St. John Evangelist Vs The Gnostics

December 27, 2018

Feast of St. John the Evangelist

Every human movement begins with high ideals preached by an effective communicator. Thus Luther began by noticing and preaching against the corruption he saw in Rome. Our democratic republic took its original light from Thomas Paine. Jefferson and Madison and their compatriots gave us the U.S. Constitution, with its separation of powers and federalist limitations on the national government. The Republican party arose from the ideals of Lincoln and the anti-slavery Whigs. The modern Democrats derived much of their fervor and philosophy from Catholic governor Al Smith and his colleagues, who were energized by Pius XI’s encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno.

But every human institution is also directed and afflicted with human leadership, humans who are flawed, wounded by original sin and its effects. So Luther’s movement, operating outside of the Catholic church, ended in forty thousand Protestant denominations–the scandal of the Christian religion, founded by Christ, the one who prayed that we all be One in Him. Both of our major political parties today suffer a kind of stiffness that result in government paralysis. And our republic is in many ways so wounded that the founders probably roll over at least once a week. All human institutions seem to rot, the further they get from their foundational principles.

St. John, in his old age in exile on the nothing island of Patmos, off the coast of modern Turkey, heard of and read about that kind of rot that was afflicting some of his nearby Anatolian churches. So the Holy Spirit inspired him to write the Book of Revelations, or Apocalypse of John, which begins with encouragement and admonition to the seven churches John appears to have been a kind of Archbishop to. Moreover, John wrote three letters which the Church has preserved, the first of which we began to hear proclaimed today.

The rot that seems to infect churches after their establishment is of two kinds. People come to Christ with baggage, baggage of the intellect and baggage of the will. The bad habits they have come to in a sense enjoy before professing faith in Christ, their moral failures, particularly having to do with sexual expression and family, do not disappear with baptism. If they have been unfaithful or unchaste or perverse before joining the church, they are likely to continue being attracted to those sins afterwards. That’s why we continually preach conversion and frequent confession, communion, and prayer. All the Apostles had to face that if they survived the first few years of ministry. We can see it in the letters of Paul, Peter, Jude, James and John.

But there are also habits of thinking, failures of the intellect, that can carry over past baptism. If a convert was from a Jewish background, that family was likely to continue keeping kosher and expecting other Christians to refrain from pork and shellfish, as well as adultery and incest. If a new Christian was a pagan, he’d probably continue to cook and eat the cheap cuts of meat that came out of the pagan temple sacrifices. And that would scandalize some of the other Christians.

In the second half of the first century, however, there were some heresies that crept into Christian churches that are lumped together and called “gnosticism.” The Greek word gnosis means “knowledge” in English. It was a complex religious movement that reached its full flowering in the 2nd century, but John faced its beginnings at the end of the first century. It came to Catholicism from the pagan world.

In general, Gnostics taught that it’s what a person knows that saves him. The idea is that there are secrets known only to the special few that set them off and give them the means to understand the spiritual element of humans, the only thing worth revealing. They taught dualism, the notion that the physical is evil, maybe made by an evil God, and the spiritual is good. Jesus Christ was then the one who brought this knowledge. Some believed Jesus was just an apparition, a spiritual reality, not in the flesh. Thus John emphasizes that the Word was made flesh, and pitched His tent among us, in His Gospel, chapter 1. In this letter he tells us Christ “was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands.” Spirit and body, flesh and spirit are Christ, and in us are all to be redeemed. Moreover, the great promise to us is that we, like Jesus and Mary, will rise from the dead to be present, spirit, soul and body, to our God forever and ever. And so we say, St. John the Evangelist, pray for us.