On Good Friday, after the ministers enter in silence and the congregation spends a few minutes in silent prayer, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer appoints the following collect:
Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
This prayer is very ancient, dating to the tenth century Gregorian sacramentary where it appointed for Wednesday of Holy Week. The Sarum missal also appoints it for the Good Friday postcommunion, which presumably is where Cranmer got it; the prayer shows up in the Anglican liturgical tradition as a Good Friday collect already in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer.
It is a prayer that I have always found quite affecting, and all the more so now as I prepare for my first triduum in holy orders, my first time hearing this prayer as one set apart by prayer and the laying on of hands to shepherd God’s people and share with them the treasures of his grace.
Consider for a moment what this prayer says, what it declares to God and to those praying it: “behold this your family,” it cries out to God! The prayer declares that whatever assembly of people made it to church on Good Friday - probably a rather ordinary set, externally rather indistinguishable from anyone else - is, in fact, nothing less than the visible family of God, for whom Jesus Christ went willingly to an agonizing death. These people, in all their concreteness, all their specificities, all their joys and hopes and sins and failings, all their quotidianness, are those whom Christ loves enough to die. And if Christ loves them, how could we who bear his name - and especially those charged to minister in his name - do any less?
It seems to me that one of the great temptations for those willing to name problems in the contemporary church is to fail to love that all-too-human group of people that this prayer dares to call God’s family. It is so very easy to measure the church as it is against the church of our imaginings - a church that is younger, more devout and on fire for God, more diverse, more truly committed to justice, or what have you - and find it wanting. And let’s be honest: there are plenty of reasons that the church is hard to love at the moment. It might be mainline lukewarmness, or evangelical captivity to increasingly-extreme right-wing politics, or the problems of abuse, cruelty, and apathy that seem to plague all corners of the church. Whatever the reason, it is so easy to look at the church with an angry, cynical heart.
And yet. And yet. Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family - not the church as we want it to be, not the church as it ought to be, but the church we are actually confronted with: those who believe strongly and those who struggle to believe, those advancing daily in holiness and those caught firmly in sin’s grasp, the motley assembly of sinners in all their specificities and idiosyncrasies - behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross. This, this is God’s family, not the church of our imaginings. These, not people who are more pious or have better politics or whom we simply find more agreeable and pleasant to be around, are the people whom God loves unto death, and whom God gives to us to love likewise. Have you ever considered just what, ontologically speaking, you see when you look out at the congregation immediately after communion? A body of people just now mystically united to Jesus! One might weep to see them as they really are in that moment.
Of course, there’s a danger in this language, this account of who the people assembled to worship really are and how one ought to relate to them. It can be - and is - mobilized in some quarters to shut down criticisms of the church, to suggest that calling people to repentance and amendment of life is somehow ‘unpastoral,’ to argue that those who want the church to be better must be operating out of contempt for the church as it is. To love the church as it is, on this construal, is in opposition to pushing the church to be more faithful to our Lord. This cannot be right.
But it is true that those who want the church to be more faithful to our Lord must first see the really-existing church as it truly is - as God’s family - and love it. What’s more, they (we!) must love the church not as an abstract idea or as a repository for certain doctrinal commitments, but the church as those flesh-and-blood people with whom one prays to God, hears the Word, and eats the Supper. Such is God’s command - and such is, frankly, the only way to survive. Back in my union organizing days, a mentor told me that organizers motivated primarily by hatred of injustice, by deep anger about the world as it is, almost invariably burn out. They struggle mightily to keep bitterness at bay, struggle mightily to avoid transferring their anger to the people who fail to get it, who aren’t committed enough, don’t work hard enough, don’t sacrifice enough. The organizers who make it in the long haul, she said, are always motivated primarily by love: love for the people they are trying to organize, love even for their political enemies. They are the ones able to avoid burning out, and the ones who are more effective at moving others - others who feel loved even as they are pushed to take risks and do difficult things for the sake of a better world. So it is, it seems to me, in the church.
I devote a good bit of attention on this Substack to the problems of the part of the church in which God has seen fit to place me, and I don’t apologize for doing so. But I hope it is clear that my writings are motivated in the end by a love for the church, a love that is not just for the church as a theological concept, but for the church as those very specific individuals alongside whom I worship and serve, to whom I preach the Gospel and administer the sacrament. For, as we will pray this Good Friday, they - we - are together God’s family, those for whom God saw fit to die, those who God longs to draw into a closer and more intimate union with himself both now and unto the ages of ages. It is my hope that this Holy Week, as we commemorate the paschal mystery, the mighty acts of God which won our salvation, we may be moved both to adore God for what he has done for us and to see each other for what we really are: God’s family, called by the Word, washed by the saving waters of Baptism, fed in the Supper - the family for whom Jesus Christ was willing to die.