20.1
WE have observed the modern tendency to ignore the Devil. This is almost as great as the ignoring of the Apostles. If the first ignoring leaves unexplained a most important element in the work Our Lord came to do, the second badly falsifies Our Lord's plan for the continuation of His work upon earth. It is clear that Our Lord attached an enormous importance to what He would do to the Devil and through the Apostles. Our concern now is with the Apostles.
Consider what He said to them at the Last Supper, these men who were about to desert Him: “I do not speak of you any more as My servants; a servant is one who does not understand what his master is about, whereas I have made known to you all that My Father has told Me; and so I have called you My friends. It was not you that chose Me, it was I that chose you. The task I have appointed you is to go out and bear fruit, fruit which will endure.” (John 15:15-16)
Clearly, He was preparing them for a great thing; and we will not understand His plan for mankind, unless we see their place in it. In that plan there are many elements, but as His teaching proceeds, two emerge as dominant. One is the coming of the Kingdom, the other the spiritual shaping of men's souls by the gifts of truth and life that He brings. Take the teaching on the Kingdom first. The angel who announced to Mary that she was to be His mother said of Him: "His kingdom shall never have an end". (Luke 1:33) It was on His claim to found a kingdom that the Jews framed the charge upon which Pilate sentenced Him to death. Our Lord made it clear that His kingdom was not the kingdom the Jews wanted, nor the kingdom that Pilate would have thought worthy of drastic preventive action.
The interchange between Our Lord and Pilate, indeed, is worth noting. Our Lord had said: "My kingdom is not of this world"; Pilate asks: "Thou art a king then?" Our Lord answers: "It is thy own lips that have called Me a king. What I was born for, what I came into the world for, is to bear witness of the truth." (John 18) Here as elsewhere, we see that Our Lord's kingdom is bound up with the spiritual gifts He had come to bring. He was founding a kingdom, in which those who believed in Him should receive truth and life.
Just as the Kingdom and the gifts were two sides of the one reality, so are the things He was preparing for the Apostles, stated sometimes in terms of the Kingdom, and sometimes of the gifts. We are all meant to enter the kingdom, as citizens of the kingdom. Our Lord was set over the kingdom, as ruler by His Father; and now the Apostles are to be rulers in the kingdom, and not simply citizens. In this kingdom the ruler must be not only one who commands but one who serves. Christ serves supremely; but in their measure the Apostles likewise must serve. His service we have already seen analyzed, as opening the Way to Heaven by the sacrifice He offered, and giving the Truth and the Life, that men need to tread the Way. He now equips the Apostles to continue to serve in all those same ways. In the religious sphere they would require obedience to their commands; for without that there would be no unity and very soon no society. This is simply the background to service. They are to dispense the gifts of Truth and Life; for these cannot be given once for all. Each new generation and each new person, born into the world, must receive them. This continuance of the gifts of Truth and Life must strike us as obvious; once we grasp what the gifts are. There is another continuance, that the sacrifice is, in some way, to continue on earth. At the Last Supper Our Lord makes His Apostles not only teachers and ministers of the sacraments, but priests, offerers of the sacrifice. There was to be sacrifice in the Kingdom: St. John says “Thou wast slain in sacrifice - Thou hast ransomed us with Thy blood and given us to God. Thou hast made us a royal race of priests to serve God.” (Rev:9.)
Before a detailed examination of the kingdom Our Lord founded, let us summarize rapidly the preparation He had given the Apostles. First, as dispensers of His Truth, there was the three-year period in which they heard Him teaching others, and received special teaching for themselves. At the Last Supper Our Lord promised them further aid from the Holy Spirit: "Well, when the truth-giving Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, has come to befriend you. He whom I will send to you from the Father's side. He will bear witness of what I was". (John 15:26.)
After His Resurrection He enlightened their minds to make them under-stand the Scriptures. (Luke 24:45).
