The Gospel is read in the church at every service, at every
service we are standing around this word of God and we always think that that
makes us God’s own people. And yet a great deal more is required of us if we
wish to be this people of God and the people who can claim that that divine word
belongs to it. The Bible was born in a human community, the Gospel was born
within the Church. Both the community of Israel and the Church of God were there
before Scriptures were elaborated. It is from within this community that
knowledge of God, love of God, vision of His greatness, vision of His incredible
beauty, vision also of the condition and destiny of the becoming and the
vocation of man sprang. It is the community that brings forth a witness of
something which is known to it, which is its life, which is its love and its
joy. The people of the Bible are not the people who read it, are not the people
who keep it faithfully in their hands and proclaim it. The true people of God,
the true people of the Bible, the true people of the Gospel should be such a
community that could write the Holy Book, proclaim it within its experience,
bring it forth, give birth to it. Short of being such a community we do not
truly belong either to the Gospel or to the people of God.
Often we console ourselves thinking that we are the worshipping
community where the word of God is declared, where it is preached, the community
that somehow aims at living the word. And yet when we look around we see that
what is made manifest gives the lie to our claim. If we were the community which
from within, from the depth of its own experience had brought forth the divine
word, those who hear us repeat it, proclaim and preach it would have a double
revelation: on one hand of the thing declared, on the other hand the fact that
these things have become flesh and blood, that they have become reality of human
life and the community which would preach the divine word would be a proof that
this divine word is true.
Is that what we see? Can we say that the community which we are,
small or big, is a community which in itself is a proof of the message which we
bring, the good news that Christ brought into the world? Is it not still true
and perhaps more now than it was in the early days, that the word of God is
mocked and reviled because of us? Here is the rebirth to which we are called. We
have a Book which has been brought forth from the very depth of human experience
of God, a Book in which God indeed speaks through a community that could witness
the truth of the word. We must become again such a community, we must learn to
live according to God’s own word, to the revelation of His will; we must learn
to be such people whose life coincides with the word of the Gospel.
As long as the Gospel remains a law outside us, as long as the
Gospel is the divine will different or opposed to our will – we are not the
community of the Gospel; we are aiming at becoming it, perhaps, at best, but we
are not yet a community capable of revealing the good news to the word. Christ
said that the word He has preached is not an arbitrary command of God, it is the
revelation of what true humanity is, it is a revelation to us and to others of
how a truly human being should feel and think and will and live. As long as we
do not feel that way and think that way and live that way – it is not that we
are disobeying God’s law, it is not that we are destroying our true self, we are
not human in a true sense, in the vocational sense of this word. And so the
renewal of the Church begins within each of us. The reform of the church when it
touches ways of praying, when it affects outer constitution is not a return to
the sources. There is only one well of light of which streams the water of
eternal life – it is the Gospel itself which is a revelation to each and all of
us of what human being is and what human relationships are.
Let us then take earnestly this witness of the Gospel, realising
that when the judgment comes it is not God with a law, different or alien from
us, who will judge us. We will see what we should have been, what we might have
been and what we have not chosen to be. There will be sadness, there will be
tears indeed, not because God will curse and reject us, but because, seeing the
beauty of our calling, we will see how far short of it we have fallen.
Let us then in the time left to us, and it does not take years,
it takes a moment that transforms a life, let us turn to the Gospel itself, let
us learn from Christ Himself what we are, what we can be and if we have any
doubt we can, let us remember Christ’s own words when Peter asked: “Who then can
be saved?” Christ answered: “This is impossible to men, but to God all things
are possible.” Let us go forth in this hope and in this joy and in this
certitude. Amen.
