Christ” (Heschius: cf. Liturgy of the Hours, Lauds, First Sunday of Ordinary Time). The People of God is God’s only in the measure of its participation in the life and the triple mission of the Son of God. It is meant to be a “people on the move,” evangelizing the world of which it forms part. It is not a closed people, but is open to all those it meets, seeking to draw them to join in the pilgrimage to the promised land. Its mission is also to be salt of the earth and light of the world (CCC 782). Only a Church that is truly a united people, one in faith, charity, and ideals, one in respect for rights and in the fulfillment of obligations, one in love for lawful authority coming from God, can be “that messianic people which is a most sure seed of unity, hope and salvation for the whole human race” (Lumen Gentium, 9). See: Assent and Dissent; Baptism; Catholic Identity; Church, Membership in; Church, Nature, Origin, and Structure of; Communio; Dissent; Ecclesial Rights and Duties; Excommunication; Heresy; Judaism; New Covenant; Old Covenant; Schism. |
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