Today’s Gospel (for Mass) is the end of the Gospel of Mark:
Having risen in the morning on the first day of the week, Jesus appeared first to Mary of Magdala from whom he had cast out seven devils. She then went to those who had been his companions, and who were mourning and in tears, and told them. But they did not believe her when they heard her say that he was alive and that she had seen him.
After this, he showed himself under another form to two of them as they were on their way into the country. These went back and told the others, who did not believe them either.
Lastly, he showed himself to the Eleven themselves while they were at table. He reproached them for their incredulity and obstinacy, because they had refused to believe those who had seen him after he had risen. And he said to them, ‘Go out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News to all creation.’
It echoes the beginning of Mark’s narrative:
The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah,the Son of God…
So let’s talk about the pervasive, casual and damaging assumption that compartmentalizes “evangelization” and “doctrine” – a variation of the decades old and well-worn attempt to bifurcate “pastoral” and “doctrinal.”
Consider Mark. Consider his Gospel, what he says here and throughout. He begins with good new and ends with Jesus command to proclaim Good News. What is this Good News?
Well, Mark assumes that you have been following along, so you know at this point that the Good News is about Jesus’ identity and the Kingdom of God. The Good News is not about you, the proclaimer of it. It’s not about what Jesus has done for you. Sorry. You are involved because you, like Mary Magdalene and Peter, are a witness and are called to proclaim what you’ve witnessed, which might involve (as with Mary) healing and release from spiritual darkness or (as with Peter) radical mercy, but no, the core of the Good News is not about you. It’s about who he is. It has a content, and that content is, yes- theological.
In today’s first reading, from Acts, Peter and John say, “We cannot promise to stop proclaiming what we have seen and heard” – but it is clear that what they have “seen and heard” is not focused on the impact Jesus had on them personally but on who Jesus has been revealed to be. Again, a theological truth that matters, not because it’s a correct set of words, but because appropriating that truth about Jesus just might change your sense of what the world and life are all about and for.
I randomly opened the Gospel of Mark to chapter 7 in order to flesh this out, and here’s what I found.
This chapter is particularly, perhaps even ironically useful in this discussion because Mark quotes Jesus as condemning the Pharisees’ “teaching as doctrines human precepts” (v. 7). Ah-ha! Look deeper.
What’s the issue here? Jesus is being critiqued for ignoring the ritual cleansing before eating. What’s his response?
It’s an explanation – witty and a bit cutting – rooted in defining things – drawing distinctions between external and internal, the material and the spiritual. You might even say it’s…theological.
For it is.
Look. Anyone who has actually been involved in evangelization or pastoral work in a serious way that tends to people in the context of holistic Catholicism rather than pushing ideology or pet programs knows things.
You know that the life questions that bring people to the door of the church, hesitating, curious, hurting and yes even fearful always – yes always – end up having a theological dimension to them, articulated or not.
You know that responding to a teenager’s anxious existential questions and yearnings requires more than assurances that God loves you and let me share my experience and have this peek experience and you’ll be fine. You must and you do give them more credit than that and they’ll demand it. For you can answer, be assured that God loves you and be at peace and…fine.
But what follows?
What does it mean that God loves me? God made me? What does that even mean? How does that fit with what I’ve learned in science class? How can I know all of this? The Bible? The Church? You? What reason do I have to privilege all of those sources above anything else the world has to tell me? My atheist friend is a really good person, and the kindest person I know. Are they going to heaven? How do you know? How does that fit with the other things you’ve been telling me? And on and on and on.
Do you see? Yes, yes. Theology, spirituality and pastoral studies are all distinct disciplines and ways of discourse. Got it. But in the end, they can’t be bifurcated – one flows into the other, which is why the well-trained minister, lay or ordained, is trained in all of it.
Most fundamentally, it is wrong to build these walls between “doctrine” and “real life” that requires a more “pastoral” approach because doctrine is an expression of real life.
This is where convert stories come in handy.
I try to avoid the convert-cradle Catholic battles that sometimes erupt in Catholic Land because I tend to believe that both everyone is right and everyone is wrong. In other words: we all have our limitations of vision and we all should continually be on guard against pride.
But in reflecting on this current potential controversy, it occurred to me: This is what happens when your curial offices are staffed by a bunch of careerist cradle Catholics.
The temptation of the cradle Catholic (like me) is, indeed, to see Church teaching as a concrete given that your more fluid, changing life proceeds to bump up against. You grow up with assumptions about reality embodied in Church doctrine, but then you, well, continue growing up, battle your own weird feelings that don’t seem to match what the Church teaches is good and brings you happiness, and then you meet all kinds of other people who seem fine without it and the Church teaching might start to feel like a set of clothes you were given but doesn’t quite fit anymore. How to make sense of it? The Church teaching doesn’t seem to so easily explain your life anymore.
The experience of the convert is quite different. The convert has lived life bumping up against other concrete givens and found them wanting, lacking in explanatory value. And then, in some way, he encounters Catholicism. These encounters are of wildly different types – they can be intensely personal, evocative, they can be a moment in Church, witnessing an act of charity or reading a paragraph in a book. But in the end, for most converts, what happens is that they find that the concrete givens presented by the Catholic Church explain their lives. For many converts, the experience of doctrine and Church teaching is one characterized by freedom, deep understanding and clarified vision – life makes sense now. Jesus is the Son of God, the Lord whose Body you’ve encountered articulates the Truth – in its teachings, prayer, traditions and works of mercy – about what the universe and your life are all about.
I wrote a bunch of apologetics books for teens and young adults. The writing of them came directly out of my experience of teaching high school theology and, going deeper, my experience of the intellectual tradition of the church via my own informal studies and graduate school. Because what that teaching taught me was that these kids craved solid truth, not because they wanted to check off boxes or appear a certain way, but because in order to flourish, they knew they needed a solid foundation, assuring them of their purpose. They had brains – they had questions. And my rationale for these books and my approach was to assure them, quite simply, that they weren’t alone. Their questions – arising naturally from rational minds living in the world, raised perhaps in the agony of a lonely night – are the questions human beings have asked since the beginning. Lots of people – most people – have asked them and many, many smart people with deep experience in the world of joy and suffering have explored and answered those questions. Those theological and philosophical questions.
Look, theology has its own traps and people do, indeed, go off the rails and use it to avoid actual human engagement. I am at a loss to understand how most of the homilies I’ve heard in my life are either ten minutes of pastoral platitudes strung together or listing of various abstract teachings with hardly anyone putting effort into tying it all together, with no one doing the hard but obviously necessary work of engaging the very real human yearnings I know these guys hear every day in the confessional with the life changing rich Good News of Jesus, the Son of God.
No, “evangelization” isn’t standing up and offering a list of statements. Who thinks that? Who ever did? Evangelization is doing exactly what Jesus commands us to in Mark: Proclaiming the Good News about him and his Kingdom.
It’s a proclamation that has to be ready and prepared: prepared for the realities of people’s lives and also prepared for the questions they will raise in response to what you might have thought was a simple proposal: Here’s Jesus, the Son of God. He loves you.
Really?
Son of God? Love? What do those mean?
And how do you know?
How is this true, not just for you, but for me – and the whole world?
Can you please explain?