In his homily on April 19th of this year, Pope Francis said that we are not to be “benchwarmers” in the efforts of evangelization. He preached, “A ‘couch potato’ evangelization doesn’t exist. Get up and go! Be always on the move. Go to the place where you must speak the word of God.”
In the readings chosen for today, we hear how on fire St Paul was to preach the Word of God. Paul’s evangelizing got him in trouble with the Hellenists (Greeks) of Jerusalem. For his own safety, the apostles had to whisk Paul out of Jerusalem to the community of Tarsus. In John’s first letter he exhorts his disciples, “Children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.” In the Gospel, just prior to leaving for the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus uses the image of the vine and the branches to describe his relationship with the apostles. “By this is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”If they are truly his disciples they are to bear much fruit by continuing to spread the Gospel Jesus taught them.
This brings us back to the image that Pope Francis used in his homily. Are we just Catholic Christian “couch potatoes”? Do we just do “what we think we have to do by obligation” to go to heaven? Instead of being alive and living our mission as disciples of Jesus, bearing much fruit, do we just lethargically remain on the couch, covered in the dust of our own Christian complacency? Pope Francis urges us to rouse ourselves from the sink holes of our spiritual couches, brush off the dust of our complacency and follow the example of St Paul, St John and the other apostles by actively living the Good News of Jesus, not just in the spoken and written word, but in deed.
In the “old days”, many Catholics thought that evangelization was the “job” of the priests and the nuns. As the scriptures and Pope Francis say quite clearly, there is no room for lazy Catholicism. The job of evangelization belongs to all of us who are baptized.
