It is fitting that the author of the Hebrews in the 2nd Reading exhorts Christians to recognise the race for which they have entered and to persevere in running until the final goal. And Jesus reminds His disciples that there will be frictions and rejections when one embraces Him vision. It is a journey of faith for it is fraught with difficulties and rejection.
Human that we are, we have been trying to tame the Gospel. Christ’s warned the disciples that His message would bring about conflict. Christ did not come as much to establish a “new” Kingdom as to restore God’s values in this world. But we are innovative as well as resourceful. As a result, we try to mould or shape Jesus according to pragmatic and relevant criteria. In short, we need to bring Jesus up to speed to keep up with our times or to make Him more like us.
Chesterton was right when he pointed out a painful reality that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried”. As uncomfortable as that sounds, he hit the nail on the head. We continue to dumb Jesus down so that He becomes more palatable since we are unable to rise to the occasion. A saccharine Jesus is pleasant enough to swallow.
It could be true that we fear the cost of Christianity to be too high to pay. The highest price is paid with our lives. It is a known fact that true discipleship will lead to rejection. Jesus repeatedly warned His disciples that this was to be the case. “If they have treated Me shabbily, do you not think that they will treat you badly?”.
This is the objective reality of what it means to follow Christ and to speak His truth. But subjectively, there could be ways for a prophet who dares to speak the truth. Raining down fire and brimstone could be one way of doing it. We tell it like it is. Perhaps what is true and what needs to be said does not necessarily make us right. St Teresa of Avila, the great reformer of the Carmelites, apparently prayed to God to spare us from gloomy saints. Amongst the holy nuns she lived with, there were some who were serious with holiness that they had forgotten to laugh.
There must be a way to be prophetic that embraces both the seriousness of the message we stand for and yet at the same time not impose our righteousness on others. There may be a way to be authoritative without sending out an authoritarian vibe.
Perhaps we begin by not taking ourselves too seriously. St Laurence whose feast is in August held fast to the faith and for that he was martyred. According to his executioner, he was burnt on top of a gridiron. At one point, he told the executioner, “Turn me over, I am done on this side”. Whether or not he said that he embodied a spirit that was at once steadfast and yet cheeky. He was audacious as if he were in control but more profoundly, his brazenness came from a confidence that his story would not end with his death.
There is a Gospel to be proclaimed. The Christian message is true and just living out our Gospel values is prophetic already. We will stand out even without attempting to. What has happened is that given the different ideological bents there are, when we believe that we own the truth, we may have to shout louder because everyone is dug into his or her position or we might apply pressure, overt or covert, in making sure that others toe the line of what we hold to be true. A good example is Laudato si. We may be facing a climate crisis of cosmic proportion. What is not helpful is the pressure, openly enforced or stealthily applied, for us to subscribe to all the climate initiatives that are put out and also the guilt-tripping for failure to comply. People can either be excluded or shamed for not embracing the ecological gospel.
To be prophetic, the question is how we inspire rather than shame people to action. In other words, how to keep our faith without compromising and yet without being self-righteous?
It is endurance with a spirit of joyfulness. A person with terminal cancer is visited by a friend. There is really a gloom surrounding a person whose death is imminent and it is easy to be sucked into the cloud of depression. Drawing a person out of that gloom does not cure the cancer but it can help the person not to waste whatever time he or she has left oppressed by the thought of imminent death but to spend every minute available joyfully.
Life is tough, and yet our faith calls us to live it heroically. However, this heroism does not have to be sad. The joy of the Gospel is such that maybe it is not the truth that attracts others. It is an ability to be joyful that gives hope to others who are looking for a reason to believe. The RCIA or OCIA has begun. It is a programme which centres on the truth of Christ’s Gospel. In itself, should that not be attractive enough? Do we not hold truth to be a paramount desire? And yet, what is most attractive for seekers is to encounter the joy of those who are taken up by the truth of what they believe in. We are naturally uneasy with judgementalism which is a form of being right that overbearingly makes others feel bad. Thus our genius is to hold on to truth but at the same time inspire others simply because we love the truth and are happy to live it to the full.