As dispensers of Life, their preparation was as thorough. He sent them out to administer baptism, whereby men are born again into the life above nature. He gave them the power to change bread and wine into His Body and Blood and administer it to men, “for unless we shall eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood we shall not have life in us” (John 6:54). He gave them the power to forgive sins, that is to restore to the souls of men, the life they have lost by rejecting God's will for their own.
This is too vast a preparation for a dozen men who were to survive Our Lord by so short a space, and then to leave the world as He had left it. What He was doing was to establish the framework of His kingdom; the kingdom of which there should be no end. In that kingdom He would work on men, through men until the end of time. The Apostles were to be the first of a line. They would multiply successors, and the successors would die, and their successors after them, but the line would never fail. The come and go of men would not matter, since it is the one Christ operating through all of them.
These men are simply to be human instruments in the hand of Christ Our Lord, with the value of what they do resulting because He does it. For the coming alive and continuance in life of His kingdom, the Holy Spirit must come on it and abide with it. "I am sending down upon you the gift that was promised by My Father; you must wait in the city until you are clothed with power from on high". (Luke24:49).
In the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles St. Luke adds to this. The Apostles had been asking Our Lord about the restoration of the Kingdom. He answered: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and you will receive strength from Him; you are to be my witnesses in Jerusalem and throughout Judea, in Samaria, yes, and to the ends of the earth". (Acts 1:8) & (see Acts 2:1-4)
20.2
Our Lord sees His kingdom and speaks of His kingdom with great precision of detail. Just before His Ascension He said to His Apostles: "Go teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you and lo, I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world". (Mt. 28:19-20)
Notice the threefold all - all nations, all things, all days. While there has been plenty of disputation over the word Catholic, this one phrase of Our Lord's should have prevented most of it. Catholic means universal. Examining the word universal, we see that it contains two ideas, the idea of all and the idea of one. Universal is some sort of unity embracing all, some way of having all in one, all nations, all teachings and all times. It is not an exaggerated description of the Catholic Church; and not by the wildest exaggeration, could it be advanced as a description of any other.
You will observe that the mission, Our Lord gave the Apostles, was to last till the end of the world. He was speaking to them, not as themselves only, but as officials in His kingdom, who should have successors until the end of time. They were to teach, that is they were to communicate truth, to baptize and to communicate life. He, who is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life, sends these men out to bring to the world His gifts of truth and life; and to bring men to the Way, too, for in finding them we find Him; where they are, He is.
This continuous presence of Christ with His Apostles gives us a double guarantee. First the certainty that the truth and the life we receive from them, we are actually receiving from Him, so that they are true truth and living life, His gifts to us, not their gifts to us. Second, and even more vital, the certainty that in contact with them, we are in contact with Him. He had already given us some hint of this in His lifetime. Sending out the seventy-two disciples, He said to them "He that hears you, hears me,"(Luke 19:16); in the same sense St. John says: “those who are baptized by them are baptized by Him.” (John 4:2)
If Our Lord was to be with them in their teaching and baptizing, and their work for the kingdom generally, why did they need the Holy Spirit? Christ, Our Lord, was the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, working among men, in and through the human nature He had made His own. We have seen that, because it was a human nature, it needed the supernatural life, the operation of the Blessed Trinity in the soul by grace, which is appropriated especially to the Holy Spirit. As God, Our Lord was infinite; but as man He needed the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. This is, not only to elevate and sanctify His human nature, but to give the special light and strength it needed for the special things, which the Son of God was to do in it. We have seen how Our Lord is constantly spoken of as being acted on by the Holy Spirit. “God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, so that He went about doing good, and curing all those who were under the Devil's tyranny.” (Acts 10:38) Just as the human nature, through which He worked on earth, received light and strength from the Holy Spirit; so the human society, through which He was to continue to work, would need light and strength from the Holy Spirit, in order that it might be maintained at the level of what He would use it to do.
