On a drizzly Thursday evening, I hurried into the cathedral compound just minutes after the 6.30pm mass began. I slipped into a pew next to a friend, and noted with pleasure that the Rector had decided to take the memorial of the North American Martyrs—he was in red. Plus, like the martyrs he is a Jesuit too, and in an age when congregations are so thin on the ground, anything that underscores the unity in God of a community throughout the passing fads of the world is something welcome.
Father went up to the pulpit and said, “I am going to read your the biography of St Isaac Jogues.” And that he did, all the way from the martyr’s birth, to his entrance to the Society, to his time in what is today upstate NY, to his eventual martyrdom and death. Then, Father added something to the tune of, “Let us contemplate how much these martyrs, and St Isaac Jogues among them, sacrificed so that they could bring these people the good news. Consider the price they paid for spreading the good news.”
It’s something that has stuck with me the whole week since. We say that so often: “spreading the good news”. We talk and talk about evangelisation and bringing the good news and telling people the gospel, so much so that I think we might forget how contentious the ‘good news’ really can be. I mean, we do realise we’re saying, you’re a sinner and you can’t help being a sinner, right? And that you need saving by a God, and that the underlying fabric of the world is that your offenses must be repaid in blood, which was fulfilled by the one holy and eternal sacrifice? And that many of the things you think are fun or OK now are in ways big and small obstacles to your union with God? And that you will have to change—and that you’re not perfect?
That’s all ‘good news’, for sure—for I am convinced of the truth of the Church and her teachings and of the God she worships—but it’s not fun news.
I think back to Father’s description of those Jesuit missioners, of how they tended to the sick, visited families, taught children and adults their catechisms, baptised, married, and buried. It was in listening to that that it struck me, with some sadness, how superficially I had conceived of this ‘good news’. (I’d put some of that down to the phrase itself, but that’s a discussion that won’t quite add value.)
When I hear the admonition to go spread the good news, it’s as if I just have to go and tell it to people, that intellectual understanding, possibly accompanied by an emotional, affective reaction, is the be-all, end-all of Christian evangelisation. The missioners, however, would have had a much different experience of that. Today we call their activities ‘spreading the gospel’, but they did much more than talk. They lived lives, and loved the people they served, and most importantly, must have had to understand the work of evangelisation not as one of intellectual communication, but of conversion of life. It doesn’t matter so much that someone has accepted the monumental claims of Christ, as much as it does that he is changing his life, bit by bit, to align with the authority that those claims exert. It doesn’t matter so much if someone knows that the Logos became incarnate and died on a tree, as much as it does that he is led to see and feel how the pain of forsaking a life once thoughtlessly embraced is in every moment both a thanks-offering to and a suffering-with Christ.
It’s so much more than just ‘spreading the good news‘, basically. And for us Christians, it’s so much more than just knowing the good news, and generally feeling loved and appreciated by such a good God who made the whole universe and every day sustains our being, and so on. There’s an element of earthy work built into the Christian life; we must let the Divine Sower overhaul and make fertile the soil of our hearts, as painful as the hoeing and sowing may be. We must let ourselves be made into a different person—we must let ourselves be conformed to Christ. We must cooperate with the taking-apart and putting-together of our lives, and of the people God has given us to love. We must be doing, whether it is the contemplative’s way, of cultivating the virtue of religion and the discipline to pray; the mother’s, of instructing in a million little ways just to turn out, by God’s grace, a God-fearing child; or St Isaac Jogues, of teaching and instructing and giving until there’s nothing left, trusting that God will provide, trusting that his physical, corporeal oblation would sanctify his spiritual children and himself.
the lexical form 