A good friend of mine began his journey towards priesthood by reading the gospel that we have begun reading today: the gospel of Mark. Somebody handed him a copy of the gospel on it's own, a copy of this one gospel taken out of the rest of the Bible. He often told me about how he carried that gospel up into his bedroom, where no one else could see him, and he gradually read through it.
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| Good News! |
Reading the gospel transformed my friend's life. It led him to offering his own life as a priest to share the Good News with other people. In Mark's gospel, my friend encountered what the writer of the gospel intended, "the Good News about Jesus Christ, Son of God."
At the moment, we are journeying with a new translation of the Roman Missal, the book of prayer that we use in the Catholic Mass. We could say that we are, at the moment, 'Lost in Translation'. You see, all of the prayers that we use, all of the readings we listen to, are translations.
We might not be aware of it but, for example, the Old Testament was written first of all in Hebrew, the language of the People of Israel. Properly speaking, the Old Testament is called the Hebrew Bible. When the Israelites were expelled from their own land, they journeyed out into the greek speaking world. Eventually, they translated their Bible into greek for all of their people who were gathering to worship & pray in their synagogues.
For that reason, remembering that Jesus was a Jew, the first Christians wrote down the gospels in the primary language of their day: greek. When Christianity spread as far as Rome, and became more or less the State Religion of the Roman Empire in the third century, the Bible, and all the prayers of the Church were translated into Latin, because Latin was the official language of Law, of Business, and of Civic Life in ancient Rome.
It took almost twenty centuries, almost 2,000 years, for the Church to make the big leap to using the language of local people around the world for the Mass. And, so it was in 1965 that the first translations of the Roman Missal in English, Irish, and all the other languages of the world, began to be used at Mass. It would take another ten years, from 1965 to 1975 for a stable translation in English to be developed. This translation was in use up until last weekend when we made the momentous leap to using the newest translation of the Roman Missal in English. The story of translation is a core part of the story of Christianity.
To go back to the gospel of our Mass today. The word 'gospel' in English is a word that we associate with Church. The word gospel is not really used outside of Church, and where it might be used it is automatically associated with all things 'churchy'. The word 'gospel' is a translation of the greek word, 'evangelion'. From evangelion we get the familiar word: 'evangelise'. But the word 'evangelion' in contemporary English means 'good news' or 'glad tidings'. So, to evangelise means to share with others the good news that we have already heard ourselves. The gospel is literally 'good news'.
The story of Jesus is The story of Good News – and this evangelion – this good news, is a story that we cannot put down once we pick it up. It is a story that promises to change and shape our lives in ways that we may wish it didn't.
The 'good news' will evangelise us, but only if we want to be evangelised. And to be evangelised means to be absorbed by the story of Jesus and ultimately to encounter the Lord in a profound and personal way in prayer, in the Sacraments and in the broken Community of Faith that the Church is. Pope Benedict put it like this in his first homily as Pope:
... Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him. The task of the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome. But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world. ...
www.vatican.va
Don't let the good news be lost in translation. Very often we assume that our experience of Church, our experience of faith, our experience of God, is all that there is. Our hearts and our minds are not open to the possibility of being evangelised, not because we are bad, but because we become used to religion in the way that it seems it always has been. We know that religion is no subsitute for the personal encounter with Christ that Pope Benedict speaks about.
It is never too early, and it is never too late to be evangelised. It was as a teenager that I really encountered the good news of Jesus, even though I had been baptised and confirmed and went to Sunday Mass with my family long before that. The real encounter with Jesus led me to where I am today as a happy human being, as a happy priest. And the first task of this priest, and all priests, is not to 'say Mass' but to share "the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God."
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