To bear witness

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Our faith is not a faith based in idealistic dreams.  It is a faith based on concrete reality: the reality of what God has done for His people in history.  The Israelites professed this in their Psalms: they recognized that their people could not have been victorious over their oppressors and foes without the help of God.  This victory was a very real victory: a military victory that enabled the Israelites to claim real territory as their own.

Yet we who are steeped in a more ambivalent and relativistic culture do not like to think of God as helping the Israelites defeat other peoples in battle.  For what then of the other peoples?  What of the peoples whose first-born sons were slaughtered, who were displaced and lost their homes?  It seems a real injustice to suppose that God favored the Israelites over others.

 

But I do think that if we read the Old Testament carefully, we find hints that, though the Scriptures tell the story of God’s unique relationship with the Israelites, God also never forgets that He is the Father too of all other peoples.  Theologians and biblical scholars have different ways of expressing this: God is covenanted to the Israelites but also holds forth a promise to the rest of humanity. 

It’s important for us as a Church to remember this.  We have a special relationship with God as the Body of Christ on earth.  But God does not forget other peoples, and the promises He gives to the Church also extend to non-Catholic Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, secular atheists – all of humanity.

 

It is also important for the Church to bear witness to God’s action within its own history.  At times this will require the Church to repent for its own sins, just as the Israelites did throughout biblical times.  But it also requires us not to be timid about professing the blessings which God has wrought through the Church.  To be sure, to speak of God’s action in and through the Church will expose us to ridicule from people who do not want or are not able to see God at work in the world.  They will say we were deluded, or blind, or try to find some purely human causes for what the eyes of faith interpret as the work of God.  But we must bear witness nevertheless to the hope that God has brought into the world through the concrete reality of His Church.

I was reading in National Geographic about a woman from Iran who converted to Christianity through devotion to Mary Magdalene.  She was so astonished to discover in Christ a man who regarded a woman so highly that He appeared to her first, before his male friends!  Women, she said, were invisible in her own country (much the way they probably were in first-century Israel), but Jesus – and the Scriptures which recorded His life, and the Church which bore witness to His memory – made them visible.  In this woman’s life, the work of the Church (despite its own sins and flaws and confusion with regard to the treatment of women) brought hope and a knowledge of her own dignity as a daughter of God.

Today is the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared to a poor Indian in Mexico and gave him the courage to claim equal dignity to the European Spaniards.  God’s promise extends even to the Indians!  His life, too, testifies to the work of God in human history: God’s promise stretching to encompass the entire world.

Individual Catholics must also bear witness to the concrete reality of God in their own lives.  We cannot divorce Christian truths from their physical manifestations.  A purely over-spiritualized Christianity is the luxury of the privileged.  Consider Christians in Nigeria who risk their lives to attend church on Sundays and must be attended by armed guards.  Yet they go!  But here in this country, many people who profess to believe in God do not go to church at all.  They are too busy, they can’t fit it into their schedules, they can praise GOd just fine outside of church.  Meanwhile, Nigerian Christians are willing to die for something that we in America take for granted.  Their witness, too, is a concrete witness to God in the world.  

We in America often think it’s good enough to worship God in sunsets and rainbows, on mountaintops or ocean sides.  We do not think it necessary to take the concrete action of devoting our time and moving our bodies to a physical space dedicated to worship.  But that movement means something.  It means something to the Nigerians.  It means something to the woman from Iran who went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Mary Magdalene in France.  It meant something to Juan Diego, who trekked up and down the mountain carrying the flowers of the Virgin.  These concrete realities that demand something of our time and our bodies: this is how we bear witness to our God at work in the world.

This is the meaning of the Incarnation.  God was not content with speaking to us from a cloud or inspiring us what a “feeling.”  He came to us in the flesh.  He came to us in space and time.  He sacrificed Himself in space and time.  Do we dare second-guess God by supposing it’s good enough to have an overly interiorized faith that risks devolving into self-centered sentimentality?

We are called to bear witness with our words - real words.  We are called to bear witness with our actions - concrete actions.  When God has blessed you, don't be afraid to tell the world about it!  When you feel the Holy Spirit calling you to do good, don't be afraid to do it!  Think of the Iranian woman unashamed of the tears coursing down her face as she prayed for the intercession of Mary Magdalene.  Think of the Nigerian family braving militant groups to make it to church.  Think of Juan Diego who, though an illiterate Indian, told the bishop what to do.  Let their witness give strength to your witness.  Let the fires of their faith set your faith on fire.