The People of God
Some of you may have begun to think I had given up on my posts on the Second Vatican Council. Pilgrimages and the season of Advent have kept me away from my reflections on the council for several weeks, but I am ready to get back to them now. The great thing about a series of posts like this is that they will likely take more than a year to complete, as there are sixteen documents, each of which has many things to teach us about our faith.
The second chapter of Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, is entitled, The People of God. It begins with a reminder that we are saved as a people.
At all times and in every race, anyone who fears God and does what is right has been acceptable to him. He has, however, willed to make men holy and save them, not as individuals without any bond or link between them, but rather to make them into a people who might acknowledge him and serve him in holiness.
Lumen Gentium reminds us that Christianity is never to be, in the words of a recent military slogan, an army of one. We are saved as a people. The old saying goes, “the only thing one can do alone is go to hell.” The salvation offered to us by God was first revealed in his covenant with the people of Israel. But even during this covenant there was the promise of something greater in Christ.
Behold the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…. I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts and they shall be my people. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
We believe as Christians covenant made by God with the people of Israel was a preparation for Christ’s new covenant with the people of God who are now gathered into the Church. Our salvation is now still being won by Christ through the sacraments of the Church. Here is how Lumen Gentium describes it:
All those, who in faith look towards Jesus, the author of salvation and the principle of unity and peace, God has gathered together and established as the Church, that it may be for each and everyone the visible sacrament of this saving unity. Destined to extend to all regions of the earth, it enters into human history, though it transcends at once all times and all racial boundaries.
It never fails to amaze me as to how much wisdom was among the council fathers to begin their discussion of the Church by talking not about buildings, not about hierarchy, but about a people who are gathered together in Christ. The visible Church, like Christ, is very much a part of human history while at the same time wedded to heaven. We are the living stones that are meant to shine forth as a visible sign to the world of Christ’s salvation which is offered to all.
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