Carrying the Light of Christ

 

Thursday of Third Week in Ordinary Time

Heb 10: 19-25; Mark 4: 21-25

Dc. Larry Brockman

 

Guess what!  All of you carry the light of Christ within you.  When you were Baptized, you were given a candle which was lit from the Paschal Candle, and that Paschal candle was first lit from the Easter fire during the Easter Vigil mass.  The paschal candle symbolizes the light of Christ that resulted from His Resurrection.  That means each of you bears the light of Christ within you.

So, the question for us today is simply this:  Is your lamp hiding under the bed?  In other words, are you hiding the light of Christ within you or are you showing it for all to see, effectively evangelizing by word and deed?

There are a couple of ways that you can hide your light.  First, there are those who believe, but they think that their faith is just between them and God.  They don’t need the Church; and they don’t need others.  They just need to talk to God and affirm their belief.   We see these people chastised in our first reading.  Paul says clearly:  “We should not stay away from the assembly”.  And that’s because we really need each other.  God is by His very nature a social being.  First, He is three interrelated persons in one God.  Second, why else would He have made all of us, and then tell us we are made in His image and likeness?  And so He wants us to love and cherish each other, reinforcing our Faith, and giving Him Glory and praise in the assembly.

The second way we can hide our lamps is to keep them neatly hidden right here in the Church.  That’s why the Pope has called the year of Faith.  We have been conned by today’s “inclusive”, secular society, into keeping our faith to ourselves in the name of tolerance of everyone else’s beliefs.  We have bought into the philosophy:  “Let’s not offend others who don’t believe as we do”.

Well, I’m sorry, but we need to take the light of Christ out of this Church and spread it far and wide for all to see.  And sometimes it may offend people- it offended the Romans, who persecuted the early Christians.  It offended the Nazis and the Communists, who sent those who stood up for their faith to concentration camps and worse.  And it will likely offend today’s secular humanists who believe in gay marriage, abortion rights, atheism, and a whole range of other moral atrocities that Christianity opposes.

Now you might say, it just isn’t right for us to offend others, we should love them instead.  Two thoughts on that.  First, aren’t their beliefs and practices offensive to us?  But that doesn’t stop them from being bright beacons of their position in the public sector.  So much so that Christianity is losing ground fast.  The second thought is this.  Recently I saw a quote from Pope Benedict that made an interesting point about love.  He talked about “love in truth”.  And the long and short of it was this:   We are all being called to love, yes.  But you cannot love someone if you are not being truthful with them.  And one of the worst ways we tell an untruth is by hiding the truth, and by keeping it to ourselves.  It is called a sin of omission.  God is love; and God is truth.  And so, everything we do needs to be done with loving kindness, but we must always represent the truth.  And it is time for our Christian truth to be front and center again in our society.

And so, let us reflect today on how we can come out of this Church and bear the light of Christ in in our secular society.  It is time to get involved.

Tags: ,

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.