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| Ecce homo (behold the man) by Cigoli. |
We should not ground our faith in our denominations, our traditions,
or our culture but in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was
early in the development of the church that we saw these schisms, divisions,
and dissensions beginning to form. The apostle Paul, writing from Ephesus, a
city in present-day Turkey, around AD 55 or 56, addressed the “jealousy and
quarreling” (1 Cor. 3:3) in the church in Corinth:
For when one
says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human
beings? What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through
whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted
the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. (1 Cor. 3:4–6)
I believe it’s
not coincidental that one of these early disputes was about the human leaders.
Church leaders are never perfect; the only one who ever lived a perfect life
was Jesus Christ.
The early apostles were imperfect both before
and after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came to dwell in their mortal bodies.
Jesus had to rebuke the apostles a number of times over His three years with
them. New Testament author Luke told the story in the ninth chapter of his
Gospel of an argument among the apostles about which of them would be the
greatest. A little later, while entering a Samaritan town, the apostles asked
Jesus if they should “call fire down from heaven to destroy them [the village].”
Jesus rebuked them.
The apostle
Paul referred to the church as the “Body of Christ.” Not once did he refer to
it as the “Body of Christians.” He taught that there was no longer Jew or
Greek, slave or free, male or female, but all were one in Christ. (Gal
3:28) It’s time we embrace the diversity of the Body of Christ and
perhaps we’ll find the real Jesus.
From an excerpt from the
book, "Roaming Catholics: ending the wandering to embrace the wonder"
by the author. Available at Amazon.com
