I heard a
story about a priest who was going to stay with his niece and her
partner. It was a little awkward because they were both into
occult practice and he was a priest. They also knew he knew
they were into this. But for the couple of days that he was
with them he never once mentioned a word about it, or made any
remarks or comments. Instead he was just very loving towards
them and showed great respect for them. They were so moved by
his that it actually won them over to Christianity.
Frank Duff,
the man who founded the Legion of Mary, had a lovely saying: ‘Win
an argument, lose a soul.’ Arguments don’t win people over;
love does.
Today’s
readings present us with two things. First of all, the prophet,
or the person who speaks the word of God, the message of God, is
going to meet opposition. While that applies especially to the
one who has to preach it, it also applies to all of us who try to
live it. As you know it is ‘cool’ to be just about anything
except Catholic at the moment. We are in the minority
now and the Lord is putting it to us to try and be faithful in the
midst of so much opposition. In the first reading God says to
the prophet:
Brace yourself
for action… Do not be dismayed in their presence… I will make you
into a pillar of iron and a wall of bronze to confront all this land
(Jer 1:17-18)
The Lord
continues to say the same to us. ‘Don’t be afraid because
people are opposed to you, or to your way of life, or what you
believe in. Instead, stand your ground.’
They will
fight against you but shall not overcome you, for I am with you to
deliver you—it is the Lord who speaks (Jer 1:19).
It is a big
temptation for us to take what might seem like an easier option, or
just to take the bits of our faith that suit us. After all,
that can seem much more ‘reasonable’. This is 2013 after
all. However, that is not what the Lord tells us to do.
The Lord tells us to try and be faithful to his word, because that is
the path that leads to life. That is the path that will bring
us to fulfilment more than anything else. Following the way of
his teachings is not easy, but it is completely worthwhile.
From the
beginning of his preaching Jesus met continued opposition. In
today’s Gospel we read how in a matter of minutes the people went
from admiring the beautiful words that came out of his mouth, to
wanting to kill him. And another time when the apostles came
and told him that everyone was looking for him because they wanted to
hear him, he said, ‘Let us go elsewhere to the neighbouring
towns.’ He knew what he had to do and whether he was popular
or not, he just kept going about what the Father in heaven had sent
him to do.
The Lord is
telling us something through all this. He is calling us to be
faithful. Yes we are in the minority and yes there is plenty of
opposition, but it doesn’t matter. God has given us something
extraordinary in his teaching and although we are free to take it or
leave it we will never find anything else that could compare to his teaching.
The second
thing that we are presented with in today’s readings is the call to
love. Nothing is as important as this. Love is patient,
kind, gentle, tolerant. This is what we are called to try and
live. We will say more to the people around us by the way we
live than by any arguments we could make. In the
beginning the Christians were a small group and people were very
suspicious of them. But it was the witness of their lives that
convinced others as to what they were about. People were amazed
at how they loved each other and how they tried to live. The
same holds for us.
In one of his famous speeches, Martin Luther King said something very similar:
In one of his famous speeches, Martin Luther King said something very similar:
To our
bitterest opponents we say: We shall match your capacity to inflict
suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet
your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, we
shall continue to love you… Throw us in jail, we shall still love
you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our
community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half-dead and
we shall still love you. One day we will win freedom, but not
only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and
conscience that we shall win you in the process. (Martin Luther King,
Strength to Love)
The ‘secret’ you could
say, to be able to live this way, is for us to root ourselves in God,
because it is only through our relationship to God that we receive
the ability to love those around us; to be tolerant with those who
are different to us or who directly oppose us. That is why each
week we keep coming back to listen to God’s word and see what he is
saying to us; and we keep coming back to receive Jesus in the
Eucharist, because if we try to live the way of Christianity by our
own strength we will quickly fail. The Lord doesn’t expect us
to live it by our own strength and neither should we. Our
strength comes from staying close to him.
In the end
there are three things that last: faith, hope and love and the
greatest of these is love (1 Cor 13:13)
No comments:
Post a Comment