Living Our True Identity

Earlier this week, I went to jail. Don’t worry – I was there for a good reason. I was attending a training session for those who wish to volunteer in ministry work with those in the detention center. Several priests in the area, including myself, will soon be going there on occasion to offer confession for inmates who are Catholic.

During the course of the training, the senior chaplain explained that for many of those in prison, religious affiliation can sometimes be a fluid thing. In other words, they’re Baptist if the Baptist chaplain comes around, and Jewish when the rabbi visits, and Catholic if the priest is there. One of the biggest challenges of prison life, it seems, is that there is so much time and so little to do, and so when the opportunity comes along for human interaction and conversation, inmates are willing to adapt themselves – even something like their religion – in order to seize the moment.

That got me to thinking – you and I, though not in prison, are sometimes sort of the same way. Hopefully we’re not identifying ourselves with multiple religions, but don’t we sometimes adapt or shift our religious fervor depending on where we are, or who we are with, or what we are doing? Maybe we are one way with our families or our church community, but when we’re with friends or coworkers or classmates, we’re something else completely. Maybe we go through phases where we feel very Catholic and we pray and participate in the sacraments, but then other times, we let those things go entirely. We act a certain way on Sunday morning even though we had acted a totally different way on Friday night.

This problem existed in Jesus’s age too. The Jewish people were God’s chosen people, but they didn’t always act like it – they fell victim to fear, malice, oppression, all of the things that any other nation did. In the first reading, the prophet Ezra, having led back to Jerusalem a large number of Israelites returning from the Babylonian exile, reads aloud to them the Law, the Torah, God’s commandments to Israel of how to live. And the people weep – they weep out of sadness because they had failed to fulfill those commandments and they weep for joy because they have been given the chance to start again.

This aspect of our human condition – however you want to characterize it: being two-faced or wishy-washy or even hypocritical – is something we all fall victim to, in greater or lesser degree. Except for Jesus. Though truly man, he was also truly God, always in communion with and intimately connected to his heavenly Father. Jesus was incapable of duplicity or guile or sin not because he wasn’t truly free but because, being truly free in his Father’s presence, his human will perfectly conformed to the will of God. In every moment – whether in a healing, or a sermon, or just an encounter or a glance – Jesus perfectly embodied the fulfillment of his Father’s will. It was mission, his identity, and he never wavered or faltered from it.

Christ in the Synagogue (1868) by Nikolai Ge

Jesus announces the nature of that mission very explicitly in the Gospel today. Returning to the town where he was raised, entering his own home synagogue, surrounded no doubt by family and neighbors and friends – he announces that he is the fulfillment of Scripture, that he is the one anointed by God “to bring glad tidings to the poor, … to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free….” But it’s not a mission that he came to accomplish alone, especially now that he physically sits at the right of the Father in heaven. Instead, it’s a mission that he began but which is perpetuated through the Church, continued by every believer. We are, as Paul reminds us Corinthians, the parts, the members of the Body of Christ; we are, in a sense, his new family, his friends who are united to him not by blood or background but by mission and purpose. We do a variety of things, exist in this world in a variety of ways, but as a whole we form the living, breathing, active Body of Christ which continues to fulfill the Father’s will on earth.

How do we do that? In a number of ways. Through prayer, through sacrifice, through the active practice of our faith – we unite ourselves to what God continues to do in the world today. Even more, we can become the instruments through which God does it. Around our country, around the world, the Catholic Church is one of the biggest providers of education, health care, and support for the poor and the downtrodden, not just because we are altruistic but because we understand that is what Jesus would have us do. And in smaller ways, much smaller, we can be examples of his love and mercy to others – through daily encounters of faith, through small offerings of love, through heartfelt instances of forgiveness.

My friends, in this Year of Mercy, you and I are challenged to live authentically from our identity in Christ, and not to waver or falter in it. We are encouraged again to see ourselves not as we so often do – as from this background, or that culture, or this occupation, or that political persuasion. Rather, above all else, we are first and foremost members of the Body of Christ – his hands, feet, eyes, ears. We each fulfill, according to our own gifts, according to our way of life, the mission of furthering the work begun by Jesus, the mission of fulfilling the Father’s will. The role of the Church, of every believer, is to keep doing what Jesus started until all the world is converted. What is your part in that? What mission is God asking of you?