One of the
things that I often find difficult about being a priest, is trying to
preach the word of God. I love to pass on the teaching of
Christ, but it can be very hard to make yourself do it sometimes.
Why, you might ask? because it is not always what we want to
hear. It may well make me unpopular and I don’t want to be
unpopular. I want everyone to love me, just as we all do. We
all have a need to be accepted and loved and no one wants to be
unpopular. And if you preach the Word of God, it can make you
very unpopular, because we don’t always want to hear it. It
is much more tempting to preach about what is popular, what we want
to hear, what is not so disturbing.
The problem
is that if we don’t teach the Word of God, then we end up with
nothing. We end up with a feel good religion, where nothing
disturbs us and if we don’t like what we hear, then we just listen
to something else that we do like to hear. That is not what our
faith is about. Our faith isn’t just about feelings. It
goes much deeper than that and if it doesn’t, there’s something
wrong. The teachings of Christ make demands of us to live a
certain way of life, to keep the commandments of God, to be faithful
to the promises we make, not to give up because things don’t feel
good. It is demanding. We’re told to love our enemies
and pray for them. I don’t want to pray for them, I want to
kill them! But that’s not what God is asking me to do.
I take
consolation in the fact that Jesus was the perfect priest. He
did everything perfectly. He was the ideal preacher, and
healer. He knew exactly how to deal with people and awkward
situations, and He preached the Word of God; and what happened? They
killed him, and rejected a lot of what he said. When he taught
them about the Eucharist, half of them walked away. He said,
‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you can not have life within you.’ And they said, ‘Don’t
be ridiculous, that’s crazy talk,’ and many of them left him.
But he didn’t run after them. He let them go, and that
gives me hope.
Let me just
put a question to you. If you don’t like what you hear when a
priest or someone is preaching, and I’m not just talking about bad
preaching, but if it disturbs you, ask yourself this: why does it
disturb me? Is it because it doesn’t suit our lifestyle and
we would have to change if we are to try and live the word of God, or
is it just because it is wrong? If we are listening to the word
of God, then it should disturb us. If it’s the teaching of
Christ, then it will disturb us every once in a while. The more
you read Bible and listen to the what God teaches us, the more you
realise that there is such great depth to it. It applies to
every situation and every way of life. It applies to every one
of us, if we are prepared to listen.
If we want a
strong foundation for our faith—the house built on solid rock, as
Jesus described it—then we have to build it on the teachings of
Jesus; not just the bits we like, but his teachings whether we like
them or not.
Finally,
remember what the Lord says in the first reading, ‘Whether they
listen or not they will know that there is a prophet among them’.
God keeps sending us people to speak to us, sometimes they are
priests, sometimes not; but God keeps speaking to us, but it’s up
to us to listen.
