Daily Mass Gospel Reflection- To Believe, Is To Proclaim

Friends, in today’s Gospel, the risen Lord commissions the eleven Apostles to proclaim the Good News to everyone.
And this commission to evangelize the people of the world extends to all baptized Christians.

To evangelize is to proclaim Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead.
When this kerygma, this Paschal Mystery, is not at the heart of the project, Christian evangelization effectively disappears,
devolving into a summons to bland religiosity or generic spirituality.
When Jesus crucified and risen is not proclaimed, a beige and unthreatening Catholicism emerges,
a thought system that is, at best, an echo of the environing culture.

Peter Maurin, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, said that the Church has taken its own dynamite
and placed it in hermetically sealed containers and sat on the lid.
In a similar vein, Stanley Hauerwas commented that the problem with Christianity is not that it is socially conservative or politically liberal,
but that “it is just too damned dull”!

For both Maurin and Hauerwas, what leads to this attenuation is a refusal to preach the dangerous
and unnerving news concerning Jesus risen from the dead.

+++When Jesus had risen, early on
the first day of the week,
he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven
demons.
She went and told his companions who
were mourning and weeping.
When they heard that he was
alive
and had been seen by her,
they did not believe.

After this he appeared in another form
to two of them walking along on
their way to the country. but they did not believe them either.

But later, as the Eleven were at
table, he appeared to them
and rebuked them for their
unbelief
and hardness of heart
because they had not believed those
who saw him after he had been raised.
He said to them, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every
creature.”+++

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