Trust and responsibility

Added at some point to Mark’s original gospel was an appendix in which is recorded this final command of Jesus:  Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. The Gospel is not to remain within the small group of disciples. They have to go out and move from where they are in order to reach the whole world and bring the Good News to all peoples, to every creature.

Without a doubt, these words were enthusiastically being heeded when Christians were in full expansion and their communities were multiplying all over the Empire. But how do we listen to them today when we see ourselves powerless to retain those who are leaving our churches because they feel they no longer need our religion?

The first thing to do is to live from the very start with absolute trust in God’s action. This is what Jesus has taught us. God keeps working with infinite love on the heart and conscience of all God’s sons and daughters, though we may consider them “lost sheep.” God is not blocked by any crisis.

God is not waiting for us to set in motion, starting from the Church, our plans of restoration or our projects of innovation. God keeps acting in the Church and outside of the Church. No one lives abandoned by God, though they may have never heard anyone speak of Jesus’ Gospel.

But all this does not dispense us from our responsibility. We have to start asking ourselves new questions:  Along which pathways is God walking to find men and women of modern culture? How does he want to make present the Good News of Jesus to the men and women of our day?

We have to ask ourselves something else still: What invitations is God sending to us to transform our traditional form of thinking, expressing, celebrating, and incarnating the Christian faith so that we may facilitate God’s action within modern culture? Do we not run the risk, with our inaction and stagnation, of becoming the restraint and the cultural obstacle to the incarnation of the Gospel in contemporary society?

No one knows what Christian faith will look like in the new world that is emerging, but it is not likely that it would be a “clone” of the past. The Gospel has power to usher in a new Christianity.

May 17, 2015
Ascension (B)
Mark 16, 15-20