Leaders See
And Act
Twenty-Seventh Week of Year II Monday October 3, 2016
(Begin reading Galatians)
The Responsorial Psalm pledges grateful fidelity to our faithful God: “The Lord will remember his covenant forever” (Psalm 111).
In
Galatians 1: 6-12 Paul calls us to
faithful stewardship of the message
entrusted to us: “If anyone preaches a version of the Good News different from
the one you have already heard, he is to be condemned.”
Paul
gives the reason, and says we need to keep ourselves aware of it: “I want you
to realize this: the Good News I preached is not a human message that I was
given by human beings. It is something I learned only through a revelation of
Jesus Christ.”
The
Gospel is not a philosophy that can be edited. We don’t own it. We are entrusted with it as stewards responsible
for preserving it.
We
are also responsible for putting the Good News to work. Jesus compared his words to seeds sown to bear fruit. He
compared our stewardship to that of servants to whom a man going on a journey
entrusted his property. To the one who did nothing but preserve what was
entrusted to him the master said, “You ought to have invested my money with the
bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.”1
Luke 10: 25-37 offers a good
example of how to do that. The “good Samaritan” ministered to the man in need, as we are all committed to do by our
baptismal consecration as priests.
Ironically,
the two members of the priestly caste in the story, the priest and the Levite,
did not! The one who did was what we would call a “layman.” This detail was
intentional on Jesus’ part. In the Gospels the priests were generally opposed
to him. This reminds us that priestly ordination calls people to holiness but neither gives nor guarantees it. That
depends on each one’s personal response to the Gospel, to which a common
obstacle, for clergy as well as laity, is the desire for power.
But
we are also consecrated stewards of Christ’s kingship, charged to exercise leadership in changing whatever needs to
be changed in the world. As such, we must go beyond ministry and try to
eradicate the causes of the damage we
see done to others. We do this by challenging cultural assumptions and changing
social structures
What
we can do depends a great deal on circumstances. In a democratic society such
as ours, every citizen has a voice. We can speak out, we can campaign, we can
vote. We can address the causes of crime and work for reforms.
We
are also committed — by Baptism — to speak and work against abuses in the
Church. When we or others are wounded by unenlightened or unfeeling policies or
pastors, it is not enough to seek or give comfort. We need to take action. A passive laity is an unfaithful
laity. To criticize without demanding change is a cop-out. “The Lord will remember his covenant forever”
— and so must we.
1Matthew 25:27
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