AN URGENT TIME FOR CHRIST!

The Church considers the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ as urgent a task now as ever. None of the great strides in scientific or social progress has reduced this need. Why? Because, save for the message and grace of Jesus Christ, our fundamental human condition remains one of desperation, with or without the benefits of science.What are the causes of our desperation? They ar e both internal and external. It is easy to understand the desperation of the incurably ill, the extremely poor and destitute, or those living in lands wrecked by war or famine. We know, nevertheless that we can be in a secure and prosperous situation and be no less desperate. We may be desperate because we feel that what our heart most desires we can never have. Or our desperation may stem from having attained our heart’s desire only to discover it did not bring us the happiness we so much hoped it would. We may be desperate for fear of never finding true love, or from being disappointed in it.We may be desperate because we feel we’ve been cheated out of our chance to achieve greatness in our career or in some other field of endeavor, because others were blind and didn’t recognize our talents or give us a fair chance. Or we may be desperate because through years of faithful service and dogged determination we made it to the pinnacle of success, only to find we had become a stranger to those around us and even to ourselves, and had let the best and most important things of life slip through our fingers.We may be desperate because a loved one suffers some deep pain and we feel powerless to help. We may be desperate because we feel we never received the love we needed as children and now nothing seems to be able to make up for it. We may be desperate because we are approaching the evening of life and are alone. We may be desperate because we have neglected our children and now they have rejected us, and we fear we have lost them for good.We may be desperate because we have neglected what is most important of all our relationship with God and we feel we can never recover a lost innocence or make up for the wrongs we have done. We may be desperate because we simply feel lost.For these and countless other reasons, we may feel desperate. Even if we had everything we ever desired and were able to say we were the luckiest and most blessed persons alive, our situation would still be desperate because all these good things these loves, these achievements, these possessions will be taken away from us, for we must die. Our earthly joys, dreams, hopes, and aspirations will all be extinguished in death.We have devised a culture that enables us to distract ourselves from our mortality, but the jaws of death will eventually close on us whether we are ready or not. No human tonic has ever freed any human being from desperation, because there is no human solution to the predicament of our mortality.It is not until we distance ourselves from the noise and activity swirling around us so as to enter into silence and prayer that we are able to hear the cry that rises from deep within our souls, and it is not until we squarely face that part of us which lives in quiet desperation that we are able to know with our whole being what it means to need to be saved, and to know the futility of all purely human projects of salvation. It is also only then that the urgency, power, and majesty of the words of Jesus Christ are able to seize us as they should: “I am the resurrection and the life: whoever believes in me, though he should die, will come to life; and whoever is alive and believes in me will never die” (Jn 11:2526).Only the horizon of eternal life, which Christ opened for us by his passion, death, and resurrection, can free us from the sorrow of our mortality, and that is why the Church proclaims that there is no lasting peace or joy or hope for humanity apart from Jesus Christ, and why it is that she considers the preaching of the gospel as urgent a task today as in any age, and why she believes it is folly to put our trust in earthly powers alone political, economic, scientific, or otherwise to make our lives secure and free from desperation.