I've been reading my new book, which makes me ask, why have I never heard of this man before now? I'm speaking of Herbert McCabe. I guess Dominicans don't really get famous very often. God, Christ and Us is a collection of sermons and other teaching, so it doesn't come off like hard-to-read theology. I don't mind some of that myself, but this is very accessible.
Here's another quote for you to chew on - very good stuff on the Kingdom of God, about temporary things vs. permanent things. Check it out...
I think that the author of Hebrews is thinking of the fact that in one way we have received the promise, in one way the Kingdom has come. We are no longer simply groping in the dark. In a sort of way, in Jesus Christ the promise is fulfilled, the Kingdom is established - in an odd sort of way, myteriously, in the way we call 'sacramentally'. Sacramentally, we have arrived at the Kingdom, just as Abraham arrived as a stranger, a foreigner in the Promised Land. But he lived there in a tent - a temporary shack. And he didn't make the mistake of thinking that what he built was the real thing. It was just a structure he threw up while waiting for the gift of the real city, waiting for the terrible giving of the city, a giving that involved letting his people be broken and remade.
In a way the whole thing is a bit like growing up, becoming mature, becoming in fact fully human. ...Of course children already possess humanity. But it is also something they are reaching towards, something unknown. They must live in their childhood as in a tent, as in a temporary dwelling. They must not cling to it as a permanent possession. If they do, it becomes a hiding-place, a way of avoiding the call to set out and grow up. But obeying the call not only means not only venturing into the unknown. ...It means being prepared to let the tent be blown away by the wind of the Spirit.
Now the Church, and any other structures we use on our way to the Kingdom, or when we first arrive in the Kingdom, are all tents, shacks. But we can treat them as permanent. And then they become hiding-places, ways of evading the summons to receive the real city from the terrible hands of God, ways of refusing to be taken down into Egypt and remade, ways of refusing death and, therefore, of refusing resurrection.
The Church is a tent, a shack, a temporary dwelling on our way to the fullness of the Kingdom. Oh my. I think this is very true, though. And because this is true, we cannot afford to think of the Church as the point of it all. It is not the point. The Church is sacramentally the presence of the Kingdom of God on earth. It's a conduit, a tool God is using to move us from one way of being to another.
I've said this before. The Church is really a stop-gap solution for a broken people. It's not meant to be permanent. Once the fullness of the Kingdom swallows us all up, there will be no more need for the Church, our worship as members of it, it's liturgy, even for the Sacraments. We won't need all this any more at that point. We will be where It has been leading us.
This is not to say the Church is unimportant or not needed now. We are far from the recapitulation of all things. Until then, the Church is our vehicle of transformation. It is the vessel God has given us, in which we travel from the brokenness of this dimension of life into the fullness of the one we do not yet fully see and experience - more accurately, into the re-merger of these two dimensions, the earthly one and the Kingdom.
"Then, if we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike. Herein we cannot possibly do amiss." John Wesley
"Keep your eyes on the crucifix, for Jesus without the cross
is a man without a mission, and the cross without Jesus
is a burden without a reliever." Fulton J. Sheen
"...I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be
completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen
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