Following God’s word in our lives does
not mean that everything will be smooth sailing. Again and again, the prophets preached God’s
holy word with such truth and honesty that their preaching brought about a
great deal of division in their community.
Some of the people who heard God’s word wanted to repent and heed the
meaning of the message. However, others
wanted to harm the prophets for their honest words that threatened the status
quo and that cut to the heart of what was wrong in society. Look at Jeremiah – he preached a message
against the war that Israel was engaging in, he predicted the downfall of
Jerusalem, with his message causing great division within his community. The message that Jeremiah brought was
threatening to the governmental officials of his day, so they threw him in a
muddy cistern to die.
When we think of Jesus, we probably
think of his message of love: love of God and love of neighbor. We think of all the healing Jesus brought to
the lives of many who were suffering and oppressed and outcast in society. We think of his message of peace. So, how is it that Jesus tells us in today’s
Gospel that his message is so radical that it will bring division, not peace,
that it will even divide families? When
we think about peace, we think about it in our modern Western point of view of
peace as order and silence, as stillness and tranquility, as the absence of
war. But ancient Israel was a culture of
a lot of activity, of noise and spontaneity.
Israel was a nation trying to survive along side its neighbors in midst
of many foreign powers coming in and imposing their rule. In the midst of Israel’s cultural reality, we
have the Hebrew word shalom, or peace, which involved confronting conflicts,
which involved making something whole and complete again. In Ancient Israel, shalom or peace was always
applied with justice and compassion.
Christ’s message is not a message of
just fitting in and going with the flow and living in the absence of war. Christ knows that his message will bring about
division in our world when it challenges what is socially acceptable and what is
politically correct. Recently, in
reflecting upon Christ’s very radical Gospel message, Pope Francis told us as
members of the Christian faithful that we need to speak the message of truth
and love to the world, not the message of hypocrisy. Francis wants all of us to speak the truth in
love, not to speak the social language of society in order to be polite, in
order to fit in, to say nice, warm fuzzy words that we don’t really mean.
We hear today’s Gospel message in the
midst of a long journey Jesus is taking in the Gospel of Luke to the city of
Jerusalem. Jesus knows that the end of
this journey will not bring about tranquility and comfort. He had been baptized
in the waters of the River Jordan, revealing a special mission that he had in
the world. However, he knows that upon
his arrival in Jerusalem, he will be baptized by fire, that he will be put to
death on a cross. Jesus felt a lot of
pressure on this part of his journey; he knew that his message would bring
division, conflict, and unrest. But he
knew that he had to continue to preach his message, to speak the truth, to
confront and challenge.
Let’s be honest: it is not easy being a
Christian in the world today. And I can
tell you, it is not easy being a priest in the world today. Sometimes the message that we preach in the
Gospel will offend people. Sometimes
they will see how this message hits them directly in their daily lives, and it
will be uncomfortable for them to be challenged in this way. But our last three popes – John Paul II,
Benedict XVI, and Francis – they all have warned us that relativism is the
greatest danger in the world today. By
relativism, the popes mean that in our world today, people do not see truth or
moral values as absolute, but rather we have a lot of people who create their
own moral criteria and moral code by which they live, justifying their own
actions and their own way of thinking, whatever that may be. Pope
Francis said that he took his name as pope from St Francis of Assisi, a man
who always promoted peace in the world.
But, Pope Francis added, true peace is always accompanied by truth, and
true peace cannot exist if everyone has his own criteria and if everyone claims
exclusively his own rights without regard for the universal truth and the good
of others. We have a lot of people today
who claim that they are Catholics, but they disregard the teachings of the
Church and disregard the truth that Jesus teaches, setting them aside for their
own values and their own personally chosen truth.
Yes, we are in challenging times right
now, but it has always been a challenge to live the Gospel message in our
lives, to apply it to our reality and to preach that message to the world
through our actions and through our lives.
Yet, we are called to face this challenge, to apply the Gospel to our
lives, even when it is not comfortable or easy.
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