Homily: 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle A
Being a missionary is hard.
My guess is that most of you here would agree with that statement. Let’s just think about the life of a
missionary for a second: He or she is sent to a foreign land—that is, an
unfamiliar place—where it is likely that the people who live there do not speak
the same language as he or she does; they probably have quite unique cultural
practices, too, and live by some moral norms that are strange, possibly even
offensive, to him or her. Yet in the
midst of all of this, the missionary has to find ways to communicate the Gospel
message to the people to whom he or she has been sent. In doing so, he or she will probably face a
broad range of reactions: from the extremes of complete acceptance and firm
rejection (even, possibly, to the point of being put to death!) and including
all the shades of apathy that come in between.
Yes, the life of a missionary can be very hard.
And I should know.
I’ve been one for the last eleven years.
If a missionary is someone who has been sent to communicate the Gospel
message, then I think that I qualify as a missionary. In July of 2012 I was sent out into this diocese—an
unfamiliar place to me, since I grew up near Chicago—to continue the work of
bringing the Good News of Jesus Christ to the people of this diocese. When I arrived here, I found that the people spoke
a little bit different than I did. I
also found that there were cultural practices unique to this place and that
there were certain moral norms to which I was going to have to grow accustomed. Through all of these things, I’ve had to
adjust, adapt, and continue to find ways to communicate the Good News of Jesus
Christ to you, the good people of this diocese, while experiencing the full
range of reactions: mainly acceptance (thanks be to God) but some rejection and
many different shades of apathy mixed in.
Perhaps we don’t often think of him in this way, but Jesus
was a missionary, too. Just think about
it for a second. From all eternity the
Son of God dwelt in perfect communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit. He participated in the creation of the
universe. And, when God’s greatest
creation—man—used his free will to separate himself from God, the Son of God
accepted the mission to go forth from the Father and the Holy Spirit to take on
human nature so as to complete the work of redeeming man from the sin that
separated him from God. In doing so,
Jesus—the divine person in human nature—had to adjust, adapt, and constantly
look for ways to communicate the Good News that the time of redemption had
finally come. As he did, Jesus also
experienced the full range of reactions: he was both enthusiastically accepted
and fiercely opposed, including all of the shades of apathy that come in
between.
I imagine that most of you here do not see yourselves as
missionaries, however. No, you all are
mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, doctors, nurses, teachers, laborers,
farmers, homemakers, first responders, city council-persons, etc., etc. No, you’re not missionaries, because you’ve
not been sent to some unfamiliar place to communicate the Good News of Jesus
Christ. I imagine that the Pharisees
(and their disciples), and even the Herodians (who were loyalists to King
Herod), probably thought the same thing.
Each of these groups was concerned more about maintaining the status quo
according to their principles and so each was challenged by the teaching and
works of Jesus. However, these were all
Jews and so Jesus’ reaction to them was an attempt to awaken them to the
mission that they had been neglecting. “You are all God’s chosen people,” Jesus seems
to say, “called to wait for the Messiah, yes, but called, nonetheless, to a
mission to proclaim to the people of the world—from wherever you are—the Good
News that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is sovereign over the entire world; and,
thus, that salvation awaits them, too.” In
other words, the Pharisees and the Herodians become too caught up in issues
that were wholly of this world (for example, about whether they should pay the
taxes to Caesar). Thus the point of
Jesus’ statement, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what
belongs to God” was to tell them, “Even though you must be in the world, do not
be of the world. Rather, be of the work
of God while you are in the world.”
This, of course, is the message that also comes to us. Yes, we are all of those things mentioned earlier
with which we self-identify. Above all, however,
we are missionaries: that is, those called to communicate the Good News of
Jesus Christ and to make God’s sovereignty known and realized in the world. I
mean, it’s right here in the Liturgy, isn’t it?
At the end of Mass, the priest says (among other options) “Go and
announce the Gospel of the Lord.” It is
a missionary mandate! And if we’ve
experienced the joy of the Gospel, then this should be a welcome mandate to
receive; for none of us finds it difficult to share the joys in our lives,
right? For example, we have no problem showing
pictures of our children and grandchildren, because we feel such joy that they
are, in a way, ours. This is how we
should be about sharing the Gospel. And
so, if this joy for sharing the Gospel is not in you, then find someone who has
it and cling to them until you feel it too.
For then you will be ready (and energized) to fulfill the mission that
you’ve been given.
My brothers and sisters, this is the message of World
Mission Sunday: that we are all together called to carry the Good News of Jesus
Christ into the world from wherever we find ourselves. Because of this, we are also called to support
each other in the mission with our prayers and our material sacrifices—whether
that be here in our evangelization efforts in our pastorate as part of Uniting in
Heart, or in the efforts being made in far-off places, like Mongolia. Let us recommit ourselves, then, to this
“mission from God”—that is, of bringing the joy of the Gospel to all those
around us—so that God’s loving plan of universal salvation might soon be
realized.
Given at St. Joseph Parish: Rochester,
IN – October 22nd, 2023
World Mission Sunday
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