The bright and
shining face of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
The
Mission: not Conquest but Compassion
January 22, 2012, 3rd Sunday Ordinary
Time
Jonah 3:1-5
I Corinthians 7:29-31 Mark 1: 14 -20
Alleluia,
alleluia.
A reading
from the holy Gospel according to Mark
Glory
to you, Lord.
After
John had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee
proclaiming the gospel of God: "This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God
The
Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord
Jesus Christ.
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Introduction
Super
Bowl XLVI
The Christmas
season is over. We’re in liturgical `Ordinary Time’ now until Ash
Wednesday, February 22, one month from today. Then we will enter into the `Extraordinary Time’ of Lent, and plod along through
the forty days of Lenten penance until Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012. In the
meanwhile, for a great majority of Americans there’s one great event on the
horizons to brighten up the doldrums of these winter days: Super Bowl XLVI, February 5, 2012.
Christianity: a missionary religion
Jesus
called twelve apostles, and then sent them on mission. (Lk. 9:1) He also called
seventy-two disciples and sent them on mission as well. (Lk. 10:1) Then after
Jesus’ death and resurrection, the eleven apostles went to Galilee to the
mountain where the risen Lord had told them to go. There they met the Lord, who
again sent them on mission. He commanded them, saying,”Go forth into the whole
world and make disciples of all men, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Mt. 28: 19) Christianity is a
missionary religion, and its mission seems
to be to make the whole world Christian.
Islam: also a
missionary religion
Islam, like Christianity, is also a
missionary religion, and its mission also seems to be to make the whole world
Islamic. One of the five great Pillars
of Islam is Shahada: a proclamation of personal
faith that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. At the end
of the day, Shahada is loaded with a missionary
urgency to make the whole world Islamic. Sometimes
listed as a sixth Pillar of Islam is Jihad:
holy war. That word can innocently mean a holy war of self discipline waged upon
one’s self in the struggle to surrender to Allah. (In fact, `Islam’ is
an Arabic word meaning `to surrender’ - to surrender to God’s will.) Or Jihad can mean
something downright ominous. The horrific event of 9/11, when Islamic
extremists drove two 747’s into the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan, bringing
down not only mountainous heaps of mortar and bricks but also 3000 innocent
people was indeed a Jihad - a holy
war against `infidels.’ The horrendous event of 9/11 which required an
operation working day and night for 10 months to haul away 2,000,000 tons of
debris (in which were rescued 20,000 body-parts for appropriate burial) was
indeed a Jihad - a holy war against `infidels.’
Judaism: not a missionary religion
Unlike Christianity and Islam, Judaism is not
a missionary religion. In the early Church
when a problem arose about Jews mixing
with Gentiles, Peter Simon, a Jew, got up and said, “I now realize that God has
no favorites but gives welcome to the man of any nation who fears Him and acts
uprightly." (Acts 10:28-35) The
same theme that God has no favorites is found in Deuteronomy 10:17, II
Chronicles 19:7, Job 34:19, Wisdom 6:7,
Romans 2:11, Galatians 2:6 and Ephesians 6:9. If God has no favorites but “gives welcome
to any one from any nation who fears him and acts uprightly,” then there is no
frantic need for Judaism to go forth and make the whole world Jewish. Judaism
rests in peace. It lives and lets live, and it wishes itself to be left in
peace. It launches no crusades. It plots no attacks on metropolitan areas to
bring down not only towering skyscrapers but also and especially `infidels.’
Not a mission of conquest
Christianity
is, indeed, a missionary religion. But what is the nature of the mission on
which Jesus sends us? Is it a mission of `universal conquest’ – a mission to
make the whole world Christian? The New Testament does, indeed, present Jesus
as commanding the apostles to “Go forth into the whole world and make disciples
of all men, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit.” (Mt. 28: 19) But scholars agree that that command with its very
explicit Trinitarian formula (which reads like an excerpt from a baptismal
ritual manual) is more the command of the early church community bent on growth
and expansion, than the command of the historical Jesus.
That
missionary command (which the early church community put into the mouth of
Jesus) “to go forth into the whole world and make disciples of all men,” at the
end of the day, is an ambitious mission of `universal conquest.’ Such a mission
to make the whole world Christian is not only a very ambitious task; it’s also
fraught with all sorts of mischief, as the dark history of Christian missionary
activity proves.
