The Ministry Of Jesus And The Relationship Of Justice And Worship

Jesus' ministry portrays for us a radical vision of the kingdom of God, where God is known through forgiveness and the human community is united in love and peace. Christian liturgy points us to this vision and must be shaped according to it.

The most radical and distinctive thing about Jesus' ministry was, indeed, his vision of a universe where God alone is ruler. This was not the typically eschatological vision common to many preachers and prophets in first-century Palestine—an eschatology which predicted an impending apocalyptic catastrophe that would overturn both nature and the political order, and result in victory and vindication for God's chosen elect (the land and people of Israel). Like John the Baptist before him, Jesus had "?existentialized?" eschatology, shifting its focus away from cosmic cataclysms and military victories to concern for the individual's relation with God. But unlike John, Jesus saw this relation "?not as the harsh judgment of a terrifying God but as the intimate presence of a loving parent?" (Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming [New York: Vintage Books, 1988], 59). For Jesus, what is arriving is neither a cosmic explosion nor a judge with fire in his eyes, but a lover whose only "?cause?" is the human cause, i.e., the peace, joy and freedom of the human community. God's own self is given over completely to the human world, Jesus claimed, and so a radically new order of things is emerging—an order in which traditional expectations, opinions, and values are subverted or reversed. The Beatitudes point to this new order by calling "?blessed?" precisely those people we would rather ignore—the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the "?bleeding hearts?" (peacemakers, seekers of justice). Try putting some of our contemporaries among these "?blessed ones,?" and the radical danger of Jesus' vision become clearer: "?Blessed are the homeless … Blessed are the addicted wandering city streets … Blessed are the battered women … Blessed are persons living with AIDS.?" The Unleashed Revolution In nutshell, Jesus unleashed a revolution that requires both a redefinition of God and an utterly new way of relating to one another. Four aspects of that revolution deserve particular attention: Jesus proposed a radical redefinition of who God is and where God is: Jesus rejected the notion of a God with "?an attitude,?" whose ego and agenda are opposed to the interest of the human family. Instead, Jesus proclaimed the astonishing and unfathomable mystery of God's disappearance into humankind (see Sheehan, First Coming, 61). From now on, Jesus announced, God's "?self?" can be defined only in and as one's neighbor, only in and as "?the least of these little ones.?" Moreover, all creation—the whole world with its limitless history of death and sacrifice, grandeur and decay—has become the holy temple where God is revealed, bestowed, met, loved, embraced and worshiped. In short, the first and most fundamental liturgy we are called to celebrate is the "?liturgy of the world?"—the holy festival which Chilean poet Pablo Neruda saw arising from the "?confusing impurity of the human condition,?" from "?the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding—willfully rejecting and accepting nothing.?" This "?liturgy of the world?" is an ecumenical event shared with all other creatures who experience this world as grace: For Jesus, who is God and where God is can be known only in and as the human world—its persons, its passions, its purposes, its destiny. Jesus proclaimed forgiveness as the basic name for our experience of God: But this forgiveness is not primarily a "?moral category?"; it is neither a need arising from our shame and guilt nor a reward for our good behavior. Instead, forgiveness has to do with Jesus' radical—and non-chronological—sense of time (time defined by content, not duration). Rejecting the "?salvation history?" model of time (with its ineradicable past, its present to be endured, and its future to be endlessly awaited), Jesus proclaimed the present-future. The "?eschatological future?" is already arriving, is already breaking into the world—quite literally—as God's forgiveness, as God's own gift of self erupting everywhere, appearing "?on the inside of everything and on the outside.?" For Jesus, forgiveness thus means God's presence, God's arrival in the present moment of our human life and history. That presence floods the universe, and waits only to be acknowledged, grasped, shared and celebrated. In Jesus' view, we experience the arrival of God's reign as forgiveness, and we extend it through the praxis of human liberation: If God is known only in and as one's neighbor, then God arrives only in and as the enactment of justice and mercy in our world. As Jesus understood it, the reign of God is transformed into the practice of human liberation, of working to free ourselves and others from anything and everything which keeps us from experiencing this world as grace, as gift, as presence and self-bestowal of God. Whatever prevents us or others from affirming "?this earth as honey for all creatures and all creatures as honey for this earth?" is contrary to God's reign. Here we are at the threshold of some very serious questions about the relation between our celebration of liturgy and the praxis of human liberation. How—and to what degree—do our liturgies enable us to experience the world as grace, as gift/presence/self-bestowal of God? Can a liturgy roaring with psychobabble, convulsed by graceless gestures, cramped