From Gossips to Evangelizers: God needs Human Social Media to Proclaim the Blessings in our Sufferings!
Isaiah 50:5-9a; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35
In Nigeria, they are popularly called “radio without battery” – gossips. How they get their news is not clear, but they seem to have antennas in every home, beer parlor and meeting arenas: they capture everything said, unsaid and yet to be said. In fact, their stories suggest they are heart-readers, going by how much their tales contain. Indeed, they are busy, so they are busybodies – news collectors, disseminators and crafters. Every society has them, and in democracies they are paid, either as spies, journalists or freelancers. What a world, what a people, what a piece of news!
There is a commonality between Gospel and Gossip – both of them are pieces of news. A significant difference separates them, though – gossip is bad news, gospel is good news. Today, our media outlets glory more in bad news than a conscious predilection for good news. On social media, evil acts go viral within seconds, good news is contested, debated and verified. Gossips get ready hearing, they become readily sensational and breaking-news trails their achievements: poverty in Africa makes it to headlines, not African contributions to Western civilization. The Christian foundation of Western civilization is denied because the gospel is too much a burden to carry for 21st century human beings!
Israelite gossips promoted the importance of Israel not its duties and responsibilities to God and towards other human beings. Israel was full of arrogance – we are the people of God, we must crush others and be superior to them! But when the strong (Judah) was exiled in Babylon, a new storyline began – what went wrong? Sufferings and shame have a way of humbling us and keeping us real! When a gossip becomes a victim of gossips, he/she begins to taste of his/her own medicine. The power of the strong to crush the weak and the helplessness of the weak before the strong is resolved when the strong accepts to be considered weak – that is our message! That strength is shown through the power to lift the weak out of weakness and not celebrate and perpetuate their weakness. Our first reading summarizes it well – “The Lord God opens my ear that I may hear; and I have not rebelled, have not turned back. I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting”. The spontaneous human reaction would be to fight back, but the strength in weakness is the ability to endure for a higher good!
The ear that hears the cry of the weak and the needy, the back that carries the burdens of the down trodden, the face that is covered with the spittle of the proud and insults of ingrates, is a disciple of God who allows his rain to fall on the good and the bad, his sun to shine as well upon them. God is our yardstick for measuring how human life should be lived, the testimony of how God has related with us individually and as a community – compassion. The story of God’s magnanimity is a tale of love and forgiveness. It is a concrete demonstration of how the strong helps the weak; the power of God’s example and not the weight of God’s strength, when he punishes! The remedy to gossip is to have an eye that sees the good in others and to help bring out the best in others. Jesus is the epitome of this kind of suffering, and we must learn from him.
From our first reading, the good news proposed to us is the salvific importance of suffering. It is comparable to the nine inconvenient months of pregnancy and the pangs of birth at the end of it, but these pains and sufferings are overshadowed by the joy of bringing a child into the world, the happiness of holding one’s baby in one’s arms. It is like the labor of love and the investment it requires to marry the lady of one’s dreams, and the promise of fidelity that follows marriage, despite the storms and harassment of 21st century assaults on the marriage institution. What more, it compares well with the joy of priestly celibacy and religious vows taken because of love and sacrifice that emphasize the eternal over the ephemeral, when lived in coram Dei (in honesty to God)! Not gossip, but good news: when we tell the stories of our sufferings that lead to the joy of the other, the salvation our inconveniences brings to the other and the joy we have for making a positive difference in the lives of other human beings.
Our gospel today presents three personalities: the crowd, Jesus and the apostles. On the one hand, the crowd constitutes the amorphous group of our gospel, who without any personal contact with Jesus, yet talked about him, those we call “gossips”. On the other, we have apostles who, although they were with Jesus, but the gossips’ version of who the Messiah was confused and beclouded their vision and experience of Jesus from making a personal opinion about him. Then, Jesus himself, who allows each one the opportunity to decide for himself/herself what to believe about the Messiah. The question Jesus asked led the apostles towards a personal retreat in order to decipher the identity of the Messiah. It was the story of the Cross that really awakened in the apostles the consciousness of messiahship – suffering for others and not personal aggrandizement.
Jesus did accost the news outlets of his day in order to change their story from gossips to good news. Jesus’ days presented the search for miracle workers, revolutionaries and saboteurs. Those disgruntled by the Roman occupation of Palestine and fiscal exploitation, those who had had enough of religious bigotry and hypocrisy, and those casualties of social laws: outcasts, widows and victims of ritual or “sinful” infirmities. Individuals as these abound in our communities and neighborhoods even today. Jesus’ preoccupations in the question “who do you say that I am” are the victims and agents of gossip, not forgetting gossip itself. He challenges his apostles to become evangelizers because it is when good people refuse to tell their stories that the stage is yielded over to gossips. The very source of good news is God himself, but the human persons are the agents and conveyors of God’s good news, the blessings received and anticipated from God. It is in telling our stories, how they connect us to God and one another, that makes us evangelizers. “Who do people say I am?” is a question of gossip, but “who do you say that I am” is evangelization and the spread of the good news, especially when it is telling the tales of our blessings from God.
Jesus’ question, “who do you say that I am,” mutes gossips and reveals evangelizers. It is only the person who is “tuned” to God’s channel and not gossips’ frequencies and wavelengths, only such persons are evangelizers and promoters of what is good in others and encourage others to do good. By paying attention to gossip, we share in their bad news, but by paying attention to Jesus Christ, we spread the good news of God. The advantage the apostles had was the possibility of learning from Jesus and to be corrected by him when they erred. The Bible is there for us today to learn from. Even when Peter erred by rejecting the cross, the initial confession was not revoked; on the contrary, he was helped to see the connection between one’s faith and suffering – both are complimentary and not mutually exclusive. Errors remain and subsist when there is no listening ear given to God’s word as a means of correcting human mistakes. Errors occur when we take off our gaze from God, and allow human beings to decide for us what is right and wrong. The world needs gossips because they are those who promote the human agenda, but God needs evangelizers to announce the truth of the gospel, the carriers of good news! The transformation from gossips to evangelizers – those who do God’s will and accept the truth from God – is only possible by imitating Jesus Christ.
The Church, yes, the Church of Christ, is human beings who are grafted unto God through Jesus Christ. The building blocks of the Church are individual Christians whom Christ redeemed with his blood, among whom some are gossips and others evangelizers. A Christian is one who has found his voice despite the crowd, whose faith leads him/her despite the deafening cries of gossips and bad news. When God serves as one’s beacon, it is the light of faith that guides one on earthly pilgrimage. The journey of Jesus with Peter and the others is one that involves sufferings and contradiction – the Cross and death of Christ.
Indeed, when sacrifices characterize our earthly existence, then love becomes a reality and not an ephemeral echo of human speech. This is the point made by James, in our second reading – “I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works” (James 2:18). The world is transformed through what we do, and not what we say. The transformation of our world through our deeds could be positive or negative depending on what we do. The power of love transforms our world into a better place for all and sundry. Sacrificial love is the vehicle of peace, joy and justice. Our positive actions should trump our theories and rhetorics for good. A Christian is known more by what he/she does and not just what is said. Today, Christians need to stand up to be counted through the testimonies of their good examples; then, and only then shall the gossips be silenced and evangelizers have a field day!
Assignment for the Week:
Tell someone something good a Roman Catholic priest did for you or your family.