But a mission of compassion
If
Jesus does not send the Apostles forth on an ambitious mission of universal conquest,
then what is the mission on which He sends them?
Matthew
says Jesus called the twelve Apostles and sent them forth to “Cure the sick,
raise the dead, heal the leprous, and expel demons.” (Mt 10: 8) That’s the
mission! It’s not a mission of `universal conquest.’ It’s a mission of
universal compassion! Jesus sends them forth not to do something to people (convert and baptize them) but
rather to do something for them:
“Cure the sick, raise the dead, heal the leprous, and expel demons.”
A legendary missionary who baptized everyone
Mission as a frantic effort to do something
to people (to convert and baptize
them lest they be eternally lost) was singularly embodied in the legendary
missionary, St. Francis Xavier. Born in Spain in 1506, he joined the Jesuit Order,
and became the greatest of all Christian missionaries, with the possible
exception of St. Paul. He is called the
Apostle of the Indies and Japan, because he is
known to have baptized 40,000 converts. In fact, he is said to have
baptized 10,000 people in a single month! When he died in 1552,
his body was buried in Goa, India, but his right arm and hand which baptized
thousands is preserved in a
glass reliquary in the church of the Gesù in Rome for all to see!
A little missionary who baptized no one
For
the legendary Francis Xavier mission was doing something to people: converting and baptizing them.
For Mother Teresa of Calcutta,[1] foundress
of the Missionaries of Charity, mission was doing something for people. At the time of her death, September 5, 1997,
she had 610 missions in 123 countries.
Those missions had hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy
and tuberculosis. They ran soup kitchens,
family counseling centers, orphanages and schools. This “Saint of the Gutter”(as she came to be called) together with her
fellow-sisters, gathered up the dying in
the gutters of Calcutta (whom the caste system of India walked right by). The
sisters carried them off to their hospice, where they bathed and fed them. Then without
pouring one drop of baptismal water over their heads, Mother Theresa and her
sisters kissed these poor souls and sent
them off to heaven, but not before healing them of the worst malady imaginable:
the thought of not being worthy of being
picked up from a gutter!
Two models of mission
Here
are two outstanding models of mission: St. Francis Xavier who baptized everyone,
and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta who didn’t baptize anyone. The two models are light
years apart from each other. For St. Francis Xavier, mission was doing
something to people (converting and
baptizing them). For Blessed Teresa of Calcutta mission is doing something for people – the very same mission which
Jesus sent the twelve Apostles on, when He told them to go forth and “Cure the
sick, raise the dead, heal the leprous and expel demons.” (Mt 10: 8) Behold two
models of mission: one of conquest and the other of compassion.
A new approach to
mission
St.
Cyrian, bishop of Carthage (d. 258)
is famous for his dictum
“Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” –
“Outside the Church there is no salvation.” What an urgent mission that places
upon our backs – the mission to have to go forth and “make disciples of all men,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,”
lest they die without salvation.
Dr.
Joseph Hough, President of Union Theological Seminary in New York, invites
Christians to take a new approach to other religions, and therefore a new
approach to mission.
Born
into the Calvinist Tradition, which stresses the absolute freedom and
sovereignty of God, Hough uses that freedom and sovereignty of God in a
positive and constructive way. God, he says, is free even to come to human
beings as a fellow human being. That’s what makes Christmas possible. God is free to come to human beings in any
form that God chooses – free to come to us in the person of Jesus Christ, or in
the person of Mohammed. Dr. Hough’s approach enables us to see other believers
“not as foreigners or strangers” but as brothers and sisters “in the
household of God.” (Eph 2:19) It enables
us to see other believers as “fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another
race of creatures bound on other journeys," as Scrooge’s nephew says in Dicken’s Christmas Carol.
Conclusion
A pleasant relief
What a pleasant relief to know that we can
be passionately Christian, and still believe that there can be salvation outside
the Church (though that does, indeed, deal a blow to old St. Cyprian’s famous dictum).
What a pleasant relief to know that the mission is not to make the whole world
Christian or, worse yet, to make the whole world Catholic. What a pleasant
relief to know that the mission is not to go forth and do something to people (convert and baptize them); the
mission is to do something for people
(cure the sick, raise the dead, heal the leprous and expel demons).What a
pleasant relief to know the mission is compassion, not conversion. Conversion
can be dark and ambiguous. Compassion, on the other hand, can only be bright
and shining – like the face of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. 
