The Christian - Disciple of Jesus Christ
The Christian challenged by the world, Continued
Too many Christians – even practicing ones – do
not have a sense of the Christian as a ‘person with a mission’, one to whom
Jesus Christ ‘has confided other people’ (Lacordaire), who not only accepts the
faith on behalf of himself and those close to him, but confesses and proclaims
it publicly, knowing that Jesus has said: “Everyone who acknowledges me before
others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies
me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven” (Mt.10.32).
For the first Christians, embracing the faith, being baptized into water and the
Holy Spirit, meant sharing immediately a secret and a joy that surrounded them,
and translating it into words and actions in the course of their daily life, in
the very midst of the surrounding paganism.
We shall never radically reverse the present situation until Christians
understand the vocation, the dignity that is theirs in virtue of their baptism,
and until living communities of fully committed Christians bear collective
witness at the very heart of the world.
A Christian is not authentic unless inspired by hope”. St. Peter would go so far
as to declare that the disciples of Christ must 'always have your answer ready
for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you have' (1 Pet.3,15). Hope
is a constituent element of our being. It gets bad press these days; people feel
it is used as a tranquillizer or an alibi..
The present age forces us to lay aside our facile optimism, our too human
strategies, and to nourish our hope at its supreme source: the Word of God and
his inexhaustible, invulnerable and unwearying love. Everything points to the
fact that we are at one of the great turning points in the history of the
Church, when the Spirit is bringing about, at a depth hitherto unknown, a
mystery of death and resurrection. It is time to listen attentively, in inner
silence, to “what the Spirit is saying to the Churches.” (Rev.2.29)