We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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A modernist scholar once complained that Jesus came to proclaim the Kingdom of God, but instead all we got was this lousy Church. He’s not the only person to have felt a bit disappointed, nor the only one to form the conviction that the Church is a tragic letdown, a mistake, and not something Jesus ever intended. One seldom looks round one’s local parish and is filled with the awestruck feeling, “Behold! The Kingdom!” It’s one of the things Uncle Screwtape rather enjoys banging away at, as he tells his nephew Wormwood:
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool.[1]
This odd tendency to mistake the merely pictorial for the spiritual is all over the place, I fear, in our current approach to the Faith. We imagine we are being spiritual, but really we have this vague notion that the “Kingdom of God” should somehow be a sort of egalitarian co-op of shining saints and folk affirming one another in their okayness, all in union with a Jesus who is not so much “Lord” as “Wise and Strong Affirmer of our Basic Goodness.” Certainly, much of the American Catholic Church is afflicted with this vision, leading to a celebration of the liturgy which author Amy Welborn has puckishly described as the Rite of the Church of Aren’t We Fabulous.
You’ve probably had to endure, at some point, a “sacred meal” where we gather around the Table to celebrate our Us-ness because it’s all about Us. We come to share our story, not humble ourselves before the gospel. We come to break the bread, not the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ fully present in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Altar. We come to know our rising from the dead, without the nasty business of taking up crosses. Some of our trendier talking heads speak of the “reign of God” and assure us that the crucifixion of Jesus was a tragic accident, not part of the plan of God at all. We are taught by some to see the liturgy as a time where we come to discover yet again that we are superior to all previous generations as, for instance, in a homily I once endured in which the priest informed us that even Jesus had to “learn to overcome his racism.” Along with this celebration of our superior Us-ness, we banish all those dark pre-Vatican II notions of sin, humility, and sacrifice, except for the sake of self-empowerment and toned abs, and assert our “dignity,” a word that sounds an awful lot like “pride” in the mouths of suburban Americans.
In short, we in the American Church start by talking about the “Kingdom” but somehow quickly end by talking about the People’s Democratic Republic of Heaven, free of odious and (this must be said with a sneer) “medieval” notions of hierarchy, authority, and so forth.
Given that Jesus’ conception of the Kingdom seems (in stark contrast) to have something to do with founding rather than fleeing from the Church, my suggestion for repairing the increasingly stark disconnect between AmChurch Cath Lite and the actual Church (and Kingdom) is to return to the language of Jesus and, in particular, to what words like “kingdom” actually mean in the minds of Jesus and his apostles. When we do that, we discover that before Jesus and his apostles look forward to the coming of the Kingdom, they have their minds rooted in the past and, in particular, focused on one King. It is King David and his kingly line that lie at the root of the entire Jewish conception of the Messiah.
For the Messiah is no one and nothing other than the Son of David. The entire Jewish conception of the Messiah rests on the conviction that God will make good on a promise given to David after he was made king of the people of Israel by popular acclaim and began to reign in Jerusalem. The language of that popular acclamation was, as we shall see, significant. But even more significant is the nature of the covenant God makes with David after the king seeks counsel from the prophet Nathan on whether he should build a “house” (i.e, temple) for the Lord. Nathan replies to him with this astonishing prophecy:
Go and tell my servant David, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Would you build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling. In all places where I have moved with all the people of Israel, did I speak a word with any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’ Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, that you should be prince over my people Israel; and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. And I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and violent men shall afflict them no more, as formerly, from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his Kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his Kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he shall be my son. When he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men; but I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. And your house and your Kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established forever.’” (2 Samuel 7:5-16)
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York, NY: MacMillan, 1970), pp. 12-13.
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