2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 49:3, 5-6
Second Reading: 1 Cor 1:1-3
Gospel Reading: Jn 1:29-34
The Mass Readings seem to make this Sunday an extension of the feasts we have just celebrated: the Baptism of the Lord and the Epiphany, in both of which Jesus manifested himself to us.
“I myself did not know him,” John says in the Gospel Reading; “but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.”
That revelation did not stop with the Jews. “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth,” God says to Israel in the First Reading.
Accordingly, St. Paul, a Jew, could tell even the Greeks of Corinth that they were “called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.”
Through our baptism, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we “are incorporated into the Church, and made sharers in her mission”: to bring “Christ’s faithful to share in his communion with the Father in the Holy Spirit.”
“In her whole being and in all her members, the Church is sent to announce, bear witness, make present, and spread the mystery of the communion of the Holy Trinity,” the Catechism says. (“Mission” comes from the Latin missa, which means “sent.”)
Notice: “in all her members.” We are each called, individually, to spread the good news that our sins can be forgiven, that we can share God’s life, that we need not die forever, that we can achieve utterly perfect, unending happiness.
First, we ourselves must be convinced that God loves us. “It is from God’s love for all men that the Church in every age receives both the obligation and the vigour of her missionary dynamism,” the Catechism says.
Second, we must live as if we know that God loves us. We must “walk the road Christ himself walked, a way of poverty and obedience, of service and self-sacrifice even to death,” the Catechism says.
Third, we must proclaim the good news intentionally. We are each called to be a missionary, proclaiming the Gospel to people who do not yet know Christ.
“Difficulties both internal and external have weakened the Church’s missionary thrust toward non-Christians, a fact which must arouse concern among all who believe in Christ,” Pope St. John Paul II said in his 1991 encyclical Redemptoris Missio.
In the Church’s history, “missionary drive has always been a sign of vitality” and its lessening “a sign of a crisis of faith.”
In the past, we have directed our missionary activity toward foreigners. Now, however, our own country is mission territory, for it is no longer Christian.
To be missionary, we do not have to preach on street corners; all we have to do is believe and act like Christians. That alone, in our society, will make us “a light to the nations” and “the salt of the earth.”
The mission of the Church “is to be a leaven and, as it were, the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into the people of God,” the Catechism says.
The Pope said his encyclical, which ostensibly invited the Church “to renew her missionary commitment,” nevertheless had as its goal “an interior renewal of faith and Christian life,” for the two are inseparable.
“Missionary activity renews the Church, revitalizes faith and Christian identity, and offers fresh enthusiasm and new incentive,” he explained. “Faith is strengthened when it is given to others.”
Missionary evangelization is “the primary service” the Church offers to “a world that has experienced marvellous achievements, but which seems to have lost its sense of ultimate realities and of existence itself,” he said.
We must pass on the good news of “the redemption that took place through the cross,” he said, for only that can give meaning to our life in this world.
