The New Testament speaks of what happened to Jesus after his death in two different ways. A very frequent one is “Resurrection”. When that word is used it emphasizes the fact that Jesus overcame death and came back to life, but it is not clear that Jesus did not return to the life he had before he died on the cross. Other language speaks of its “glorification”. When this word is used it emphasizes that Jesus, in his humanity and divinity, began to enjoy the glory of God. Jesus was exalted, ascended to the throne of God. The two ways of speaking complement each other. But St. Luke, both in his Gospel and in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, articulates the two aspects of Jesus’ Passover and explains that, for forty days, the risen Jesus appeared and instructed his disciples in various ways. But after that time, Jesus ascended into heaven. From then on Jesus’ appearances to instruct his disciples ceased; they received the Holy Spirit who strengthened them for witnessing and the disciples began to preach the gospel and establish communities. Jesus ascended to heaven to return at the end of time to conclude and finalize his salvation. Between his ascension and his future coming is the time of the Church, of evangelization, of witness. That is our time and our task.
Proclaiming the gospel. Some discourage this activity, commanded and ordered by Jesus, with the excuse that one should not try to change the way of thinking and believing of others. If so, any political campaign that tries to change the way voters think and vote should be banned in the first place. The gospel is not just another ideology, not just another philosophy, not just another religion among the many that exist in the world. The Gospel is the offer of salvation that God makes to humanity burdened by the search for the meaning of life in the face of death, sickness and pain. The gospel is the offer of forgiveness and reconciliation that God makes to people grieved by their faults, burdened by a past that they cannot change. They are people who question their right to continue living and wonder about the value of their life. The Gospel is an offer of light and truth, of joy and beauty to encourage us to overcome the shadows and deceptions in which human life is often trapped and enslaved.
We are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the beginning of evangelization in Guatemala. From our current way of thinking, it is censured that evangelization was something imposed on the native peoples; but this way of speaking simplifies things. We are aware of the efforts of the priests to learn the local languages and of the adaptation of the Latin alphabet in order to write the American languages, we know that catechisms were written in these languages, we know the efforts to explain the faith in an intelligible way. Implicit in all these activities is the idea that those evangelizers considered the indigenous people capable of understanding, reasoning and learning. According to the mentality of the time, the greatest and noblest purpose of the warlike and political action of conquering new lands and their inhabitants was to achieve eternal salvation. There was
brutality and violence; but where there is none. There was brutality and violence among indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans and the 20th century has witnessed the degree of brutality, violence and inhumanity of which we are capable. The two wars currently in the news confirm this. It is not a matter of justifying such violence by arguing that it exists everywhere.
It is a matter of preventing the fixation on the ever-existing violence from preventing us from seeing the achievements, contributions, development, humanization and good works that were immense and generous. The Spaniards, both the conquerors and the politicians and the religious and ecclesiastics acted according to their own way of understanding reality; and the indigenous people reacted according to their own. The evangelizers, with their way of acting, demonstrated their conviction that their interlocutors were people, children of God, who until now had been deprived of the knowledge of God’s love and of the salvation that Jesus Christ had brought us, and therefore they had to offer them what they considered more humane and dignified ways of life: concentration in towns and cities, instruction in the faith, administration of the sacraments and with it eternal salvation. That was what the Spaniards also wanted for themselves. The indigenous people were not considered savages to be exterminated, but men and women who could become brothers and sisters in the faith and fellow citizens of heaven.
Jesus Christ sends his disciples to proclaim the gospel to every creature and to baptize everyone who believes. Why this claim of universality? What does the Gospel of Jesus Christ offer that can be of interest to people of all peoples and cultures, of all times and places? Jesus Christ, with his preaching, death and Resurrection offers salvation in the face of two universal human needs and deficiencies. Death overwhelms us all, it undermines the meaning of life for everyone, it seems to corrode the motivation for good, solidary, constructive works. Why make the effort if in the end we all die like the mutts? Christ, the Son of God, shared our death and conquered it in order to share with us, the believers, his victory over death, so that for us too death may not be the end, but the door to fullness. On the other hand, the shortcomings of freedom make our life twisted. We build ourselves with our decisions and actions. But those decisions and actions are affected by negligence, irresponsibility and sometimes even malice. We do not always decide well and constructively and thus ruin our lives and those of our neighbors. Is there a way to straighten the path and correct life so that the past does not mortgage our future? Yes. The love of God that manifests itself in forgiveness to the one who repents to accept it is the gift, the gift, that Christ won for us with his death on the cross.
Moreover, Christ from heaven has sent upon us and his Church the gift of his Spirit to share with us his victory and salvation. We have only one God, only one Savior and only one Sanctifying Spirit that leads us to the fullness of joy and life, which is the call and vocation to which God summons us believers.
Mario Alberto Molina, OAR