Trust and Responsibility

by: José Antonio Pagola
May 17, 2015

Mark 16:15-20

At some point an appendix was added to the original gospel of Mark in which this final mandate of Jesus is recorded: "Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature." The gospel must not remain within his small group of disciples. They are to go out and travel to reach the "whole world" and bring the Good News to all the peoples, to "all of creation."

Undoubtedly, these words were heard with enthusiasm when Christians were fully expanding and their communities were multiplying throughout the Empire, but how do we hear them today when we see ourselves as powerless to retain those who abandon our churches because they no longer feel a need for our religion?

The first thing is to live based on absolute trust in God's actions. Jesus taught us so. God continues to work on the hearts and minds of all His sons and daughters with infinite love, even though we consider them to be "lost sheep." God isn't blocked by any crisis.

He isn't waiting for us to put our plans for restoration or our innovation projects into action in the Church. He is still acting in the Church and outside of the Church. No one is abandoned by God, even though they might have never heard about the Gospel of Jesus.

But all this does not dispense us from our responsibility. We must begin to ask ourselves new questions: Through what paths does God go looking for men and women of the modern culture? How does He want to make present the Good News of Jesus to the men and women of our time?

We are to ask ourselves something more yet: How is God calling us to transform our traditional ways of thinking, expressing, celebrating, and incarnating the Christian faith such that we propitiate the actions of God within modern culture? With our inertia and inaction, don't we run the risk of becoming a deterrent and cultural obstacle to the incarnation of the Gospel in contemporary society?

Nobody knows how the Christian faith will be in the new world that is emerging, but it will hardly be a "cloning" of the past. The Gospel has the power to inaugurate a new Christianity.