Preaching at the end of the
Upper Room conference was a bit like following a combination of the Sermon on
the Mount and the Gettysburg Address. Archbishop
Miller’s address was particularly profound and groundbreaking.
I figured, therefore, that for the sake of the folks who’d watched the conference all day I should lighten up my homily with joke. But that wasn’t easy—it’s been a year and a half since I tried a joke in church. During the livestream months it was pretty risk to try to get a laugh from a congregation of four!
I decided to try a few “good news/bad news jokes,” since many of them come from parish life.
They fell flat except for this one:
Good News: Church attendance rose dramatically the last three weeks. Bad News: You were on vacation.
So, let’s get a bit serious. As you know, the word gospel comes from old English words meaning good news. And evangelize comes from a Greek word meaning the same.
In his exhortation “The Joy of the Gospel,” Pope Francis says that the Gospel “will always remain good news until it has been proclaimed to all people, until it has healed and strengthened every aspect of humanity, until it has brought all men and women together at table in God’s kingdom.”
The Pope reminds us that our faith is not just a bunch of rules and doctrines but a life-giving proclamation full of hope and promise. Someone calculated that in that document, Pope Francis uses the word “love” 154 times, “joy” 109 times, and “peace” 58 times.
But how are we to handle the bad news about the Good News? Because today’s readings, at first glance, don’t sound like good news.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus foretells his suffering and his death. Another discouraging note appears when ambition rears its ugly head among his disciples.
And our reading from the Letter of James makes it clear that ambition was just one of the vices that messed up life in the earliest Christian community.
The first reading, from the Book of Wisdom, is a graphic prophecy of the death of Jesus. And it casts a shadow on every Christian, since the hatred of the godless for the righteous did not end with the Crucifixion but remains a fact of life today.
Can we doubt that, when every day 13 Christians worldwide are killed because of their faith, 12 churches or Christian buildings are attacked. And when every day, 12 Christians are unjustly arrested or imprisoned, and another 5 are abducted.
That’s the 2021 report from the World Watch List of the top 50 countries where Christians are persecuted for following Jesus. The watch list, compiled by Open Doors, a respected charitable organization, found 309 million Christians living in places with very high or extreme levels of persecution, up from 260 million in last year’s list.
Bad news for sure. Or not? David Curry, the president of Open Doors has said “You might think the [list] is all about oppression. … But the [list] is really all about resilience.
“The numbers of God’s people who are suffering should mean the Church is dying—that Christians are keeping quiet, losing their faith, and turning away from one another,” he stated. “But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, in living color, we see the words of God recorded in the prophet Isaiah: ‘I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert’.”
One of the greatest challenges a disciple faces is understanding that bad news can never overpower or contradict the good news of Jesus Christ, who overcame sin and death and all that oppresses us.
Yet Pope Francis writes “The Gospel, radiant with the glory of Christ’s cross, constantly invites us to rejoice.” [n. 5]
The cross is a radiant symbol of glory. And it’s not only about Christ’s glory but ours. As St. Paul writes in words I quote so often, “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God,” or, in another translation, “God makes all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28).
All things—even suffering.
Calling our archdiocesan evangelization conference “Upper Room” was brilliant—because the upper room or Cenacle in Jerusalem is the traditional location of the Last Supper, the place where the apostles huddled in fear after the Crucifixion, the place where the risen Lord appeared to them, where the gathered in prayer with Mary awaiting the Holy Spirit, and where that Spirit was given.
What a tapestry of bad news and good news: dejection and fear, redeemed by joy and empowering.
The joy of the Gospel is meant to overcome not only our big fears but even the smaller ones. Pope Francis writes that “many lay people fear that they may be asked to undertake some apostolic work and they seek to avoid any responsibility that may take away from their free time.”
He even gives an example we experience right here at CTR: “it has become very difficult today to find trained parish catechists willing to persevere in this work.”
And he doesn’t spare the clergy, saying that “Something similar is also happening with priests who are obsessed with protecting their free time.”
Whether it’s priests or laity, the Pope says, “people feel an overbearing need to guard their personal freedom, as though the task of evangelization was a dangerous poison rather than a joyful response to God’s love which summons us to mission and makes us fulfilled and productive.”
What’s the “bad news” of losing some free time against the “good news” of sharing the Gospel with others?
Dear friends, the first gathering in the Upper Room was the first Eucharist. The last of which we are aware was the sending forth of the first missionaries empowered by the Holy Spirit.
As we gather today for the Eucharist, let’s make the connection between our worship and our work: between our coming to church, and our going out to the world.
The good news is that everyone of us has been called and commissioned to share the joy of the Gospel with others. The bad news is… Well, there really isn’t any bad news.
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*Lasky, Mike Jordan:“Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium: Work for justice at the heart of discipleship.” Millennial Journal. See Wikipedia, “The Joy of the Gospel.”
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