14th Sunday 2021
Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2Cor 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6
Many many moons ago, from the beginning of Advent 1982, until Holy Week 1983, I had a brief and inglorious career with the Catholic Missionary Society, conducting parish missions in various parts of England. A mission included eight hours a day of door knocking, ringing the doorbells of people whose addresses appeared on the parish census lists. It never took long in any parish to realise that these lists were hopelessly out of date, many people having moved or died, whilst many of those who were found were at best indifferent, at worst hostile.
Some priests revelled in the work. One of our number, a cheerful Irishman, on approaching a block of flats, would press all the buttons at once to see who might be unearthed. I, on the other hand, tended to press the bell very gently, count ten, and then high tail it away as fast as my legs would carry me.
To me, knocking on the doors of fifty total strangers a day was the nearest thing to hell that I could imagine. Indeed, one night, dreaming that I was to spend eternity doing parish missions, I woke myself up with a cry of dismay.
I mention this because, in the course of one mission, one of my colleagues found himself pondering Our Lord’s words from today’s Gospel: “He was amazed at their lack of faith”. I, meanwhile, had that question of Jesus’ constantly running through my head: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find any faith on earth?”
If that was the situation almost forty years ago, how much more difficult must it be today? Is Jesus still amazed at people’s lack of faith, and what can be done about it?
In all honesty, we need to admit that the Church hasn’t always done the cause of the Kingdom, and of Jesus, a lot of favours. The clergy sexual abuse scandal has caused, and continues to cause, an immense amount of harm. Then, in addition to these ghastly crimes which men knew that they were committing, there are the equally destructive horrors perpetrated by people who genuinely believed that they were doing God’s will, in the residential schools in Ireland and Canada and, we shall probably also learn, in the USA. Small wonder if people are saying “Well, if that’s the face of Christ, then He’s an ugly so-and-so, and I really don’t want to know Him”.
These dreadful events have, in recent years, overshadowed the good which the Church has done over the centuries, and continues to do, in the fields of health care, education, development, the feeding of the hungry, and the defence of the oppressed and the marginalised. It is very easy, but wrong, to conclude that the Church always does more harm than good, especially when a writer such as Hilary Mantel can make a great deal of money—and be given a damehood—by deliberately distorting history by making St. Thomas More into a torturer, and the torturer Thomas Cromwell into a hero chiefly, as she admits herself, to express her hatred of, and to damage the reputation of, the Church of her birth.
So, will Jesus still be amazed at people’s lack of faith, and, when He comes again, will He find any faith on earth? Perhaps more to the immediate point, what can be done to reawaken faith? There is constant talk of evangelisation, but nobody seems willing, or able, to explain what it means. There was even a Decade of Evangelisation, which went down like the proverbial lead balloon. So what is to be done?
Perhaps we need to pay more heed to St. Paul’s words, in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, as he ponders his own shortcomings, weaknesses, struggles and failures, and concludes “It is when I am weak that I am strong”. We must remember also, again with St. Paul, that we are preaching a crucified Christ who will always be, to many, a folly and a stumbling block.
In other words, we must be a humble Church, deeply rooted in Christ, and showing to the world the true face of Christ. There must be no trace of arrogance or superiority, and we need to recall the words of Pope St. Paul VI in his Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii Nuntiandi”: “The modern world listens to witnesses rather than to teachers, and if it listens to teachers, it is because they are also witnesses”. Let us remember too that it is when we are weak that we are strong, and that success and failure are not always what they seem.
