Bishop Enrique Díaz Díaz shares with Exaudi readers his reflection on the Gospel of this Sunday in October 2024, entitled: “May all peoples know your goodness.”
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Isaiah 56, 1. 6-7: “My temple will be a house of prayer for all peoples”
Psalm 66: “Let all peoples know your goodness”
I Timothy 2, 1-8: “God wants all peoples to be saved”
Saint Mark 16, 15-20: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature”
Note: Today is World Mission Sunday, which is the scheme I propose, but you can also follow the readings of the 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Mission Day is a very special day. It is to remember and make present all of God’s great project of love for man, all that He has done for love and the opening of His invitation to all peoples to participate in a full life. Jesus, Himself sent by the Father, is the model of all mission, and looking at His life and work we can understand the greatness and beauty of this task. The text of Saint Mark shows us the last moments before his departure, where Jesus transmits to his apostles the same mission that He had received from his Father. We cannot, therefore, have any other model of mission than the life of Jesus himself. Jesus himself, taking up the words of the prophet Isaiah, affirmed in the synagogue his role as messenger: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to announce the Good News to the poor…” Now Jesus entrusts this same mission to his apostles and wants them to do it in his same style: to announce the Gospel, to expel demons, to speak a new language, not to fear poison or snakes, to lay hands on the sick, to give them health.
Thus, if we want to fulfill the same mission as Jesus, we will have to follow in his same footsteps and adopt his same attitudes: He, being the Lord, became a servant and obedient to the point of death on the cross; being rich, he chose to be poor for us, teaching us the path of our vocation as disciples and missionaries. In the Gospel we learn the sublime lesson of being poor by following poor Jesus and of announcing the Gospel of peace without purse or bag, without putting our trust in money or in the power of this world. The great source that will fill us internally will be the personal and community encounter with Jesus, looking at Him and with Him, listening to His projects and dreams, comparing our ideals with His and adjusting our desires to what He Himself proposes to us. If we have the illusion of being like a great river that always springs forth and floods with fertility, we must first fill our hearts with the presence of Jesus. A river that has no source runs dry, dries up and disappears. It cannot give life because there is no life inside it. That is why the day of the Missions, more than a day of conquest, as some have understood it, is the joyful proclamation that we have God in our hearts, who gives us joy and happiness. As Pope Francis tells us, the Gospel is not carried by conquest, but by contagion of a missionary life. That is why the announcement will be seen more in our works than in our words. In the generosity of the missionaries, the generosity of God is manifested; in the gratuitousness of the apostles, the gratuitousness of the Gospel appears.
For this reason, we Christians need to start again from Christ, from the contemplation of the one who has revealed to us, in his mystery, the fullness of the fulfilment of the human vocation and its meaning. We need to become docile disciples, to learn from him, in following him, the dignity and fullness of life. And then, with a joy that is beyond our hearts, we will bring Good News to a world that is lost in despair and cannot find a compass to guide its steps. In Christ, the Word, the Wisdom of God, our world can once again find its centre and its depth, from where we can look at reality in the sum of all its factors, discerning them in the light of the Gospel and giving each one its place and its appropriate dimension.
Mission Day, we could say, is also the day of fraternity, because we cannot and do not want to remain alone with God’s project, because if we have discovered that God is our Father we will have to commit ourselves to a life of dignity for all our brothers; because if we have lived the gratuitousness of his love, we will manifest our love for our brothers in concrete and committed ways; because if we have received the same mission from Jesus we will be ready to face its same consequences: “he loved to the end.” Mission Day will be, therefore, a day of loving, of loving everyone, of loving fully, because our hearts are full of the love of Jesus.
