When I look at you I see people I am not inclined to like. In the same way I did not think much of Christ. I thought Christ was irrelevant, impotent, a matter for others. I did not recognise him for who he is.
Just as I did not recognise Christ, so I do not recognise you. I thought you were incompetent and so I avoided you. But now I understand that you are given to me and set before me by Christ. You are the people he has chosen, for me now. In order to receive him I have to receive you and I cannot have him without taking you – you are him to me. There is no way to Christ for me except through the people I want to avoid. Now, teeth still gritted, I have to open up to you, pass on to you the things given to me, love and trust you, even though I know that that trust will be betrayed many times before it is vindicated. But for the first time you are becoming visible to me as you will be.
This love also obliges me to tell you what a way you have to go. If I love you, I have to correct you, and I have to put with the dislike, bafflement and hurt that that brings, understanding that this is the very opprobrium that Christ carries for me. So let us no longer look at the Church and see only a corrupt, despicable institution, or a hierarchy, separable from Jesus. When we do not see that is our sin, made visible there on the cross, it remains our sin. When we do see that it is our sin that he is carrying there, then it is no longer our sin, for he has really taken it away from us. Jesus is Christ – anointed – with his whole people, among them the people in church and classroom whom we may no longer regard as inadequate, but in reconciliation and union with whom we are being made perfect.
