D. Vincent Twomey SVD sees Mission Sunday as an opportunity to reflect on the question “Why mission?” and to think about what our response we can make.
The answer to this question given by Pope Benedict XVI in his Message for Mission Sunday is not in the first instance a statement but a person: St Paul, the greatest of all missionaries. He began life as a young religious fanatic, Saul. Born in exile in Tarsus, he was a zealous Pharisee, who later boasted that he had studied in Jerusalem under one of the leading rabbis of his day, Gamaliel. Saul was convinced that what the early Christians believed – that Jesus of Nazareth was Lord God – was blasphemous. And so he persecuted them. He approved of the stoning of the first martyr, Stephen. Then, on his way to Damascus to imprison those who believed in Christ, a light from heaven flashed about him, he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”. “Who are you?”, Saul asked in return. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:3-5).
His conversion was complete. Jesus is the Lord God, the redeemer of all humanity. Saul was specially chosen by God to become the apostle to the Gentiles (cf. Acts 9:15; 22:21), i.e. to the nations of the world, and not just to the Jewish Nation, as the early believers tended to assume. Now called Paul, it was he above all who enabled the early Church understand the full implications of the mystery of God’s becoming man, namely to redeem all human beings through faith in the Son of God. The Gentiles did not first have to become Jews. Faith alone saves. Paul discovered the Church’s catholicity, its universal nature as embracing every nation and transcending every culture, because Christ died for each and every person, so that each of us might share in the fullness of the divine life. Transformed by his personal encounter with the Risen Lord, his theological training under Gamaliel helped him to spell out the full implications of the Christian faith for the early Church. On one occasion, he even challenged St Peter, whose life-style was not in conformity with the implications of the faith Peter himself preached (cf. Gal. 2:11).
At the core of Paul’s preaching is the Crucified Christ: he was acutely aware that Christ had died for him personally, and for each human being, equally personally. This was the message he preached from Jerusalem to Rome and to the ends of the earth. The weakness of the Cross reveals the power of God’s love. The triumph of God’s love over sin and evil was manifested in the Resurrection and is now present in his Body, the Church. By persecuting the Church, Saul was persecuting Christ himself. The Risen Christ’s presence in the Church is real. He is encountered in what we now call the sacraments, above all the Eucharist, which St Paul described so vividly (1 Cor 11:17-32). The sacraments transform us from within. Nourished on Christ’s’ Body in the Eucharist we become His Body, the Church (cf. 1 Cor 10:17). We are divinized – and so we must manifest that divine love in our daily lives in our love for others (cf. 1 Cor 13).
Many of our contemporaries do not know this. They live in darkness and in the shadow of death. The core mission of the Church is to preach the message of faith in season and out of season, so that people might know what God has done for them, how much God in Christ loves them, how they might find hope and joy in their lives.
The urgent mission of the Church in Europe is to reawaken the embers of faith that are still there and to reach out to those of no faith. Paul would not understand our complacency in the face of the present fall-off in practice. The culture of death has become so prevalent because we have lost our zeal for Christ, lost our zeal for souls. October is the occasion to renew our zeal.
But Pope Benedict XVI, in his message for Mission Sunday, reminds us that we cannot limit our gaze to our own local Church. We cannot ignore the fact that the greater part of the world’s population does not know Christ. Countless people do not know his love for them. They have not encountered him so as to allow him transform their lives – because we who believe no longer consider it our urgent responsibility to send out missionaries to them or encourage young men and women to leave all to become foreign missionaries. Dialogue with the other world religions is part of that mission, but not its essence. Concern for justice, peace and the integrity of creation are essential aspects of that mission, but neither do they constitute its essence. What is the essence? St Paul would say: to preach Christ Our Saviour, in season and out of season so that others will be converted to the Risen Lord and encounter Him in His Church. “Woe to me if I do not preach [the Gospel!” (1 Cor 9: 16).
This article first appeared in The Word (October 2008), a Divine Word Missionary Publication. D. Vincent Twomey SVD is the author of Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age, (Ignatius Press 2007) and The End of Irish Catholicism? (Veritas 2003).
