The Mission of Evangelization Includes Us
20th Sunday of the Year
If we take seriously the teaching of the past five pontificates that every member of the Church is entrusted with the mission of evangelization, then today’s readings seem to indicate that we are all bound to end up living more or less in a van down by the river. For preaching the prophet Jeremiah is thrown into a cistern; the Letter to the Hebrews extols those who have shed their blood for the faith; and Jesus tells us he has come to bring not peace but division. Far be it from me to criticize the wisdom of the liturgy of the Church but these selections do not make for a rousing call to go out and evangelize an unbelieving world.
Perhaps the Church’s wisdom here is to manage our expectations about how heeding that call will be received. From my own experience the picture the readings paint pretty much checks out and accounts for my own hesitation to be an evangelist. Like most people I like to be liked; I try to avoid upsetting any more apple carts than what conscience requires of me; and when I’m out in public dressed as a priest, I don’t imagine that people look at me and think, What a welcome sign of the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. I hope he talks to me. No matter our state in life evangelizing is a daunting task and we all (myself included) tend to look for any opportunity to push it off as someone else’s problem.
But the Gospel and the Church are clear that evangelization is our problem. There is no escaping the common mission we share by baptism to go and preach the Gospel. And living that mission will leave us where it will leave us in the eyes of the world: van, river, cistern, or wherever else.
Can we find consolation among these readings? Certainly. Could they even present a view of evangelization that sets us on fire to set the world ablaze? I put my faith in nothing less. For behind every burden we are asked to carry as Christians stands Christ who takes that burden upon himself and makes its weight easy and light. Even when his words are sharp, they are still his words – the words on which we live.
First, we must admit that we are all here today because at least someone took those words seriously. At least one person in our life is responsible for preaching the Gospel to us; and without them none of us would be in Church this morning. Yet they too believed because someone else had preached to them. And such has been the case for two thousand years that believers in the Gospel that Christ preached have preached it themselves with courage and conviction. Imagine that when the author to the Letter to the Hebrews wrote that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, he was perhaps only speaking of the few dozen Christians who had undergone martyrdom up to that point in the Church’s very early history. How much greater is that cloud for us now! We know that we are surrounded by women and men of every age and vocation, with every personality and charism, who took seriously the mission of evangelization and played their part in transmitting the faith to us today that comes first and always from Christ.
Second, that cloud of witnesses should inspire us to become part of it. As we have received, we should want to give. How beautiful it would be in eternity to see not only those who brought the faith to us but to see how we have brought the faith to others. To get there, Hebrews tells us, we need to persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. We must run with all our effort but at the same time remember that we are running toward Jesus and thus are completely dependent on his grace to reach that cloud of witnesses and for any of our preaching to bear fruit in people’s lives. We can be discouraged when we meet resistance, but discouragement more often than not is the result of putting too much trust in our own skills and talents rather than in the grace of Christ. The saints are the saints because they understood that; and if we are to join them, we need to do the same.
Third, witnesses are not limited to the cloud but are in fact all around us. The gift of the communion of the Church is that Christ does not send us out into the world by ourselves but always as a people. Within the Church we find brothers and sisters with complementary gifts, areas of knowledge, and ways of being a Christian that round out our own. They should inspire us. And we should work with them to speak the Gospel in a language and with a grammar that people in their variety of gifts, knowledge, and ways of being in the world can accept.
Fourth, Christ tells us he has come to set the world on fire. For anything to catch fire it must have the potential to burn. It may seem that the modern world is incapable of accepting the Gospel – that secular ideologies speak too loudly for anyone to hear the Spirit’s voice. But Christ assures us that the world he created is thoroughly flammable and waits, despite appearances, to be set aflame with the fire that his Gospel spreads. How we expect evangelization to go depends entirely on what we think about the people who we are called to evangelize. If we expect them simply to dismiss us, then we will be too careful and half-hearted to say anything that is meaningful and compelling. But if we approach them searching for what is in them that awaits to be set ablaze then even one well-timed match can be enough to spark a wildfire.
To put all this together, Christ came to set the world on fire, and he desires to see it blazing through the work of his Church on earth. As members of the Church, we are surrounded on earth and in heaven by a great cloud of witnesses who show us how to carry out the Church’s mission to proclaim the Gospel with courage and without counting the cost. And the call to set the world on fire should set us on fire, for it is Christ who calls us and makes whatever we do bear fruit.
All that remains is to ask what we are going to do about it. The first step is simple: talk about Jesus. When the opportunity arises to talk about Jesus don’t back away but lean into it. Second, invite the person into your living of the Christian life: to come to Mass with you, to engage in works of charity, or to attend a talk or program that allows them to engage their quest for the truth. For anyone who has not been baptized or was baptized in another Christian tradition, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults or RCIA is the process by which one becomes Catholic. Even if someone is not fully ready to make the commitment to join the Church, RCIA is still the right place to be for them to explore the Catholic faith and to ask the important questions that arise about Christ and the Church. Talk about Jesus and make the invitation. Evangelization is essentially that simple.
We can all certainly think of someone who is not here that should be. The mission that Christ gives us to evangelize is both general and particular. We are called to set the world on fire but that only happens by reaching out to those individual people in our lives who are the kindling ready to ignite. May we heed his call and set about the doing the work of the Church with the confidence that only comes from it being always the work of Christ.