Yesterday's sermon, for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time,Year A:
John the Baptist's words about Jesus - "there is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" - encapsulate a conviction which is central to the Christian faith. The human race is fallen, separated from God. The way we are now - prone to selfishness and evil in all sorts of ways - isn't the way God made us or intended us to be.
But God hasn't left us as we are. He sent his Son to "take away the sin of the world" and to restore the friendship with him that we've lost.
It's a great mystery, certainly, but it's a mystery which is central to our faith. And when Christians are strong in their faith, the Church community shares John the Baptist's conviction: Christ is the one sure way to God, and that means that the whole world has got to hear the gospel message. Everyone, ideally, has to be brought into contact with Christ and, hopefully, persuaded to become a follower of Christ. That's what the Church exists for.
But in more recent times a large part of that conviction, and the sense of missionary urgency that goes with it, has ebbed away. Now, to say that ideally everyone should know Christ and accept Christ as Saviour is regarded as arrogant and "fundamentalist" by many people. To engage in missionary activity is seen as a type of imperialism, disrespecting non-Christian customs and beliefs.
In many ways we're just as likely to find that way of thinking among church people as among the enemies of religion. Often a reluctance to claim that Christianity is true is seen as a form of progress towards a more tolerant and inclusive outlook.
My own judgement would be a bit more negative than that: that what we're really seeing is a waning of faith among Christians, a collapse of confidence in the truth of our own message. And I'd say that we can divide the process of waning of faith into three distinct stages.
At the first stage Christians believe that the gospel is true, and if it's true, it's true for everyone. Other religions and philosophies of life might contain a lot of spiritual wisdom, but they lack the fulness of truth about God and the unique work of salvation Jesus carried out for us. Pope Benedict touched on this subject in his message for World Peace Day on 1st January.
At the second stage a note of hesitancy and maybe equivocation comes in. There's an anxiety to affirm other, non-Christian perspectives - often in a rather simplistic and unreflective way, unfortunately.
Over the last forty or fifty years we've heard a lot of the slogans associated with this viewpoint: the Church must avoid "triumphalism"...."people outside the Church have as much to teach us as we have to teach them"....And in some circles you'll always get a round of applause for pointing out that "there are more real Christians outside the Church than there are inside".
One one level of course these statements are true - as banalities. On a deeper level they often express a loss of faith in the unique value of Christ's mission, and a loss of the sense of urgency in preaching the gospel far and wide and winning converts to Christ.
The final stage is the stage reached by some of the liberal Protestant churches in our own time.
Classical Christian beliefs are emptied-out, or redefined out of existence, and the kind of moral concerns that are dominant in secular society move to the foreground. Distinctive Christian moral principles, especially in the area of sexuality and marriage and family life, are disposed of - or fought-against in the name of equality and tolerance.
It's become more common even for members of the liberal denominations to say that they don't actually believe God exists as a real person. They see the Christian religion not as any kind of revelation by God to us but as a product of human imagination, like music and art and literature.
In an age when people were more inclined to call a spade a spade, this whole tendency would be named for what it really is: apostasy, a loss of faith in Christ.
Whereas the Scripture readings for today's Mass point to the coming of Christ, his life, his passion and death and resurrection, as the turning-point in God's relationship with humanity: something that it's essential for everyone to hear about and, hopefully, accept.
If we want the Church to be the "light to the nations" in Isaiah's language, surely the first step is going to have to be some kind of recovery of the sense of the unique truth of our faith that's given every great missionary figure in the Church's history the conviction and the confidence to take the gospel - as Isaiah again says - "to the ends of the earth".
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