We humans are always suspicious of people who are different from us, aren’t we? And we are always very competitive. You can see and hear me give this Homily at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGCcX8cKkgY
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Survival requires caution when faced with something new, and competition means that we then push ourselves to do greater things, which can often benefit us all. It also means that we Christians are not going to be exempt from all this. We cannot pretend that somehow we’re different when we know we’re not.
Of course, Christian rivalry can be seen right from the beginning. Think of those disciples, those, closest to Jesus? What do we hear them doing? (Mark 9:34-3.5) They argue about who is the greatest, and Jesus has to tell them that “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” He doesn’t stop us competing, but wants us to compete to be the best servant. In our 2nd Reading today from St Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, (1:1-3) and in similar readings from this Letter in the weeks ahead, we’ll hear Paul trying to deal with the same problem in Corinth. This is probably why he begins wisely by telling them how wonderful they are, addressing them as “The holy people of Jesus Christ, who are called to take their place among all the saints everywhere.” And then offers them “Grace and peace.”
But he also writes something that stands as a warning for what follows, when he reminds them that Jesus is Lord for everyone “Theirs as well as ours.”; so that setting up different parties within the Church, saying they are right and others are wrong, is not the way of Jesus. This still goes on amongst Christians, not just between different denominations, but between Christians who belong to the same Communion, in our case our fellow Roman Catholics. I’m often saddened when I see online groups of Catholics, arguing with very little love, that their way of practising the faith is the correct way and that everyone else is wrong; and adding that their way is also the best because it is the most successful, shown by the fact that more people worship with them than with the others.
One of the greatest virtues of our Catholic Church is that although we have a common faith, we practise that faith in any number of different ways. I’m always delighted to see online examples of Mass being celebrated, for example in parts of Africa, where large groups of people are singing very African songs in praise of God and are all swaying in unison as they do so. Being a fairly restrained Englishmen, I’m not sure how I would cope with always praying like that, but I hope I would learn to, if that was the only Mass I could get to. What matters is the Mass, is our offering of ourselves in worship as Jesus taught us to, not the particular way in which it is done; and the idea that the numbers who are attracted prove this way or that way right is equally misguided. People who do think like that might well have their eyes opened if they saw the numbers at Mass in places they regard as foreign. I noted a Tweet from Malawi about a week ago where the priest posted a lovely picture with the caption : 700 children gathered for Epiphany celebration. 46 received first communion, and 75 are baptized today.
Some of the greatest missionaries have been those who have taken the faith to different people throughout the world, and worked with them to use words and music and images from their own culture to express the eternal truths that we’re used to only hear being expressed in ours. Think of St Francis Xavier in the Far East, or Mother Teresa in Calcutta. They were impelled to do this by the sort of words we heard in our 1st Reading from Isaiah today (49:3.5-6) “It is not enough for you to be my servant… I will make you the light of the nations, so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
But sharing our faith with others is very different from imposing it on them, or imposing it in our way with our particular presumptions and prejudices. I’m reminded of my time in Pakistan where I once saw a building standing empty and derelict. It was a perfect copy of an English Parish Church – a failed attempt to impose a very English way of worship, with very English imagery, on a very different people. What we need to share therefore is not the outward trappings of our faith, whatever they happen to be, but the heart of our faith; and that must be not a set of words or actions, but hopefully our deep love for God as we meet him in Jesus. Absolutely central to this is the obvious truth that we cannot share love unless we do so with love, and that’s why imposition of our views is out.
Thinking of Jesus as the Light of the world might help here. Light is not a thing you can share by gathering it up in a heap and handing it on. One cannot see light, or trap it, one can only share it by indicating what it illuminates. Think what it might be like for a person born blind who is given their sight. They suddenly perceive everything they have touched and felt and smelled in a totally different way. They do not see light but they see what light does, what a difference it makes to the world we live in. In the same way, the most effective missionary is the one who simply shares what God, what Jesus, means to them, how believing makes a difference in their lives. We will have to use all sorts of words to describe this, and many may be conventional terms that the other person may not really understand. So we might say that Jesus is - God with us - that he is - the Son of God - that Jesus is - Our Saviour and Redeemer. Or we might try and explain the wonderful idea that we have been exploring once again over the Christmas period, that God chooses to come to us humans as a fellow human being. In our Gospel, (John 1:29-34) John the Baptist speaks of Jesus as “The Lamb of God.” It was his way of sharing something he had only just come to recognise, for although he would have already known what Jesus looked like outwardly – after all he was his cousin – what he had to learn and then share with others was a deeper truth which he expressed in this strange way. Yes, calling a man a Lamb is a strange way of talking, but it was his way of sharing what he had seen; and we must do the same; but with love of course, using whatever words seem to work for us. For we know that if our words are shared in love then they are being shared in God, who will translate the words, so that our hearers can understand their deeper meaning.
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