Tell my rebellious people, Thus says the Lord! Whether they heed or resist, they shall know that you are my prophet. –Ezekiel 2:4-5
St. Francis Xavier
In the course of His teaching, Christ reminded His fellow Jews that they could not take their friendship with God for granted.
He taught them that being a true Israelite is not a matter of who your parents are, but of loving and obeying the heavenly Father. He taught them that the true Israelite is not the one who sacrifices bulls and goats, but the one who sacrifices selfish interests for the good of others. Above all, the Lord Jesus taught that He Himself is the Lord of Israel, Who became man to save His people.
For everyone seeking the truth, the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ is the most delightful and wonderful thing ever.
A Jesuit missionary once told an African chief that he would have to give up his extra wives. Of course the missionary also told the chief that the true king of the universe is God, Who had become man and died for him on a cross. The chief replied, ‘Where is this King, so that I might go, kneel at His feet, and offer my life to Him in return?”
There are plenty of people out there right now who do not know Catholic doctrine and morals. If we take the trouble to teach them, they will embrace it all with joy.
St. Ignatius of Antioch
When these couples heard that there is a better, natural way, they learned it. They found the joy of living in marriage according to God’s law.
The truth is beautiful and attractive. The truth convinces people on its own; all we have to do is propose it. It is a great gift we have to offer to our neighbors: to explain the teachings of the Church to them.
On the other hand, we know that the history of the Church is full of another kind of missionary story, too. I mean the kind when the missionary announces the truth and tells the people to reform their lives. Then the missionary gets his head chopped off, or he is skinned alive, or fed to wild beasts in the arena.
This kind of missionary story all began with our Lord Himself. He invited the people to live in the friendship of God—all they had to do was embrace the truth. And they nailed Him to the cross.
Being an apostle of the truth can be dangerous. It is an adventure. It requires Indiana Jones-like skills, the wisdom of the serpent, and the innocence of the dove. The apostle has to be all things to all men in order to save some. We have to be open-minded enough to sympathize with everyone and courageous enough to call sinners to repentance. No easy task, being an apostle of Christ.
St. Paul summarized all the difficulties of his evangelical life: “weaknesses, insults, hardships, constraints.” Through it all, the Apostle relied on the grace of God. In fact, St. Paul boasted of his weakness, because the Lord had told him, “My grace is sufficient for you.” (II Corinthians 12:9-10)
The Lord says the same to us. His grace is sufficient for us. If we are faithful to the truth, the Lord will see us through. Here is how our Holy Father put it in a recent speech:
Obedience to the truth purifies our souls and guides us to upright speech and action…Speaking with the hope of being applauded, governed by what people want to hear, according to the dictatorship of current opinion—this is a kind of prostitution of words and of the soul.
The purity of the apostle means not submitting to these standards, not seeking applause, but rather seeking obedience to the truth…Obedience to the truth makes us, although it may be hard, collaborators with the truth, mouthpieces of the truth. It is not we who speak in today’s river of words, but the truth which speaks in us when we are purified and made chaste by obedience to the truth.
Let us consecrate ourselves to this noble task. Let’s do everything we can to live in and for the truth. Let’s do it for our own sakes, and for the sake of everyone out there who needs to learn the truth from us.
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July 6, 2009 at 11:09 am
Concerning the readings for the 14th Sunday of the Church Year, Hans Urs von Balthasar says that to be scandalized is for a person to reject on penultimate grounds that which he ought to have accepted on ultimate (and well known) grounds. Jesus’ own fellow townspeople all knew quite well that He was uniquely empowered by God on the basis of his eloquence and the miracles He had worked elsewhere. However, they nonetheless were scandalized by him because he was “only” a carpenter (of dubious parentage at that!). They thus illustrate the paradoxical condition of fallen man,who finds himself unable on penultimate grounds to make the saving act of faith in Christ even though he knows that he owes Christ this obedience of faith on other and ultimate grounds. Jesus willingly exposes Himself to fallen man’s inability to say Yes to God, allowing Himself to be refused and rejected by us even unto the Cross, precisely so that in and through His loving acceptance of our refusal, He can impart to us in His Sacred Humanity the graced ability joyfully to accept Him alone as our saving Yes and Amen to God, our righteousness, and our sanctification.