A friend of mine worked for one of the bishops in California. The bishop was away so he called back to the diocese. “John,” he asked, “how are things going.” John answered, “Bishop, you wouldn’t believe it. The blind are seeing, the captives are released and the poor have good news preached to them.” “Cut the nonsense,” said the bishop, “what is really going on.” It seems the work of the church in the twenty-first century doesn’t have much in common with the mission that Jesus laid out for himself. For isn’t that what this fourth chapter of St. Luke is all about: the mission statement of Jesus? He read from Isaiah because that passage described what he planned to do with his life – liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, glad tidings to the poor. What about us, what about our mission here at St. James? The bishop will ask how many baptisms we performed, how many couples got married, how many first communions were received. He won’t ask about the captives who were liberated or the blind who can see. Are we attending to the right things? Are we continuing the mission of Jesus?
Answering that question goes to the heart of the new word you hear in Catholic circles nowadays – evangelization. It used to be that Catholics felt content showing up on a Sunday. There were lots of Churches with many masses and the pews were full. The pastoral concern was taking care of the people who were attending Mass. People would come and think “Do me.” That was then. This is now. Now we are being asked to think “What can I do.” The closing of Churches has served as a wake-up call that our emphasis has to shift from only caring for those who are coming to reaching out to those who aren’t coming. We have something precious in the faith and for any number of reasons many people, even those raised as Catholics, are not eating at the table of the Lord and as in times past. Hence, evangelization – changing our mindset beyond simply maintaining what is into one of attracting others to what we are called to become. Evangelization is, therefore, another word for mission. Traditionally we thought of mission to someone out there, to another country, another continent. We have come to realize that mission is right here – among our family members, with our fellow students, between neighbors.
Jesus was the first evangelizer, the first in mission. He brought the message of God to others and invited them to follow him. As St. Luke describes the scene at Nazareth he did not do this so much by catechetical programs, by Bible study, by religious education. He did it by making the world look at least a little more as God intended it to be – a place where the captives are freed, the blind can see, the poor have good news. We are called to become like Jesus becoming missionaries in everyday life. We don’t need to change our address, our occupation, or our lifestyle. We just have to follow where Jesus leads us. OK – how? If you are anything like me, you are not sure how to promote the release of prisoners – and quite frankly a lot of those prisoners you don’t want to be released – and you are not very good at helping the blind recover their sight. (There is a tradition in the Church which sees fulfilling this mandate by freeing those imprisoned by sin and helping those blinded by ignorance. It might be profitable to meditate on what they might look like.) But I am more interested in the third charge: “to bring good news to the poor.” That sounds like something we can do. What will look like at St. James if we become bringers of good news?
The foundational good news is that God so loved the world that he sent us Jesus. God is not aloof, above it all. God showers divine love upon us. We don’t need to earn it or even deserve it. All we need to do is accept it. We are evangelizers in the spirit of Jesus when we convey to others that just as they are they are already loved by God. We are all poor when it comes to understanding how rich is the love of God for us. Jesus used to image of Father to help us see how God’s love works. We can presume that God is at least as good as we are. As parents love their children simply because they are their children, so God loves us for we are the children of God. If we love our children even when they are wayward and continue to reach out to them, so God loves us and constantly calls us back into love. God is love. This is the foundation of our good news, our gospel.
The good news is extended by recognizing that everyone we meet is a child of God. There isn’t anyone out there who is not made in God’s image, since we share humanity with Jesus. The hungry, the homeless, the needy all have a claim on us as part of our family, God’s family. St. Paul puts it in the epistle: “You ARE the body of Christ. Every one of you is a member of it.” Certainly it is true that we belong to different nationalities and different racial groups, we speak different languages and like different foods, we wear different clothes and listen to different music, we are male and female, rich and poor. (Well, maybe not so rich.) But if you look around all that you can see are children of God. Our temptation to divide up into US and THEM is an illusion. St. Paul says that the differences enrich us. The body needs hands and feet and eyes and skin and kidneys and…. The differences in the members of the body are needed. So with us. Viva la difference. We are blessed to find that there are no strangers here, on friends we haven’t met yet. We are all in this together. We might have come over on different ships but we’re all in the same boat now. That is the good news, that is gospel, that is the mission we have been called to share with Jesus.