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JESUS’ VISION OF A NEW COMMUNITY
By Fr. Aloy Cartagenas, STD

Christmas invites Christians to enter a world larger and more complex than the intimate scene of a crib, a stable, an infant and a pair of adoring parents. If, as we believe, Christmas celebrates God’s irrevocable choice of our world as the place where salvation happens socially, then our concern must reach beyond the personal arid private.
Unredeemed economic (”to the one who has, move will be given”) and unrestricted consumerism (”when in doubt, buy something else) have made Christmas a commercial success but a theological disaster. Social concern at Christmas is not a negligible trifle; it is central to the meaning of the season. Christmas celebrates the ultimate liberation of human beings through the flesh in Jesus Christ, then the liberation of oppressed peoples has something vital to do with our celebration.
Our readings for the Christmas cycle invite us to dwell not so much at the stable in Bethlehem as on the appearance of Jesus as the one who inaugurates a new community. That is why the lectionary readings move with amazing speed from the scene at the manger to the scene at the Jordan, where John baptizes Jesus.
It is this scene—Jesus’ baptism—that reveals the intimate connection between the Christmas season and social concerns. The theological importance of the event (recorded in all the gospels) should not be underestimated. By accepting John’s baptism of repentance, Jesus identifies himself fully with humanity’s sinful, guilt-ridden condition. He stands with all human beings who look for a radical change of heart and life (conversion), who carve liberation from the power of sin and evil, who seek release from all forms oppression—religious, political, social and economic. Jesus reveals God as the one who “judges” world by identifying with its hungers.
Jesus’ baptism thus signals the imminent approach of a God whose power is displayed through solidarity with the powerless. For only a God, superbly tender and strong can afford to become in Jesus weak and foolish for the sake of guilty humanity.
Jesus’ taught that God alone is Rule: all human institutions are infected by false values and unjust conditions, a teaching squarely in line with Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Yet he was more radical still, arguing that injustice could not be eliminated through reformation (whether violent or gradual) of existing institution. He perceived, in the words of Juan Mateos, that “the root of the troubles of humanity lies in the very foundations of the institutions it has created: in the striving for money, desire for prestige and thirst for power; in the threefold ambition of holding, climbing and commanding that spurs people on to rivalry, hatred and violence” (“The Massage of Jesus,” Sojourners, July 1977).
The way out of this impasse, Jesus claimed, is through voluntary renunciation of holding, climbing and commanding. He bequeathed to his disciples not a program for social reform but a pattern for a new human community: one based on the voluntary renunciation of holding goods, competing for success and controlling others. Our concern for justice and liberation in the human family is rooted theologically in Jesus’ vision of that kind of community, a vision laid before us in the biblical readings chosen for Advent and Christmastime.
A Christian parish becomes its best self when it accepts the challenge of community. The parish community, as the real expression of a local church, cannot limit its attention to the search for justice and intimacy among its own members; it must be prepared to take up the cross, standing against evil and injustice wherever they exist. This may seem like a harsh message for the Christmas season, but in fact it is the church’s message at all times, in all seasons. There is, ultimately, only one mystery Christians celebrate: the paschal mystery, Jesus’ dying and rising in a new human community called “church.”
How, concretely, do Christian congregations accept the challenge of Christmas to “become church?” Put another way: How might Jesus’ challenge to form a new human community be integrated into existing parish structures? There are numerous examples but none more important than community formation.
The Christmas season provides an excellent opportunity for those who desire to become part of the baptized community to see that community facing Jesus’ challenge to become the “new human community.” Both candidates for baptism and the baptized are confronted by the same evangelical imperative: renunciation of the “hoarding, climbing and commanding” that leads to oppression and violence. If the parish is not striving to become a “community of renunciation/’ there is nothing for the baptismal candidate to be “initiated into.”
The presence of candidates for baptism forces the community to return to its roots, to the twofold appearance of the Lord proclaimed in the season’s biblical reading: judgment and invitation. The candidates reveals the community’s need for conversion as a permanent structure of Christian life, while the community discloses the candidate’s need for the church as a “place” where the voluntary renunciations demanded by the gospel are enfleshed.
How. the parish celebrates, the seasonal liturgies of Advent and Christmastime probably gives those who will be initiated into the faith community their best clue about the community’s perception of itself, its mission and its relation to the larger world of economic and political realities. For a community’s liturgy very quickly reveals who it is and how it views itself; a few questions are good indicators: Has “renunciation” become a forgotten fact in the congregation’s life? Does your parish’s celebration of the liturgy reveal a fixation on good feelings, satisfying relationships, or does it challenge people to responsibility for forming the “new human community” envisioned by Jesus? Do the homilies risk raising bold and uncomfortable questions about conversion? Does the congregation reflect an awareness of such realities as homelessness and hunger through its prayer, its action and its participation in the larger community?
A community that is not serious about conversion and renunciation in its own life can hardly encourage baptismal candidates to embrace them. They may very well minister to the community by acting as its “conscience”.
Christmas calls a community back to its origins by remembering Jesus’ as a human child, a prophet of God’s reign, a judgment and its projects. What a congregation celebrates during this season is the beginning of a decisive new phase in the tempestuous history of God’s hunger for human companions.
The social concerns of the season are thus rooted in Jesus’ proclamation of God’s reign: the renunciation of patterns that oppress others and the formation of a new human community that voluntarily embraces those renunciations.
It is an adult Christ that the community encounters during the Christmas cycle: a risen Lord who invites sinful people to become church. Christmas asks us to recognize that the wood of the crib became the wood of the cross.

(Source: Liturgy 9, Summer 1991, 3: 81-83)

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 3:26 am and is filed under Insights.