Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Mark 16, 15-18
Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them:
“Go into the whole world
and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;
whoever does not believe will be condemned.
These signs will accompany those who believe:
in my name they will drive out demons,
they will speak new languages.
They will pick up serpents with their hands,
and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.
They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Change
1) Go into the world. Open up and let go of the prejudice that makes you believe that you know it all. Look at St. Paul! The rigid structure he grew up in led him to believe that he knew more than others. Many times, you may think you’re the one who knows it all and that others don’t, but life proves you wrong and turns everything upside down. When I was a young, recently ordained priest, I thought I knew everything and would probably end up in the Vatican. But then, I realized that’s not the way to go, that you don’t know everything, and that life teaches you. You learn to see that the person you least expect is the one who will lend you a hand.
2) Proclaim. Your function and mine is to show hope and to bring others to God, to fill them with God. Please don’t forget that we are called to evangelize. Don’t disguise the spiritual and evangelical with mere social aid. One does not exclude the other, but sometimes social assistance can overpower the spiritual foundation of our activity and even suffocate it. Pope John Paul II had to clarify this many times, because we are witnesses of hope and not generators of ideologies.
3) To every creature. I am convinced that there many ‘Saint Pauls’ in these times, people who surf the net and take Jesus to others through social media, rather than traveling and writing, like St Paul. Today we need you and so many others who proclaim Jesus simply, like that. May the conversion of St. Paul remind you that we can all change and that no one knows it all. Pray that we may fall off the horse of self-centeredness and discover that others can help us to see.
Remember that something good is on the way! God bless you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
