Fr William Fennelly OSB
‘The disciples told their story’, Saint Luke tells us, about what had just happened on the road to Emmaus and about how, at the breaking of bread, they finally recognised that their new companion was Jesus, their Lord. you can almost feel the buzz. You can hear the urgency in their voices telling what they’d seen. And they were so consumed with the business of telling the others, that Jesus comes again and interrupts them mid-flow.
Telling stories about Jesus, sharing news of God’s wonderful works, and witnessing to the Risen Lord remains a vital task for 21st-century disciples as it was two thousand years ago. It’s how the faith was spread, often at great sacrifice and risk, and how it has been handed down through countless generations the world over. In this sharing of the Good News of Jesus Christ, no detail is more important than the Resurrection, not least because, as Jesus says, it fulfils the scriptures.
So, how good are we at engaging in and performing this key resoinsibilty? Have you, for example, radiated some of that same joy of the early disciples as they basked in the light of the Risen Lord? Have you greeted people with the traditional Easter greetings like ‘Christ is risen! Alleluia!’? When was the last time you spoke with friends about an encounter with Jesus like the Emmaus disciples? How many of us see his Holy Spirit as an animating force in our lives? Did you, this Easter, choose the Easter bunny and Easter eggs over the cross? These are searching questions to ask of ourselves.
The Korean German writer, Byung Chul Han, says that Homo sapiens have degenerated into “phono sapiens”. Storytelling used to bind us together around the campfire; it connected us to our past and helped us imagine hopeful futures. The digital screen has replaced that fire, making us individuals that perform fictitious versions of ourselves to unseen peers, tailoring our looks, lives and opinions to get our story liked. “This smart form of domination constantly asks us to communicate our opinions, needs and preferences, to tell our lives, to post, share and like messages”. Han argues that in a fog of instant information, commodified data, and selfie updates, our ability to tell our stories has degenerated. He surely has a point and the effects of this decline really affect the christian community’s efforts to share its story and encourage each other in the faith. My story seems to be hard to connect to our story as christians.
One issue is ignorance of the story itself. You can’t speak about what you do not know about. ‘Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ’, it is said. Reading scripture and spending time in prayer are humble and faithful slow works of a lifetime, part and parcel of being a disciple.
Another obstacle is of course our sin. Our credibility as storytellers, as sharers of the Gospel, depends on the way we live our lives. People are rightly reluctant to accept the word of a hypocrite, one who says they know Jesus but doesn’t keep his commandments, as the Second Reading put it. Actually, I think few have the brass-neck for such double standards and so the result of sin is not that the Gospel is shared by sinners and is disbelieved, but that it isn’t shared at all for fear of being labelled a hypocrite or judged ourselves. Of course, not one of us is perfect and so failing to proclaim the Lord because of our own shortcomings is a complex but real state of affairs. Happily, there’s a remedy and one that is found in the very thing we seek to proclaim.
When we sin and we all do, we can confess and repent, as St Peter said in the first Reading. We repent knowing of the Lord’s victory over sin and death, confident of his forgiveness for all. As forgiven and redeemed people we can testify to others that we need not be trapped by our faults and vices in an endless cycle of guilt. Moreover, when we seek to avoid sinning, we hold to the ideal of being a genuinely good person on our horizon so that, ‘God’s love can come to perfection’ in us. Only by living God’s love will the Good News be seen for what it is: authentic; compelling; and transformative.
Jesus tells the disciples, as he tells us, in no uncertain terms ‘you are witnesses to this’. So let’s tell his story! Tell his story in your story! And tell the stories well, because salvation depends upon this vital task.