Vigils Reading

THE LIVING

APOSTOLIC CHURCH

By Cardinal Jean Danielou

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It is the manhood of Jesus that is the Temple of the new Law, but this

manhood must be taken as a whole, that is to say, it is the Mystical Body in its

entirety; this is the complete and final Temple. The dwelling of God is the

Christian community whose Head is in heaven, and whose members are still

making their earthly pilgrimage; it is the true Temple of which the Temple of

stone was the figure. “Be you also as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a

holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus

Christ“…

There is a basic difference between the Temple at Jerusalem and the

Christian Church. Under the old law, the presence of God is connected with the

building of stone; under the new law, it is connected with the spiritual

community. The church of stone is not in the succession of the Temple, but of the

synagogue; it is the assembly, the ecclesia, the meeting-place. Or rather, at the

same time it continues both of them, since it is the normal place for the sacrifice.

But it can be dispensed with; it is not necessary that it should be there for the

celebration of the Mass, while the community is necessary.

Thus is fulfilled the saying of Jesus: “Where there are two or three

gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them“. It is the

essential condition required for the offering of an acceptable host that is

presented in the Sermon on the Mount, where it is written: “If you offer your gift

at the altar, and there you remember that your brother has any thing against

you, go first to be reconciled to your brother: and then coming you shall offer

your gift“. No offering is accepted save that which is made in charity, in

community. For there the temple is, the one and only place where man is in the

presence of God.

This is an extraordinary fact, as extraordinary in its own order as the

presence of God in the Temple at Jerusalem. God enters into relationship not

with isolated souls, but with the community. Through the baptismal rites, the

entry of the catechumen into the church of stone is a figure of entry into the living

Church, into the community which is the place of meeting with God. Of this

meeting the Eucharist is the permanent sign, being at once the sacrament of the

mystical body and the sign of the real presence, and bringing about at the same

time union with God and the strengthening of the bonds of charity. Sin has the

effect simultaneously of alienating the sinner from the presence of God, and of

separating the sinner from the community. The primitive discipline of the

Church made this clear when it excluded the sinner publicly from the community.

The sinner still remains excluded from communion; and reconciliation with God

is necessarily required by the community as intermediary. This is the meaning of

confession, in which the priest represents the people, which itself represents God.

This is why the Church has the deposit of the living Word of God. It is in her

that the Word mysteriously dwells, thus continuing the Incarnation of the Logos.

We come to faith in Christ not by the study of dead literary documents, but in a

preliminary way through the living witness of an organism sustained and

animated by Christ, through the teaching of the living Apostolic Church; in a full

and effective way by immediate contact with the living Christ in the Church,

through the operation of grace acting in all its fullness in the sacrament.