The mission of love

If there is one phrase to summarize the mission of the Church, it is "living holiness". It means loving, starting from a phrase from the Gospel of John: "God loved the world so much that he gave his own son", not to condemn the world, but so that thanks to Him the world would be saved. It's all here. There are three ideas that question me. The first concerns the concept of Revelation: saying that God loved the world translates into the fact that God has established a dialogue with humanity.
God speaks like a friend. The Bible uses the word “covenant.” Therefore, if God's gesture to reveal himself is to establish a dialogue with humanity, the mission of the Church is the same. This gives the term "dialogue" a very strong theological tone: dialogue is not a simple chat, but an encounter between us and God, God's revealing gesture, his way of drawing close to us. This is why I always say that the commitment to dialogue does not come from theory, but from closeness in normal everyday life. If "God loved the world so much", and not "God loved the Church so much", it means that the Church must accept not to be at the center, but to place itself at the service of this love. Only by passing through the door of service to the poor will we have the opportunity to discover the meaning of life. It is not the Church that is at the center, but God and the world. The Church is like yeast in the dough: in the end we no longer need to find the yeast, but the well-baked bread. This is the first idea.

The second thing I have learned in recent years is the particularity of the bond between the Christian and Jewish faiths. It is starting from these roots that we can also relate to other religions.
A Christian cannot talk about his identity without referring to an otherness (Judaism) which is constitutive of that identity. Because an identity that forgets the otherness it bears becomes a deadly identity.
Here we come to the idea of ​​the "promise". The task of the Jewish people is to believe in the promise and translate this faith into the observance of daily life. The Christian faith does not abolish the promise, it fits into this horizon and adds the nuance of the mission. I always tell the Christians of Marseille to stop looking at the numbers because the mission must be lived with trust.

The catholicity of the Church is its vocation. It is said that the Church is one, but in reality it is a becoming of unity; she is holy, but in fact many times she is not exactly like that, but she is called to holiness and catholicity is the same thing.
How does it work? A bishop in a city not so far from here, Lyon, Saint Irenaeus, proposed this image: the Father works with the Spirit and the Son and the Spirit and the Son are the two hands of the Father.
So the mission of the Church is to be a witness to the Son, who is who we are, and to learn to work with the Holy Spirit. This is why I say that the essential word is "love".
Because he who truly loves is not centered on himself, he gives himself and gives and does not worry about himself, his survival and his problems. I see many Christians who are only concerned with the survival of the Church, instead of loving.
And we must never forget that identity and otherness go together and the otherness that is scary actually goes together with identity.
It is the Holy Spirit who is responsible for the mission and asks only one thing of me: closeness and goodness, because "goodness is disarming".

Learning to collaborate with the Holy Spirit is the path of mission, because the Holy Spirit who holds the Church together and sends it on mission always precedes it.
The Spirit works everywhere.
The Holy Spirit began before you arrived.
I remember that when John Paul II arrived somewhere he would kneel down to kiss the ground, as if to say that the Holy Spirit had worked this land well before the missionaries' feet touched that soil.
This is also the joyful mission.
This puts us in a position to believe that the Holy Spirit has already acted in everyone we meet, therefore we must make friends and offer closeness, welcome, walk together with people.
And when the right moment comes, say like Philip to the eunuch and Peter to Cornelius: what you are looking for, animates you and gives you the strength to live, I'll tell you what it is, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
It's very simple.

The Mediterranean, new lake Tiberias
The Mediterranean as "Lake Tiberias" of the new universe of nations that are on the shores of this lake are nations that worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, of the true and living God. These nations, with the lake that they surround, constitute the religious and civil axis around which this new Cosmos must gravitate
of nations… And practically what to do? What should Christian Italy do? Concern (with prayer, with meditation and with prudent, but intelligent and "wide-ranging" action) about the "unification", the convergence, of these Mediterranean nations. Carry out one's own political, economic, cultural, social (religious) action, etc. in view of the establishment of this "centre" of the new universe of nations: in view of the establishment of this point of attraction and
gravitation of nations: so that from the East and the West the nations "come to bathe" in this great lake of Tiberias, which is, by definition, the lake of the whole earth.
Giorgio La Pira, 1958, Letter to Msgr. Of the Water so that he can deliver it to Pius XII

edited by the editorial staff
(text not revised by the author)
NPFOCUS June/July 2024