We have seen that the word Catholic means all in one; and we have seen what the all is. Given that the Church was to teach all men all truths, and that Christ was to be with it in the teaching, it seems hardly necessary to add that it was to be one Church. But there is another place in which Our Lord entreats of the visible unity of His Church still more explicitly. At the Last Supper, having prayed for the Apostles, Our Lord went on to pray for all those who through their word should come to believe in Him. This was His prayer "that they all may be one, that they too may be one in us, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee; so that the world may come to believe that it is Thou who hast sent Me" (John 17:21). A unity among men as intense, in the human order, as the unity of Persons within the Blessed Trinity; an unity externally visible, so that the world could see it and be driven to conclude from it, that only the power of God could account for it.
20.3
Our Lord established His Kingdom with officials; through whom He would dispense His gifts of truth by way of doctrine, and life by way of sacrament. The kingdom was to be in the souls of men, since without that it could have borne no fruit, but not only in the souls of men. For the protection of the truth and the preservation of the integrity of the channels of life, our Lord made a further provision by choosing one of the Apostles, and giving him special functions. When He first called the Apostles, He said to Simon, the brother of Andrew, "thou shalt be called Peter" a word which means rock. When the end of His time on earth was drawing near, He made clear the reason for the change of names: (see Mt. 16:18-19)
At the Last Supper, a dispute arose among the Apostles, as to which should have first place in His kingdom. Our Lord settled it with the words: "Simon, Simon, Satan has claimed power over you all, so that He can sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for thee that thy faith may not fail; when after a while thou hast come back to me, it is for thee to be the support of thy brethren". (Luke 10:32)
After His Resurrection Our Lord appears among the Apostles, and three times asks Peter if he loves Him. As Peter answers each question with an affirmation of his love. Our Lord utters the three phrases: "Feed My lambs, Feed My lambs, Feed My sheep". (John 21:16-17) From these, we must see that the power entrusted to Peter was enormous. He is to be the rock, on whom the Church (which Our Lord calls also the kingdom of heaven) is to be founded. He is to have supremacy in the kingdom; for Our Lord promised him the keys, which are the symbol of supremacy. He is to have a final power of regulation and discipline; for his permissions and prohibitions are to be ratified in Heaven. At the Last Supper it is made explicit, that he is to safeguard the unity of the brethren, whom otherwise Satan would scatter like chaff, because by the prayer of God his own faith would not fail. This brings us to the word, infallibility. Peter is to shepherd the whole flock, the little ones and the great. He is to feed them. The spirit of man needs three kinds of food, and Our Lord came to provide them. "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God". Truth is food. "My meat is to do the Will of Him that sent Me". Law is food. "The food I shall give is My flesh for the life of the world". Sacrament is food. Peter must feed the flock with truth and law and sacrament.
It is significant that Our Lord, about to leave the earth, is conferring upon Peter His own special titles. Christ is the foundation (see 1 Cor. 3:11) and He makes Peter the foundation. Christ is the key-bearer: (see Rev. 3:7) and He makes Peter the key-bearer. To Christ belongs the power to hold these whom God has given Him; but He gives to Peter the charge of being a support to the brethren. Our Lord was truth giver and life giver; and the Church is to be truth giver and life giver. He will continue to give truth and life through the Church. Our Lord is rock and key-bearer and shepherd. He will continue, all that each title implies, through Peter. Church or Peter, it is all the same. Both are instruments, through which Christ has chosen to work.
This was the provision Our Lord made for the souls of men, that they might come to Him, be united with Him and receive His gifts till the end of time. His kingdom would grow, as it moved outwards and onwards, towards its two limiting points, all the nations of the earth and the end of time. There would be some increase of complexity in its structure to meet new needs created by its growth. All would be within the living framework He established upon earth, one kingdom, with a smaller body of officials serving the great body of plain citizens; and among the officials, one who is head over the rest, and the servant of all. The kingdom was, when the Holy Spirit descended on it at Pentecost. It still is. Until the end of the world it will be.