Spreading the Good News

Note: On Fridays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.

And so he arrived, Emmanuel, God among us. He didn’t stride his way into Rome, kicking rears and taking names. He didn’t march into Jerusalem, at least not at first, proclaiming he was the new sheriff in town.

No, he came into the world the same way we all do, born like hundreds or thousands of other babies were born that day, some in palaces, some in caves, some in mangers. It made him accessible, a little too accessible for many to believe he could possibly be the Messiah.

We celebrated his birth two days ago, or at least attempted to amid the gifts and the parties and the family squabbles and the exhaustion. In today’s lectionary Gospel reading, we are reminded how it will all end. He will hang on a cross like common criminals of his day. But there’s a twist: When his friends get to the tomb to prepare him for burial, there’s no body. And because they saw and believed, from his lowly birth or the day at the temple or his baptism or anywhere along his public ministry, all the way to the Ascension, we believe. We believe because they were fearless in their faith and by turns precise and illuminating about the knowledge he bestowed upon them. We believe because we see his work in our lives 2,000 years later, and we know he is the truth and the light and the way.

We may not write as well as St. John the apostle and evangelist, whose feast day we observe today. We may not be as gifted with the charism of the small ways as Therese of Lisieux. We may not be the mother Mary was, or as indifferent to worldly things as Ignatius was. And yet, in some way, there is something special in the way each of us is called to his service. Just as Jesus’s life for the first thirty-three years was for the most part unknown, so the greater world may never know what we do for him while we are here on earth. But he will. And that is all that matters.