by ugly furnishings, and divorced from the great bodily cycles of mating, birth and death that inspire awe and arouse fascination in our species—can such a liturgy enable the assembly to experience the world as grace or to work so that others may find that experience? Indeed, can the liturgy have any meaning at all in a world (and sometimes, a church) that marginalizes its "?have-nots?" (its woman and children; its ethnic, racial and secular minorities; its economically underprivileged) and rewards those who resist changing the status quo? Jesus believed God's reign signals the end of religion and the beginning of what religion is supposed to be about. As our sources describe them, there is little in Jesus' message or ministry to suggest he was interested in reforming religious practices or initiating new ones. Instead, Jesus seems to have been completely preoccupied by the paradox of God's presence—the arrival of God's forgiveness which, simultaneously, signals God's disappearance into people, into the liberating practice of justice and mercy (see Sheehan, The First Coming, 222). God can be found only where these latter are found—or, as the footwashing rite of Holy Thursday reminds us, "?Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est.?" Liturgy and Justice Paradoxically, then, Christian worship (like the Ruler in whose name it is celebrated) rehearses the end of religion, announces the arrival of that "?new and more cheerful order of things?" which Jesus called "?the reign of God.?" Worship in Jesus' name is thus not a journey's end, but a point of departure that launches the community on vast waters of exploration. Several characteristics that shape the liturgy of the Christian assembly flow from these facts: Christian liturgy is historical—and so is acutely aware that it is a way of doing things that has not always existed. Compared to the rites of many archaic peoples (rites believed to have originated by divine fiat in some mythic, immemorial time), the liturgy of the Christian assembly is a tent pitched at nightfall by pilgrims who know they will have to pull us stakes and move on in the morning. Further, the language of our liturgy is the language of historical communities. The words we use to praise and thank God are the same time-bound words we use to make love or make amends—the words of our wrinkles, vigils, and dreams, the words whispered when our hearts are numbed by grief or surprised by joy. So too our gestures—touches, kisses, hands raised in petition or praise, bowed heads, bent knees—all are worn by time's trades, each is marked by a tumultuous human history of use. Because it is historical , Christian liturgy is inextricably linked to the human search for peace and the human struggle for justice. Christian worship is provisional—and so is aware of the painfully limited nature of all our attempts to know and name the Divine. Our liturgies are not final answers to all theological questions. Rather, every liturgy is a hermeneusis, a lived interpretation of what human existence is. Notice how the liturgy never lets us linger too long on any single aspect of the mystery of faith, but rather rotates that mystery—like a jewel bending sunlight—through the repeated cycles of human years and human lives. Christian liturgy refuses to become ideology. It unfolds its wisdom by hints and guesses, by offering many different versions of what existence is and means. A liturgy that can celebrate a "?happy fault,?" a "?necessary sin,?" and a "?blessed passion?" is clearly conscious of the fact that to live by faith means to live with the ultimate undecidability of what is human or divine, nature or grace, within the complex textures of a world into which God has "?disappeared.?" Liturgy does not teach us the answers; it teaches us to love the questions. Christian worship signals the reign of justice and mercy—and so is never an end in itself, is never "?art for art's sake.?" The whole point of our assembling Sunday by Sunday is to discover ourselves as the place where the mystery of the present-future (as Jesus envisioned it) comes alive and is enacted as liberation. In our liturgy, as Karl Rahner once suggested, we erect a small but indispensable sign that points to the world and all it contains as ceaselessly possessed by grace from its innermost roots. That grace which saturates Creation is made visible, however, only when we become what we celebrate, bread broken in mercy for the world. Because it rehearses the advent of God's reign, worship calls us to self-surrender—to the offering of ourselves as the compassion that lets in another's pain, as the acceptance that embraces another's failure, as the love than ends another's fear, as the life that kills another's death. Christian liturgy celebrates the holy violence of conversion. "?The law and the prophets lasted until John, but from then on the reign of God is proclaimed, and anyone who enters does so with violence?" (Luke 16:16). Although these enigmatic words of Jesus are open to a variety of interpretations, one thing is clear: if you hope to become part of God's reign, you must let yourself be overtaken, knocked breathless, by a Presence, a Reality you can neither invent nor control. In a word, you have to open your life to the holy violence of conversion—a tumultuous experience that is liable to leave you feeling drenched and exhausted, as through the sea had seized, swallowed, and spat you back alive on shore. Newborn and salted, you sense that nothing looks the same, nothing can ever be the same—for in conversion's crucible a new and terrible beauty is born.