When we think about social justice — or, often, our world’s lack of it — we usually think of solutions in terms of lobbying, activism, community organizing, ethical consumerism, protests or voting. We do not usually think of the Church itself as having much to do with our society’s struggles, except maybe as a resource base for those other activities.
Yet the Church, I would suggest, is precisely God’s answer to the world’s problems. This is not because I long for a return to the Middle Ages, to Christian kings or papal states, or to the 1950s, when we sometimes imagine that Christianity enjoyed a bit more cultural hegemony. Rather, the Church is the solution to our problems because God intends the Church, right here and now, to be a community that is a foretaste of the kingdom of God.
What do I mean? We know that one day Christ will return to establish his kingdom. His reign will see the sorting out of our messes. There, in Christ’s future kingdom, centered around the worship of Christ in the flesh, we will live in harmony with God, one another and the rest of creation. That the Church today is a foretaste of this kingdom means that it is meant to consist of little pockets of people who try to live now, however imperfectly and brokenly, the life of that world to come. And the crazy thing is, in God’s wisdom — or folly as it may look to us — he has willed to make these communities the starting point for the transformation of the world.
That the Church is a foretaste explains a lot about the picture Scripture gives us of the Church. We are, here and now, gathered around the Lord’s flesh in the Eucharist, just as we will be in the kingdom. And out of this worship, as we see in the Acts of the Apostles, comes a tightknit community; so tightknit in fact that they had “all things in common” (Acts 2:44), and “no one claimed anything to be their own” (Acts 4:32). So, not only is the Church a radical community in the way early Christians were “always together” (Acts 2:46), but it also reordered the hierarchy that their world, and ours, usually attaches to wealth, status and achievement. In the Church there were “no needy among them” (Acts 4:34) because they all “sold their possessions and put them at the feet of the apostles” (Acts 4:35). The poor, foreigners, the homeless, the uneducated and even slaves were given full membership, on equal footing with the well-to-do.
Worship, community and “upside-down” social and economic relations; these should be characteristics we strive for within the Church even now, precisely because the Church is meant to be a little glimpse — a sneak peek — of what the kingdom of God will be like. Then, after all, “the first will be last, and the last first” (Mt 19:30). The Church is first intended to be the community among whose members social justice truly exists, precisely because it is a little image of that perfect kingdom to come. But importantly, it is also precisely by this community that God has chosen to begin to make a just world. God wants to evangelize the world by each of us individually bearing witness to Christ with our words and in our life. But he does so by giving the world a community — the Church — that is a living picture (however halting and even goofy our efforts are) of what human relationships with God, possessions and one another can be, and one day will be.
In this way, the internal life of the Church is essential to our mission. Our first task is not to change the world, but to be the Church, for it is only by seeing such a real, living, breathing community that our society can come to know that it is not sufficient unto itself, and to see what it could be.
Miller is director of Pastoral Care and Outreach at Assumption in St. Paul. He has a Ph.D. in theology from Duke University, and lives with his family at the Maurin House Catholic Worker in Columbia Heights. You can reach him at colin.miller1@protonmail.com.
