The Exhausted Matt Submits Humbly to the Church (Mark 5)

At Hyaets, we have the tendency to wear ourselves out. That is why, as you may have read before, that we take the Sabbath very seriously. Cause in the beginning God toiled for six days and then he RESTED on the 7th. Sometimes our rest doesn't always fall on the 7th day, but we still rest. Well I have toiled this week (or so it seems) and now it is time to rest. In about an hour we have our neighborhood community meal, and after that I want to go to bed so I can be well rested for my trip home tomorrow. But besides providing an excuse for a shorter blog post, I thought mentioning Sabbath would be a nice tie in to a very brief treatment of Mark 5: Humble Submission to Christ's Body, the Church.

Now without going into any depth at all, I want to touch on the two practical reasons that we submit humbly to the Church (that is, those who profess to believe in Jesus Christ) as offered by Ivan Kauffman in his essay on Mark 5. One, we do so to avoid the pride associated with individualism. By submitting to the Body of Christ, the community of believers, we subordinate our own and various individual ends to the overarching and supernatural end of the Church. Second, we submit in order to avoid spiritual pride. No one, including Jesus, likes a Pharisee, those whose sins were chiefly those of spiritual pride. By submitting to the Church, we realize that we are a constituent part of the Body of Christ, serving our own, unique function and carrying our own, unique crosses. We will hopefully realize that we, serving in those unique capacities, are not better than other, perhaps laxer, parts of Christ's body serving in different capacities.

Back to the relation between Sabbath and Church. As God gave the Sabbath to man as a sign of irrevocable covenant (Ex 31:16), God also created the world for men to be in communion with God through the Church, prepared by the election of Israel as the people of God. Sometimes to rest in the simple splendor of this telos for humankind is just what one needs to renew his or her mind and spirit...

Off to the community meal!

Pax et bonum