The Noble Peach
We live in a reductionist age. Politicians and salesmen try to communicate through sound bites. Even great ideas are reduced to slogans. There is a tendency to strip away all that is superfluous in the hope of discovering the essentials. It should not surprise us that this has also become one of the most popular approaches to religion and the Church.
The paradigm for this ecclesiology is the noble peach. The essence of all that a peach is and can become is found in the seed. To get at it one has to strip away the fuzz, the peel, and even the flesh. The seed contains within it thousands of peaches, forests of trees, and therefore a kind of immortality. Some future human being, living at the end of the fourth millenium may enjoy a peach from a tree that can be traced back to this single seed. All that a peach is and may become is mysteriously contained in that seed. Rip away the non-essentials and discard them if you really want to get at the mystery.
That is precisely how many people search for Jesus and the meaning of His Church. They see the layers of history and tradition as hindrances in the way of knowing the real Jesus. The only church of interest to them is the simple church of the apostles. Anything else is a distraction. They seek one peach of a church. Unfortunately, they will most likely never find it. They can imagine one that comfortably fits what they hope to find, but the real Church can no more be discovered in this radical reductionist way than a great painting can be discovered by removing all its colors.
The truth is that the search for Jesus has more in common with peeling an onion than in removing the flesh of a peach. Jesus is not found at the center of the onion. He is contained in its layers. He is present in the Wisdom of Sacred Scripture, even the difficult passages that seem to stand in the way of things I may want. This is the closest layer to the center, but it is not the center.
Jesus is found in the liturgies, the practices of the people, the laws, the leadership, and the entire lived experience of what the Church is in human history. Each layer contains something of the mystery. If each of these layers is cut away and discarded, the mystery of Jesus and His Church are thrown away in the process. When all of these layers are gone and the center of the onion is reached, all that is left is a handful of stink that will make you cry.
The mystery of Christ can not be separated from the mystery of the Church. Jest as Jesus was both human and divine, the Church is both human and divine. The difference between Jesus and His Church is that He was a man like us in all things, except sin. The Church is human in all things, including sin. Jesus never sinned. The Church does.
To expect the Church to be too good is to deny its humanity. That would be a distortion of one of its two natures. Expecting the Church to be more perfect that it can be is one of the oldest and most pernicious of heresies. The Church was not strict enough for the Donatists who refused to forgive some kinds of sins. It was not pure enough for the Catharist who demanded that its perfect ones, live like angels. It was not scientific enough for the Rationalists or simple enough for the Fundamentalists.
The Church sometimes sins. I'm not speaking about the more notorious things people are always bringing up - the crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and social injustices. When I say that the Church sins, I mean the daily things that are sometimes done in its name which are directly opposed to the spirit of its Founder.
- excerpt from Fr. John D. Bolderson's Bones of Contention, Queenship Publishing Company, 2001. pp 64-65
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