For
us today, John the Baptist is a somewhat mysterious and probably not very
appealing figure. He appears, ever so briefly, at the beginning of Jesus’
public life; and then, before we have barely gotten to know him, gets killed.
Having heard his rather shrill shout every 2nd Sunday of Advent,
we’re ready right away to put him back in storage, so to speak, while we focus
instead on the season’s more attractive and comforting sounds.
But
Repent has always been at the heart
of Advent’s message, and the fact that the Church faithfully invites John back
every Advent is intended to help us appreciate again what Pope Francis had in
mind in his recent Apostolic Exhortation, when he said that “all of us are
asked to obey [the Lord’s] call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order
to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel’ [EG, 20].
Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”) is the
Pope’s official response to last year’s Synod on the New Evangelization. Repeating
themes and phrases familiar already from his homilies and elsewhere, Evangelii Gaudium is in effect an
outline of his program for his papacy. (Popes typically issue a first
encyclical that summarizes and sets the tone for their papacy. But this Pope's first
encyclical was actually his predecessor's last one. So this post-synodal
Apostolic Exhortation became his vehicle for expressing his programmatic ideas
and aims.)
Even
more, it might be called his "I have a dream" speech. He actually
uses the "dream" image: “I dream,” he writes, “of a ‘missionary
option,’ that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so
that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language
and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s
world” [EG 27].
Clearly
this is a very personal document, written very much in Francis's
distinctive style, written to challenge the Church to look outside herself, so
as to be more missionary. It is, after all, a document about evangelization,
which inevitably requires outreach and recalibrating the Church's pastoral
methods and activities to make such outreach possible and effective. There’s
even a whole section telling us priests how to improve our preaching. And
outreach to the poor plays an important part, along with a strong critical
analysis of contemporary economic realities.
Of
course, Popes have been challenging the spirit of capitalism at least since
Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum
Novarum in 1891. Pope Francis is hardly here saying something
unprecedented in comparison with the pronouncements of his predecessors, in
particular, his most recent ones. (Just think back to Pope Benedict XVI’s 3rd
encyclical Caritas in Veritate in 2009.) Francis here, however, is expressing
himself in his distinctly personal style, making clear the importance he
personally attaches to what he’s saying. And, very importantly, these words
come not in some separate encyclical exclusively about social and economic
questions but in an exhortation on evangelization.
The
contemporary Church, it seems to me, has sometimes suffered from a certain
compartmentalization. In the pre-conciliar liturgical movement, for example, an
interest in good liturgy and a concern for social justice generally went
hand-in-hand; but later they became, so to speak, separate specializations.
Evangelization likewise has somehow come to be seen by some as
something we think and talk about separately from all those other things. And,
as we all know, there are those, who seem to strip Catholic doctrine down to
talk about sex and little else, leaving the Church’s traditional teachings on
social, political, and economic issues somewhere in limbo. What may be one of
Pope Francis's distinctive contributions is how he seems determined to hold all
these important elements of Catholic life together.
This is
an Exhortation about evangelization. It is a challenge, the Pope
says, to be “a Church which ‘goes forth’ ... a Church whose doors are
open. It is a challenge to be a Church going out to others in order to
reach the fringes of humanity” [EG 46]. To me
it seems significant that the Pope’s comments on economic inequality, for
example, follow directly from that challenge to “go forth.” Speaking of where
and to whom to go when the Church "goes forth,” Francis takes his
inspiration from Jesus’ famous instruction in the Gospel about whom to invite
to a feast [Luke
14:14]. “There can be no room for
doubt or for explanations which weaken so clear a message,” the Pope reminds
us. “Today and always,” he says, “‘the poor are the privileged recipients of
the Gospel,’ and the fact that it is freely preached to them is a sign of the
kingdom that Jesus came to establish” [EG 48W] (We will
hear Jesus cite the poor having the good news proclaimed to them as one of the
signs that validate his mission in next Sunday’s Gospel.)
In
centering economic issues at the heart of the Church's evangelizing mission,
Francis righty recognizes that it is not his task “to offer a detailed and
complete analysis of contemporary reality.” Rather he exhorts us all
to an “ever watchful scrutiny of the signs of the times” [EG 51]. It is under that gospel guideline of
scrutinizing “the signs of the times” that the consideration of poverty and
inequality arises. It arises when the Church's mission of universal inclusion
collides with the economics of exclusion:
“Just
as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to
safeguard the value of human life,” the Pope writes, “today we also have to say
‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy
kills. How can it be” - the Pope asks, in what has since become one of his more
famous soundbites - “that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person
dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
John
the Baptist prepared the way for Christ by challenging people to recognize the
reality of their lives and relearn what that life is supposed to be about. In reminding us of the priority of society in
human existence and the imperative of solidarity in human relationships, Pope
Francis is challenging us to reconsider our present-day priorities in order to
become the Church we are constantly called to be, a community called, as Saint
Paul says, to glorify God for his mercy
[Romans 15:8].
Homily for the 2nd Sunday
of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 8, 2013.
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