14th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First reading: Is 66:10-14
Second reading: Gal 6:14-18
Gospel reading: Lk 10:1-12, 17-20

“The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town where he himself intended to go.”

These people were his ambassadors. However, Jesus gave them real power: “even the demons” submitted to them. Moreover, he gave them real responsibility: he warned that those who failed to welcome them would find God’s Last Judgment more intolerable than would the inhabitants of Sodom.

In a passage omitted from the reading, Christ stressed the seriousness of their mission: “He who hears you, hears me. He who rejects you, rejects me. And he who rejects me, rejects him who sent me.”

Many people today downplay or even deplore the Church’s missionary activity. It does not really matter what religion you belong to, they argue, and no one should try to change anyone else’s mind about it.

Behind this attitude is a lack of belief in the objective reality of God, goodness, right and wrong, heaven and hell, etc. As I heard a young person say recently, “I’m religious, but I don’t let religion influence my life. I rely on it for comfort; that’s all.”

The Church is missionary by her very nature and origin, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In every age, she receives “both the obligation and the vigour of her missionary dynamism” from God’s love, for the love of Christ urges her on.

The Church’s mission is God’s mission, the Catechism says: “to make humans share in the communion between the Father and the Son in their Spirit of love.”

It is true that the Holy Spirit prompts everyone to perceive and follow the truth, and that those who obey are already on the way of salvation. However, God has entrusted the fullness of the truth about salvation to the Catholic Church. Accordingly, the Church must go out to bring people the truth.

“The Church, and in it every single baptized person, is missionary by its nature,” Pope St. John Paul II said. “Faith and mission go hand in hand. The stronger and deeper the faith, the more we will feel the need to communicate, share, and witness to it.”

It is frightening to think how much depends on us: nothing less than the salvation of the world. How can Jesus have left so much to us when we are so weak, ignorant, and sinful; when there is so great a discrepancy between the Church’s message and the human weakness of its members, as the Catechism says?

First, we must realize that in the Church’s missionary activity, the Holy Spirit is the protagonist, “the principal agent,” the Catechism says. It is he who leads the Church on her missionary paths. It is he who fulfills, in the Church, as the new Jerusalem, the promises of this Sunday’s first reading.

Second, we must never forget that to extend Christ’s reign, we must take the “way of penance and renewal,” the “narrow way of the cross.” That was Christ’s way, and the Church must follow it if she is to communicate the fruits of salvation to all humans, says the Catechism: “a way of poverty and obedience, of service and self-sacrifice even to death.”

Accordingly, St. Paul, the missionary of missionaries, prays that he may “never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Missionary work requires patience, the Catechism says. It begins with the proclamation of the Gospel to people who do not yet know Christ, continues with the establishment of new Christian communities, and leads to the foundation of new dioceses under new bishops, the apostles’ successors.

Let us always be ready to issue to the world around us the invitation in this Sunday’s psalm: “Come and hear, all who fear God; and I will tell what he has done for me”; or, as Bishop Emeritus David Monroe of Kamloops quotes in his episcopal motto, “Come and see.”

Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, and it will remain available until the end of August. Father will teach the whole course again starting in September.

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