Senior Sem.

("The cross of the Church should always bear the image of the crucified Christ." I'm pretty sure that's the sweetest thing I've ever written.)

I am currently (literally, like, right now) working on the section my Senior Seminar thesis about the Church as the Body of Christ, and what it means to live a Eucharistic lifestyle. If this does not make any sense to you in the off-set, then the following part of it will not help illuminate that in the least. Or maybe it will...anyway, read this and tell me what you think.

Therefore, as the living, breathing Body of Christ, the church enacts the liturgy of the Eucharist not only during Sunday gathering, but also throughout the week by ministering to the world “after the fashion of Christ”, bearing testimony to Him and His Kingdom . We are to bring the life of Christ to the world, the life of His future Kingdom, and we do this by modeling the life of Christ: we enter into the places that no one else will stoop down to, befriend those who are not allowed to be fully human, and insist that the legitimacy of the social forces that allow for these very situations be called into question. Jesus’ social ethics are to be normative for the Church, including the ‘ethic’ of the cross. Jesus Christ lived so pervasively against the Powers the Be that he was killed, and, inevitably, the Church as the Body of Christ in the world will come up against the same powers: as Cavanaugh argues, the very fact that the Church participates “in a communal and public discipline of bodies” of the Eucharist will “be engaged in a direct confrontation with the politics of the world” .

For the Church to ‘count the cost’ of discipleship, we must remember that Jesus said if we would come after Him, we are to “deny [ourselves] and take up [our] cross and follow [Him]” (Mt. 16:24); we are not at liberty to define the meaning of ‘cross’ in regards to how suffering may be manifested in our individual lives—when Jesus said cross, He meant ‘instrument of death’, and when He said ‘follow me’, He was standing on the path that led to Jerusalem. The cross of the Church should always bear the image of the crucified Christ: to be a disciple of Christ and to participate in His Kingdom, we are “to share in that style of life of which the cross is the culmination” , the life of social nonconformity .

However, the Church never forgets that the death of Jesus on the cross was not an expression of the pinnacle of social and metaphysical evil’s power in the world, or a necessary act that ensures individual’s entrance into the Kingdom. The cross was the destiny of Christ, which He accepted; in fact, it was the culmination of His life, His purpose, His ethics, and was the fullness of His glory and “the inauguration of the kingdom”. As Yoder states: “the cross is not a detour or a hurdle on the way to the kingdom, nor it is even the way to the kingdom; it is the kingdom come” . If the Church to be the Body of Christ to the world—living out the lifestyle of the kingdom, the new social ethic, “a new pattern for the human community” made possible by the cross, then it must live and work in anticipation of the suffering and death that comes as a direct result of coming up against the powers of this world.