WE need to realize this truth about ourselves more deeply and stably. We are meant to be living cooperators of Christ’s continuing mission of human redemption. And this is not only for a few, but actually for all of us. Of course, this truth of our faith can be acted on in stages. We cannot be all of a sudden active cooperators of Christ’s mission. It takes time, effort and, of course, God’s grace for us to achieve this ideal and dignity.
“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so, ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest,” Christ told his disciples, and is now telling us. (Lk 10,2) Despite the limitations and inadequacies we think we have to carry out this mandate, we should just try our best to respond to it.
We cannot deny that especially these days, there is a great need for these “laborers for the master’s harvest.” Today’s mission lands are not so much those places and people who are far away from the mainstream, those who still are kind of primitive in their culture and deprived even of the basic material necessities, as those who are in developed countries but very far in their faith.
More than far from the faith and from God, many people today look more resistant and even against God and anything that has to do with religion. They are more challenging since the attention and evangelization to be given to them require a more complex strategy.
In a sense, these places and people can constitute as the new peripheries that Pope Francis likes to talk about. And when he said that the Christian missionaries as shepherds should be ready to acquire the smell of the sheep, to be sure it will be a different smell from what we usually expect from poor, underdeveloped places and people. But just the same, it will be the smell of the lost sheep, even if the smell is sweet to the senses.
We therefore have to make some drastic updating of our understanding of what a missionary is. We should not get stuck with the common textbook idea that a missionary is usually a priest or nun who goes to a far-away place, and literally starts a settlement there.
While this concept of a missionary is still valid—it will always be—it now cries to be expanded to reflect its true character, especially given today’s fast-moving and more complicated world.
We have to understand that everyone, by virtue of his sheer humanity and much more, his Christianity, is called to be a missionary, and that he does not need to go to distant lands because his immediate environment already needs a more effective, down-to-earth evangelization.
Yes, even the ordinary guy in an office, the farmer, the businessman, the politician, the entertainers, artists and athletes, are called to be missionaries. That’s simply because as persons with a prominently social dimension in our life, we have to be responsible for one another.
And the biggest responsibility we can have for the others would be their moral and spiritual welfare, much more than just their economic or social wellbeing, though this latter concern is also very important. It is this responsibility that we have to learn how to be more serious about and more competent in fulfilling. This is the current situation and challenge to all of us.