Many of us reading these reflections have pretty good educations. In addition, those ministering in parishes and retreat houses have been trained in the theological, philosophical, and pastoral fields. When others, not so trained, look at us in the pulpit or as we stand in front of a religion class, they consider us “educated” in the ways of God. In many ways we are. But as we reflect on our Second Reading today we are humbled, for who among us doesn’t feel small and insignificant in the presence of the Christ described in length and elaborate prose by the author of Ephesians?
The author is not writing to humiliate or to make us feel puny, but to affirm the grandeur of our God shown to us in Christ. Hearing the reading can’t help but stir up a desire in us to know still more than we do about this God of ours and the Christ who is “far above every principality, authority, power and dominion and every name that is named.” The Christ placed before us isn’t the Jesus of the Gospels, but is the “head over all things.” Christ is above every power, “not only in this age and also in the one to come.”
When we pray and reflect on the Jesus of the Gospels we identify with the one who took flesh and was like us “in all things but sin.” But our Ephesians reading reminds us of the great power Christ has to support and cradle our lives. When we are weak, he is strong. When we are misguided or in doubt, our God (“the Father of glory”) gives us a Spirit of wisdom to help us come to know Christ and the “surpassing greatness of his power for us.”
The author of Ephesians pours out one image after another depicting “the immeasurable greatness” of Christ’s power. The reason Ephesians focused on Christ’s cosmic grandeur was because the Ephesians church was in struggle and crisis. The church then and the church now, needs to hear the reassurance contained in Ephesians, that the all-powerful Christ will not let us go, but will support embrace and guide us with the promised “Spirit of wisdom.” That’s reassuring during these days when the Church struggles with both exterior and interior “principalities and powers.”
The people I meet in my parish travels speak of the Church’s current fragility. They express disappointment over recent exercises of hierarchical authority; splits in their parish communities over liturgical practices; loss of membership to local fundamentalist sects; disenchanted women who feel silenced when decisions affecting the parish community are being made; pastors who are overworked and stretched thin because of the priest shortage, etc. I’m sure we could fill a page with our own additions to that list.
Ephesians was written between A.D. 80 -100, in no-less divisive times than our own. The Gentile majority in the young church was dismissive of the Jewish Christians members. So, the author, speaking to that time and ours, is appealing to Christians to remember that Christ is the head, we the body of Christ and the true nature of the church is both a universal and inclusive community.
In Acts, Luke also addresses the divisions within the community and the persecutions upon it from without. Hence the anxious question put to Jesus by the disciples, which we too might want to also ask these days, “Lord are you now at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” Or, as voiced by Yeats, in his poem (“The Second Coming”), “Surely some revelation is at hand: Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” We grow weary of the mess our world is in and we look for relief. Surely the time for Christ to return in his fullness is now! But until Christ does return, our lives are to reflect his holiness and we must live out our mission to spread the good news and minister, as his hands and feet, to all the world.
Jesus’ reply to his anxious disciples: “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority.” An instant fix does not seem to be coming to our weary world. What about us then? Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, the author of Ephesians and Mark encourage us today with a similar reassurance. Christ reigns and gives us his Holy Spirit to strengthen and guide our life here and now. We are to wait in hope — despite the contrary signs in our world. Ours is a broken world and we wonder when the broken pieces will come together to form the new world Christ promised us. Meanwhile we trust in Jesus’ words in Acts today: the Spirit is coming and will continue to form us into stalwart disciples of the Lord.
In Mark’s gospel today Jesus departs and leaves his disciples to continue his work. The works they do will be extraordinary because, from God’s right hand, the Lord will work with the disciples and confirm their preaching with accompanying wondrous signs.
When I lived in West Virginia there were churches that took Jesus’ teaching in today’s gospel selection quite literally. The ministers would reach into crates and lift out poisonous snakes to hold them before the congregation. Some of the pastors even demonstrated their faith by drinking strychnine poison. Not all these attempts of faith had happy endings. What then are we to make of Jesus’ departing words to his disciples? “They will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.”
In vivid images Jesus conveys the power disciples can rely on to fulfill the mission he gave them before he was taken up into heaven. Have you seen such signs of power as a disciples of Jesus in your life? He is working with us when we or another overcomes the “demons” of addiction, selfishness and violence. We speak in “new languages” when we strive to understand people who are different from us. Serpents were an ancient symbol for evil; remember the tempter depicted in the Genesis account. We handle “serpents” when we take risks to confront the evils of our day — hunger, racism, sexism, homophobia, victimization of the poor, etc. Though we deal with such risks, we will not be afraid, for Christ’s power works through us and so we, his disciples, are sent “into the whole world” to proclaim “the gospel to every creature.”
NEW BEGINNING
Each evangelist writes in a different way the mission that Jesus entrusted to his disciples. According to Matthew, they were to “make disciples” that would live as He had shown them. According to Luke, they were to be “witnesses” of what they had witnessed while they were with Him. Mark, on the other hand, summarizes everything by saying that “they were to proclaim the Gospel to every creature.”
Anyone getting acquainted with a Christian community today does not see exactly what the Gospels have told us. What they actually find out is the workings of an ancient religion that is very much in crisis. They are not able to identify clearly what Jesus had taught them as the GOOD NEWS some twenty centuries ago.
To begin with, many Christians do not know the Gospel directly. All that they have heard about Jesus is what different catechists or preachers have here and there told them about. They live their religion totally deprived of a personal contact with the real Gospel.
How are they going to confess it if they don’t even know about it in their own communities? Vatican Council II has reminded us about something totally forgotten today: “The Gospel must be, at all times, the foundation of any kind of life in the Church.” The time has come to realize and find a way to have a Christian community in which the most important thing is to understand and welcome the Gospel of Jesus.
Nothing can recreate the life and structure of our communities without the spirit of the Gospel. Only the personal and immediate experience of the Gospel can revitalize the Church. A few years from now, when the prevalent crises force us to concentrate on the very essential, we shall realize that the most important thing for Christians today is to get together to read, listen to and share the various Gospel narratives.
First of all, we must believe in the revitalizing strength of the Gospel. The Gospel stories teach us to live our Faith, not as an obligation but as personal choice. They make us practice our Christian beliefs, not as a duty or commandment, but because we share and love it. Gathered together in small groups, sharing the Gospel, we shall soon recover our true identity as followers of Jesus.
We must return to the Gospel as a new beginning. There is no use any longer for any traditional programme or pastoral strategy. Within a few years, listening to the Gospel of Jesus will not be just one of many religious activities, but the real beginning of the regeneration of the Christian faith for the small Christian communities that will still be existing within the larger and secularized society.