Christ as “the way, the truth and the life” for us

THE readings of the Mass on Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter (cfr. Act 13,26-33; Jn 14,1-6) remind us of our duty to really know who Christ is since he is the very pattern of our humanity, the savior of our damaged humanity. How he is is also how we should be. And given our journeying condition here on earth, Christ offers us “the way, the truth and the life” proper to us. 

 We have to realize very deeply and abidingly that we all have the need to know Christ well. This need involves not only a few of us. It involves all of us. And so, we just have to see how we can go through these theological sciences of Christology (Christ as the Son of God made man) and Soteriology (Christ as our savior), which can be done both formally and informally. 

 As the gospels narrate in many occasions, in spite of all the miracles and the wonderful teachings he gave them, many of the people continued to be doubtful and even suspicious of him. On several occasions, they even tried to harm and eliminate him. Of course, in the end they got their way. They managed to put Christ to death in the most ignominious way to die, i.e., to be crucified. 

 It is a phenomenon that continues to take place today, in spite of the most convincing of all the miracles of Christ—his own resurrection that later led to his ascension into heaven that was witnessed by a good number of people. 

 That many of us continue to doubt and even to be suspicious of him can be seen in the fact that we continue to take him for granted, to put him aside from our daily affairs as if he is irrelevant or just a drag to our activities and concerns, and even to openly reject and to be hostile to him. 

 We need to correct this predicament immediately and strongly, otherwise we would be fully cut off from the very source and keeper of our humanity. There are many ways to resolve this problem. We obviously cannot cover all of them, but we can at least mention a few. 

 One way is to disabuse ourselves from banking our belief in Christ mainly on some tremendous miracles and extraordinary events. That would be like testing or doubting God always. We should believe in Christ, with or without miracles. 

 Christ himself complained about this. “Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe,” he said to a court official whose daughter was dying. (Jn 4,48) We should avoid having some ulterior motives before we confess our belief in Christ. 

 We need to strengthen our belief in Christ by undertaking the relevant study of his person and mission, and by submitting ourselves to a certain plan that would make our personal and collective relation with Christ alive. 

 We certainly have to learn how to pray, how to offer sacrifices. We have to develop virtues that would resemble us little by little with him. We need to avail of the sacraments where God’s grace, his way of sharing his life with us, is channeled to us. We have to learn to wage a lifelong ascetical struggle since we will always be hounded by the enemies of God and of our own soul, starting with our own weaknesses, etc.

“Ite, missa est”

THAT’S “Go forth, the Mass is ended” in Latin. With these words, we are reminded that all of us who attend Mass are being sent forth the way Christ sent his apostles to “go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” (Mk 16,15) 

 May it be that we are always aware of this mandate Christ is giving us. We are being sent to go as far and as widely as possible to proclaim the Gospel. We are being sent to make Christ known and loved by as many people as possible, because Christ is actually everything to us. 

 To be sent by Christ to proclaim him in all corners of the world is for us to be a missionary. But we need to make some drastic updating of our understanding of what a missionary is. We should not get stuck with the common textbook idea that a missionary is usually a priest or nun who goes to a far-away place, and literally starts a settlement there. 

 While this concept of a missionary is still valid—it will always be—it now cries to be expanded to reflect its true character, especially given today’s fast-moving and more complicated world. 

 We have to understand that everyone, by virtue of his sheer humanity and much more, his Christianity, is called to be a missionary, and that he does not need to go to distant lands because his immediate environment already needs a more effective, down-to-earth evangelization. 

 Yes, even the ordinary guy in an office, the farmer, the businessman, the politician, the entertainers, artists and athletes, are called to be missionaries. That’s simply because as persons with a prominently social dimension in our life, we have to be responsible for one another. 

 And the biggest responsibility we can have for the others would be their moral and spiritual welfare, much more than just their economic or social wellbeing. It is this responsibility that we have to learn how to be more serious about and more competent in fulfilling. This is the current situation and challenge to all of us. 

 And so, we have to reconcile ourselves with the reality that we actually have to be missionaries right where we are. In fact, I would say that to go to the deserts of Africa or the forests and rivers of Brazil could be far easier to do, since in these places we only have to contend more with physical and material difficulties. 

 The people in these isolated areas may exhibit primitive violent attitudes, but their minds and hearts can easily be converted by simple and elemental gestures of goodness and, of course, the grace of God. This has always been the experience of missionaries who went to these places. 

 It’s rather in the paved jungles of the big cities inhabited by very sophisticated people immersed in very worldly things where the more demanding kind of missionary work is needed. 

 In these places, the people tend to be so confined to their own world, already made beautiful and comfortable by the new technologies, such that any talk about spiritual and supernatural realities, especially about prayer, sacrifice and the need for the sacraments, could easily fall on deaf ears. 

 These urban dwellers may not openly profess atheism or agnosticism. They can even show many acts of piety, and can even show off some good work. And this is the more difficult part, precisely because with that condition they can think they are already ok insofar as religion is concerned. 

 We need to sharpen our sense of our missionary identity to face the tremendous challenge we have today to make Christ known and loved.

Some notes on preaching God’s word

THE readings of the Mass on Wednesday of the 4th Week of Easter (cfr. Acts 12,24-13,5; Jn 12,44-50) somehow remind us of the need to spread the word of God, which is another way of saying that we have to make God not only known but also loved and pursued to such an extent that we truly become children of his, sharers of his life and nature, as God wants us to be. 

 In the first reading, we see how the early disciples of Christ started to go around to preach about Christ. In the responsorial psalm, we are made to realize that we have to the desire to let God be praised by all the nations. And in the gospel, Christ made it clear that he was and is the one who will lead us to God. In other words, he is the very Word of God. We need to listen to him, follow him and, in fact, identify ourselves with him. 

 Toward this end we need to realize that in making Christ known and loved, we have to transmit as faithfully as possible this very Word of God. This can be done in many ways, but an important way is that of preaching God’s Word. 

 Preaching the Word of God is a task entrusted to his apostles and shared by all of us in different ways. The clergy, of course, takes a leading role in this affair. It’s a serious business that involves our whole being, and not just our talents and powers. 

 First, we need to examine our understanding and attitude toward God’s word, especially the Gospel. On this basic understanding would depend what we do with the Gospel and how we handle it. 

 Do we really know the true nature of the Gospel? Or do we take it as just one more book, perhaps with certain importance, but definitely not as the living word of God, in spite of its human dimensions? 

 The Gospel is actually the proclamation of Christ as the Emmanuel, that is, God with us. This is an on-going affair that did not stop with the death of Christ. Christ lives with us up to now, and continues to do things with us. 

 All these affirmations are captured in the last lines of the Gospel of St. Matthew where our Lord said: 

 “Go, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them…. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” (28,19-20) 

 We need to see to it that in preaching God’s word, while we have to adapt it to the way and the conditions of the people, we truly manage to transmit Christ’s true message to us. In this regard, we have to realize that Christ’s true message, while full of love and tenderness, will always involve suffering and sacrifice. He even spelled it out clearly when he said that if we want to follow him, we need to deny ourselves and carry the cross. 

 We have to be wary of just making feel-good memes and messages while neglecting the indispensable role of suffering and sacrifice in our life. When we preach, let’s find a way, guided always by our faith, of making suffering and sacrifice attractive to everyone. 

 And that can only take place if we know how to relate our unavoidable suffering and sacrifices to the redemptive passion, death and resurrection of Christ. We have to encourage everyone to have a theological and Christ-like attitude to any suffering and sacrifice we have to make in this life.