Some years ago, when I was struggling with a bright but very disturbed pupil, a psychiatrist whom I consulted about him said this: “Remember, think in the long term. In thirty years’ time he might be about to stab someone, and something you said might just stop him.”
It is so often like this in our Christian faith. It is not visible success that is the most important factor in our service of God; it is our faithfulness. In the early chapters of the book of the prophet Ezekiel this is made clear: “Son of man, if I tell you to warn the wicked man to repent and you do not, he will surely die for his sins, but I will hold you responsible for his death. But if you warn the wicked man to repent and he does not, he will die for his sins, but you will have saved your life.” The issue is not how many wicked men repent; that is their choice. The question is whether we are faithful in carrying out God’s will for us. The prophets were more often met by ridicule, suffering and death than by success; their hearers were, after all, not over-eager to hear news that they would suffer if they refused to turn from their favourite (and often profitable) vices to God. But despite this, God, who wants all men to be saved, sent the prophets to them so that they might hear the call to repentance.
On the surface, the ministry of Jesus was an apparent failure. He was rejected in many places, as in today’s gospel. He collected a small band of followers around him, one of whom betrayed him, all but one of whom denied and abandoned him when he was finally arrested. The leaders of his own people conspired against him and succeeded in having him killed. In sheer human terms, Jesus was one of the greatest failures who ever lived.
And yet, after his Resurrection, the Good News of his Lordship spread like wildfire throughout the earth. His opponents were powerless to stop it. His disciples were themselves prepared to die rather than refute his name. Within just a few decades, his had become the name on everyone’s lips. Still today, he is revered by billions world-wide, and all the dark forces of the world which oppose his Church, one by one, have fallen away, as he promised to his followers: “…the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Who, living during Jesus’ time on earth, could have predicted all this, based upon the evidence of his eyes and ears alone?
It is the same for us. We are called to “go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News.” Christianity is something public; it was never meant to be cosy and private. In the Creed we confess our faith publicly every Sunday. And we are to bear witness to the Good News of the Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, in word and deed. Like Ezekiel, we will encounter opposition and even hatred in the modern world, for the powers that be are, in this era, particularly threatened by the Church’s proclamation, which questions pretty much everything they stand for. And like Ezekiel, we may see very little response to the Word in those to whom we bear witness. But we have God’s promise to Ezekiel with which this reflection began, and that should be enough for us.
We may never see or know what effect our words, our actions have on others. But, to paraphrase the words of the hymn, if we are faithful, others will know He is alive in us. When old Ananias, faithful to God’s command, went in fear and trembling to baptise Saul, the murderous enemy of the first Christians, could he have known that he was baptising the man who would become one of Jesus’ greatest Apostles and missionaries, spreading the Good News to most of the known world of his time and writing half the books in the New Testament? Did the catechist in little Kar