[stephenkhoo]

Saturday, 3 December, 2011, 1st Week of Advent
NEW EVANGELIZATION REQUIRES THAT WE BECOME ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN

SCRIPTURE READINGS: 1 CORINTHIANS 9:16-19.22-23; MK 16:15-20

The command to proclaim the gospel to all creation is given to all believers. That is why the Church is missionary in nature. Just as the Father sent Jesus, He now sends us in the power of the Holy Spirit. The mission of every Christian is rooted in the mission of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Having received the Good News free of charge, because of God’s love for us, it is now our duty to graciously share the Good News freely with others. As St Paul says in the first reading, “I do not boast of preaching the gospel, since it is a duty which has been laid on me; I should be punished if I did not preach it! If I had chosen this work myself, I might have been paid for it, but as I have not, it is a responsibility which has been put into my hands.” Indeed, Pope Paul VI states that “…evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church. This task and mission are particularly urgent because of the expansive, penetrating changes in present-day society. In fact, evangelizing is the grace and vocation proper to the Church; her utmost identity. She exists in order to evangelize…” (Evangelii Nuntiandi no. 14)

How then do we fulfill this responsibility entrusted to us? We are invited to take the cue from St Paul and our Lord Himself. St Paul said, “So though I am not a slave of any man I have made myself the slave of everyone so as to win as many as I could. For the weak I made myself weak. I made myself all things to all men in order to save some at any cost; and I still do this, for the sake of the gospel, to have a share in its blessings.” The fundamental principle of mission is to identify with the people whom we are reaching out. This was the way God reached out to us in Jesus. He became man, incarnated into our world, borne into a Jewish family and culture, suffering with us in every way except sin. Although He was divine, He “did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross!” This, too, was the case of St Francis Xavier. He brought the gospel to the East. He adapted the gospel for his audience.

Accordingly, we must incarnate the gospel in every situation we are in. This is what the New Evangelization is asking of us, that we need to consider new ways of proclaiming the Good News. In such changing times, where societies are going through significant and unpredictable upheavals in lifestyle, economy, morality, science and technology, we must be ready to make the gospel relevant to a very sophisticated society. This is our great challenge; otherwise we will make the gospel message redundant. If the work of evangelization is to bring the Good News to all strata of humanity so that society will be transformed, then we must seek to renew every person in the values of the gospel.

Such a task calls for a clear distinction between the Gospel and the culture on one hand; and on the other, we must not think that the Gospel exists in a vacuum. Consequently, the building of God’s kingdom “cannot avoid borrowing the elements of human culture or cultures. Though independent of cultures, the Gospel and evangelization are not necessarily incompatible with them; rather they are capable of permeating them all without becoming subject to any one of them. The split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time, just as it was of other times. Therefore every effort must be made to ensure a full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures. They have to be regenerated by an encounter with the Gospel. But this encounter will not take place if the Gospel is not proclaimed.” (Evangelii Nuntiandi no. 20)

Indeed, if the work of evangelization is to be effective, those who hear the Gospel must not see the Catholic Faith as an alien religion or something that is imported from another culture at the expense of theirs. Once again, we are reminded, of what Pope Paul VI reiterated, “The Gospel, and therefore evangelization, are certainly not identical with culture, and they are independent in regard to all cultures.” The gospel that we proclaim certainly transcends all cultures although expressed in and through each particular culture. We are called to proclaim the love of God in Christ Jesus and how this love is still celebrated through the Sacraments, especially in the Eucharist, and empowered by the Word of God. Consequently, where the culture is not against Christian values and truth, we should cloth the culture with the values of the gospel; and where the values are faithful to the gospel, then our faith should be expressed according to the cultures of the people. So evangelization involves inculturation and the purification of culture when the values promoted are ambiguous, deficient or contrary to the gospel.

In the final analysis, what we are called to transmit is the person of Jesus Christ. He is the Good News. The gospel is not a book or even a set of teachings but a living and efficacious Word in the person of Jesus Christ who is the definitive Word of God who became man. The gospel in essence is the Good News about Jesus Christ. That is why the goal of evangelization is the transmission of faith realized by a personal encounter with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, leading to an experience of God as our Father. We are reminded of what Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his first encyclical, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere ‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us.” (God is Love, No 1)

Accordingly, to transmit faith in Jesus Christ would require that we make possible the conditions for this personal encounter with Jesus Christ. This is where we are required to produce the signs of the presence of the Lord at work in our times and in different places. Jesus told the disciples whom He sent out, “These are the signs that will be associated with believers: in my name they will cast out devils; they will have the gift of tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and be unharmed should they drink deadly poison; they will lay their hands on the sick, who will recover.” If Jesus is to be real for humanity, they must know that He is truly the Lord of their lives. We are therefore called to continue the ministry of Jesus and extend His Lordship through the works of healing and deliverance. The Lord has given the Church the same power to heal and liberate our brothers and sisters either directly through His power in prayer or indirectly through the good works we do, especially the promotion of justice and the works of compassion, reaching out to the sick, the poor, the suffering and those under oppression of the Evil One or the oppression of the injustices of their fellowmen.

Indeed the proclamation of the Gospel cannot be mere words alone but must be accompanied by deeds if people are to come to know that Jesus is truly Lord. Through the evangelist, we read of how the gospel was spread in the early Church: “And so the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up to heaven: there at the right hand of God he took his place, while they, going out, preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and confirming the word by the signs that accompanied it.” Only in this way, could they truly sing out with the psalmist, “O praise the Lord, all you nations, acclaim him all you peoples. Strong is his love for us; He is faithful for ever.” If they had never experienced His love and His power, how could they have ever known that God is love and that God is faithful to them in love?

How then can we allow God to work with us and in us for His greater glory? We need to make ourselves available to the Lord. In other words, we must make ourselves available to the Lord and to His people. The gospel must be given freely to all, since it has been given to us free of charge. The more we are available to the Lord, the more He works in us. Effectiveness in our ministry is always hindered by our selfishness and our fear of venturing into new frontiers, whether in reaching out or the means we use in the proclamation of the gospel. Often it is because we are too proud to rely on Him, or to adapt ourselves to the situation, insisting on our established methods and our traditional ways, even though we can see that we are not bearing fruits. We have to reconsider the accepted practices and means of evangelization and pastoral outreach, for the conventional ways seem no longer effective in gaining the attention of a world that is searching for God. The Church has been abandoned by the young people, especially because the values that we want to pass on to them are neither understood nor appreciated. Furthermore, the Church’s institutions are viewed with suspicion and reservation. In such a climate, we need to consider in an entirely new way, how we can proclaim and transmit the faith. This requires humility on our part to acknowledge that perhaps, we have lost touch with our people because we are not adapting to the times.

Like St Francis Xavier, we must leave our country, our old mindset and put on a new mindset in spreading the gospel, a message that is ever old and yet must be made new. Isn’t that what the Holy Spirit is doing, helping us to proclaim not a new gospel but the same gospel in a new way? But we need to follow the spirit of St Francis Xavier who, in his zeal to spread the gospel, would venture out to India and Japan when he did not even know the language of the peoples. But he was willing to adapt to their cultures and most of all, to be faithful to the gospel values of truth and charity in his missionary and pastoral outreach because he knew in his heart that Jesus is the Good News.