A Christian Education
Have
you ever given any thought to what happens after the proclamation of the Gospel
at Mass? After the deacon or priest, elevating the Gospel Book, says, “The
Gospel of the Lord,” the assembly responds, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.”
A ritual moment that is certainly simple enough. So simple, in fact, that most
of us respond almost automatically, already sitting down to listen to the
homily that will follow.
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| Christ the Teacher from the Monastery of Saint Katherine on Mt. Sinai, 6th century |
Gospel is the English translation of the Koine Greek εὐαγγέλιον. The Greek term was Latinized as evangelium
in the Vulgate, and translated into Latin as bona annuntiatio -- Good News. The Fathers of the Second Vatican
Council, in their Dogmatic Constitution on Divine
Revelation (Dei Verbum),
explain this Good News in this way:
Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy
held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels… whose historical character
the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while
living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the
day He was taken up into heaven (see Acts 1:1). Indeed, after the Ascension of
the Lord the Apostles handed on to their hearers what He had said and done...
The sacred authors wrote the four Gospels, selecting some things from the many
which had been handed on by word of mouth or in writing, reducing some of them
to a synthesis, explaining some things in view of the situation of their
churches and preserving the form of proclamation but always in such fashion
that they told us the honest truth about Jesus. (§19)
This
“honest truth about Jesus,” who he was, what he taught, the wonders and signs
he performed, are indeed Good News. And yet, as the Gospel proclaimed on the
Twentieth and Twenty-First Sundays of Ordinary Time this year remind
us, not everything Jesus taught was easy or what many would even
necessarily call “good.” In fact, these passages from Luke’s Gospel (12:49-53 and 13:22-30) are not only challenging, they almost
seem to be at odds with the rest of Jesus’ teachings… or, at least, those
teachings we generally seem to prefer.
We can take
a cue for how to read these Gospel texts from the Letter to the Hebrews
(12:5-7), which reminds us of that we are called to “disciples”:
You have forgotten the exhortation addressed to you as children:“My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord
or lose heart when reproved by him;
for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines;
he scourges every son he acknowledges.”
Endure your trials as “discipline”;
God treats you as sons.
For what “son” is there whom his father does not discipline?
At the time,
all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain,
yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness
to those who are trained by it.
Whatever trials we endure, whatever our “education” involves, “suffering
reminds us that faith’s service to the common good is always one of hope — a
hope which looks ever ahead in the knowledge that only from God, from the
future which comes from the risen Jesus, can our society find solid and lasting
foundations. In this sense faith is linked to hope, for even if our dwelling
place here below is wasting away, we have an eternal dwelling place which God
has already prepared in Christ, in his body (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:5). The
dynamic of faith, hope and charity (cf. 1 Thessalonians 1:3;
1 Corinthians 13:13) thus leads us to embrace the concerns of all men and women
on our journey towards that city "whose architect and builder is God"
(Hebrews 11:10), for "hope does not disappoint" (Romans 5:5).”
—Pope Francis (Lumen Fidei, 57).
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