Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Jb 7:1-4, 6-7
Second Reading: 1 Cor 9:16-19, 22-23
Gospel Reading: Mk 1:29-39
This Sunday’s readings speak of evangelization. “An obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!” St. Paul says.
Jesus says, “Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”
“Evangelize” comes from the Latin evangelium, meaning “the good news” or “the Gospel.” “Evangelizing” means proclaiming the Gospel to bring others to Christ and His Church.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, baptism, confirmation, and Holy Eucharist give all of us – not just “Church leaders” like Jesus and Paul – a “common vocation,” or calling, “to holiness and to the mission of evangelizing the world,” both “by word” and by “the testimony of life.” Lay people evangelize “in the ordinary circumstances of the world,” but “witness of life” is not enough; they must also be “on the lookout for occasions of announcing Christ by word, either to unbelievers ... or to the faithful.”
Pope St. Paul VI said that evangelizing means bringing the Good News into “all the strata of humanity from within and making it new.” However, he added, we ourselves must first be “renewed” by baptism and by “lives lived according to the Gospel.”
Evangelization, therefore, begins with interior conversion to Christ and his Church. (Notice how Christ got up early and prayed to his Father for several hours before he went to the neighbouring towns.) That conversion will affect not only ourselves, but the whole culture, gradually changing its institutions to make them Christian.
If we believe what we say in the Creed, how can we not evangelize? How can we not want to share the Good News with others? How can we hide the fact that we are Catholic?
For example, how can we chat about what we did last weekend without mentioning Mass, or respond to an invitation to a movie without denouncing sex and violence, or comment on a gorgeous sunset without saying “Thank God!” or discuss love and marriage without saying that sex outside marriage is wrong?
I know a man who teaches high school science. He loves the subject, and his students know it; he cannot hide it. His enthusiasm reveals itself in the delight with which he teaches, his desire that his students understand and love the subject as he does, and the way he describes everyday events in scientific terms – sometimes for fun, but always with genuine delight. One of his students commented that he “really lives his subject.”
We know how inspiring such teachers can be. That is what we must be like with our Catholicism. Indeed, if we know and love Christ and his Church, that is what we will be like.
We must not make ourselves objectionable, as some people do. That would turn people away. We must always to be ready to “give an explanation to anyone who asks us for a reason for our hope,” but give it “with gentleness and reverence,” St. Peter says. “Truth can impose itself on the mind of man only in virtue of its own truth, which wins over the mind with both gentleness and power,” said Vatican II.
Indeed, if we are known to be Catholics, our silence can be as eloquent as speech. I knew of two brothers, one of whom had drifted away from the Church while the other remained faithful. When they met, the one who had lapsed was always ready with arguments to justify his behaviour, but his brother never let him air them. When the lapsed brother finally repented, he gave credit to his brother, whose forbearance had prevented him from stubbornly maintaining his own arguments.
We should evangelize by our whole lives. We can even evangelize through suffering, like Job, in imitation of Christ, who “bore our sickness and endured our suffering,” as we say in the Gospel Acclamation.
As soon as I read the Vatican’s new document on blessings, Fiducia Supplicans, I realized that as usual the secular news media had got it wrong.
There is nothing new in the document – only clarification. The Church has always called down God’s blessing on sinners.
The most obvious example is what happens when we enter the confessional.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” we say, and the priest replies, “May almighty God bless you, that you may worthily and humbly confess your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
Another example occurs when people who consider themselves unworthy to receive Holy Communion ask for a blessing instead, and the priest imparts “the blessing of Christ.”
A third occurs at the end of Mass, when the priest says to all those present, regardless of their spiritual state, “May almighty God bless you: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
I was once asked to bless a Catholic man who, I knew, was going to be married outside the Church the next day. I did so, both of us knowing quite clearly that what he was going to do was wrong, but without any suggestion, given or received, that I was approving or absolving.
And when I am asked to bless a car, I do so without the least implication that I endorse its make!
When the Pharisees asked Jesus why he ate and drank with sinners, he explained that it is the sick, not the healthy, who need a doctor. “I have come to call sinners, not the self-righteous,” he said.
The more sinful we are, the more we need God’s blessing.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is Death and the End of the World. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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