The mission of the Church is founded on the conviction of its truth and the gift of peace
Posted on July 4th 2010 in Weekly messages
To restrict the Gospels to the biography of Jesus would be to truncate the necessary connection between Jesus and the Church. This is the temptation for all those who think of Jesus as basically a good man, the purveyor of an unrealistic morality, even if probably true, and those scholars and thinker obsessed to discover the real Jesus amongst the ‘propaganda’ of the earliest Church. This viewpoint rejects all that came afterwards as being the unfortunate consequence of the all too fallible followers of Jesus. This shrunken viewpoint does not do justice to the invitation that Jesus extends to both His apostles and disciples to share in His ministry and mission. We, like them, are being invited, into the age of responsibility, to active participation. Whenever priests talk of active participation most think that this refers to the Liturgy alone, but today’s Gospel has an outward focus towards the world.
This invitation began not with a list of requirements, but with the example of Jesus Himself. Last week St Luke recorded the incident when James and John tell Jesus that the unwelcoming villagers, who for long lost historical reasons were antithetical to Jews, should be destroyed. This potential act of violence is rejected by Jesus because unlike them, He has full confidence in the Father’s plans for humanity. Jesus’ reaction to James and John demonstrates e a divine liberty in front of human rejection, because the truth of the Gospel does not depend on human acceptance. This is something that every Christian knows deep down but which is also a difficult lesson to learn. The Good News can never be imposed, something often considered as a weakness in human terms, and so is to be supplemented by force, a very human temptation from which most religions are not exempt.
Jesus’ liberty in front of rejection demonstrates the pilgrims’ path. This liberty is what every parent requires in front of the religious indifference of their children, and the angst and guilt this generates for diligent parents. Teenagers cannot be forced to practise their faith, but their laziness, both bodily and intellectual, need not be taken as attacking the mission of the Church. When so much at that age is done for effect, the liberty of the believing parent to continue without change to practise their faith is often seen as the un-expected response.
This liberty in front of rejection is also tied to this Sunday’s Gospel about the mission of the 72 whom Jesus sends out in pairs to the villages and hamlets He was to visit. They are to proclaim peace at the first instance, not their own as such but God’s peace. God’s peace is the biography of Jesus, whose mission of retrieving the lost, forgiving the sinner, dying on the Cross to sin, and finally rising from the dead are all integral moments is the establishment of peace. The disciples’ first words of evangelisation will mirror that of the risen Jesus, ‘Peace be with you’. The Gospel is never human power, and all the practises that go with the imposition of power. This peace as Jesus tells the 72 may be rejected and in which case they are to move elsewhere to evangelise, but to let those villagers know what opportunity they have missed.
Yet for those who do accept this peace, Christ’s grace begins an internal transformation which will be mirrored in outward conduct and way of life. Certainly our outward conduct, our moral lives exhibit all the weaknesses of the human condition, but despite this each believer discovers an inner freedom to love himself or herself, God and neighbour in the appropriate way. This freedom is his or her strength in face of indifference, rejection and hostility without recourse to the normal human responses of violence and anger.