Are We Really Salt & Light?
Last weekend, Jesus proclaimed that, with God’s Help, those who acknowledge that they aren’t, but God is, the Center of the Universe are already (!) possessing the Kingdom. The God-graced process that Jesus asks us to pursue is a state of mind and heart that strives for shalom (not peace in the conventional sense) and solidarity and compassion, non-violently, in this world.
A grace itself, the first step to possess the kingdom is to ask Jesus to believe (truly believe) that poverty in spirit (aka meekness, humility, single-heartedness) is a good thing. Our culture belittles (directly or indirectly) the values which Jesus proclaims in the Sermon on the Mount. The first step is to ask Jesus for the Help to listen to Him, amid the cacophony of the modern world. After all, isn’t that what God said of Jesus at the Transfiguration? “This is My beloved Son, listen to Him.”
Do we really listen to Jesus? Or the more basic question that Pope Benedict poses, “Do you believe in Jesus? More to the point, do you believe Jesus?” During this pre-Lenten season, we have each Sunday, an opportunity to answer those three questions honestly. Because Ash Wednesday is so late this year, viz., March 9, we have the opportunity to hear each Sunday from now until then the Sermon on the Mount, called by many the Constitution of the Kingdom of God (aka the System of God!) While we are in the time of year, sadly called Ordinary Time in the Liturgy, we continue to live in the New Testament. Jesus is still Emmanuel, God with us, even now! Hardly, ordinary time, when one desires to live, in, with and through Christ Jesus, we live in the New Testament, the Extraordinary Time, Greentime (the season of hope in God’s abiding Presence in Christ Jesus).
Jesus makes the bold statement that His disciples are called to be “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world”. It might be wise for us to remind ourselves that this is not a blanket congratulation that Jesus is throwing at us. It is a challenge to meet the demands of poverty of spirit once we have even agreed in our mind and heart that this poverty of spirit is something to be attained. Remember how our culture prejudices our interpretation of the word, “poverty”.
To qualify as “salt of the earth” and “light of the world”, it is necessary for an American Catholic in the 21st century to acknowledge that “Catholics should be different” because we have met Jesus in a Catholic Christian way. (Recall that the word “catholic” is etymologically akin to the words “(w)holistic” and “holy” . We belong to a community that celebrates the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ through a consistent commitment to the Gospel of Life. 1) We are meant to be a community who realize that our religion is ultimately mono-theism, not money-theism (Think about it!) We realize that Christ Jesus reveals the Paschal Mystery is the universal pattern, viz., everything is in process, each is involved of the process of ascent, descent and transformation. It’s God’s Plan for the universe. Why fear it?
We are a community that has reminded the nation and the world that we are called to practice “disarmament of their hearts”, in which we ask God for the Help to forego violent thoughts, words or actions and for the Grace not to condone violence even when it appears to be for a good end. We are a community that realizes that we are living in a new moment in human history, in which our very humanity is threatened by technological abuses of the environment and of the very process of human reproduction. We are a community that realizes that we are responsible for the institutions which we establish and we have to answer for any injustices against helpless people that they perpetrate.
These days, we remember that we have, as American Catholics, a vocation through, with and in Christ Jesus to be live wholisticly in our relationships with God, with one another, with our world. In these days, we need to ask ourselves if we really believe that individualism, survival of the fittest in our worlds, and people’s fending for themselves when the deck is frequently stacked against them reflects Jesus’ Programmatic of the Kingdom of God. We need to ask ourselves if we are system people or Kingdom people. The question is valid for American Catholics in every aspect of life. As Pope John Paul said so succinctly ten years ago, “there are no moral free zones.”
Beatitude living as the “salt of the earth” and as “light of the world” is a process because human living is a process. We need to ask God for the Help that we need every day to live the process. The first step in this ongoing process is the realization that to dethrone the principal false god “EGO” (with its demigods of Mars (the war god), Baal (the controlling God), Mammon (the having it all god), Bacchus (the feel-good god) from the center of our universe, we need constant infusions of “poverty of spirit” to forego the temptation.
Maybe, we, as individuals and as a Church, do not always manifest this “poverty of spirit” to the world. Maybe, it is presumptuous to think that Jesus automatically labels all of us as the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world.”
Maybe, we need this extended time to do a serious examination of conscience based on the Sermon on the Mount. How seriously we take our wholistic, Catholic religion and its demands upon us Lent, 2011 AD to examine ourselves on our basic commitment to the Gospel of Jesus? Do we believe in Jesus? More important, do we believe Him? 020611 AD jfq.
