Echoes of the Good News

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Echoes In The Gosple According To Matthew

Echoes In The Gospel According To Mark

Echoes In The Gospel According To Luke

Echoes In The Gospel According To John

Conclusion

To my dear parents Mr Johnson and Mrs Rebecca Onyeukaziri,

the first to tell me about Jesus Christ.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Towards the completion of what has become this book, one question has captured my mind. And that question is: Who actually is the Author of a book? This question struck me because during the making of this book many people contributed seriously in different capacities. In such a way that if this book is considered good by any one, it is the collective sacrifice and laborious commitments of different persons who are ready and willing to keep the Echoes of the Good News of Jesus Christ ever vibrating and resounding. The apprehension of the truth that the writing of a book is a collective or better put a communitarian project of people, who admire and believe in the courage of the initiator of the project to express and imprison his or her thought freely on paper pages or electronic pages, humbles me and increases my love for writers and for books.

I begin by thanking God in the words of Ephesians 1:3, Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ. It is the thirst and hunger for these spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ that has sustained the entire writing of this book. In fact this book does nothing but attempts to echo these spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.

I use this opportunity to express my deepest appreciation to all those since I was born, through whom I have come to know, love and now serve the God of Jesus Christ. First my Parents and dear siblings, your constant prayers and encouragements fill me with confidence and solidify my courage to face the contradictions of life in this world. I thank my Catechism teachers and the leaders of all the pious and devotional groups I participated in. In a special way I salute the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, where I developed a deep devotional love and passion for the Word of God. I thank all my formators and lecturers during my formative period to the religious priesthood. I hail and thank the Spiritan School of Philosophy Isienu, Enugu Nigeria, for re-moulding me to have a very critical and dialectical temperament and attitude to human experiences and reality in general. Profound thanks to the Spiritan International School of Theology, Attakwu Enugu Nigeria, for building in me a contextual theological consciousness and providing me with the epistemic tools to reflect and interpret the Scriptures cum the Christian teachings and traditions in relation to particular and global context. This is the attitude I have attempted to demonstrate in this book.

A solemn gratitude and admiration to all the members of my dear religious Congregation of the Holy Spirit, (otherwise known as the Spiritans), scattered all over the world working assiduously in the spirit and with the charism of our Founders, Claude-Francis Paullart Des Places and Francis Mary Paul Libermann and all the Spiritan ancestors. May we never flag in zeal! In a special way I thank my Circumscription of Origin, Nigeria South-East, through the superior, Very Rev. Fr. Peter C. Agbonome C.S.Sp., and my Circumscription of Mission, Taiwan-Vietnam for making it possible for me to share in the mystery of being a missionary, taking the Good News to the ends of the Earth. I particularly thank the members of the Taiwan group: Frs. Joseph Okoro (our group Superior), Cyr Ntadi, Victor Da Silva, Isaac Donkor, Binh Quach, Simon Nguyen, Jean-Pascal Lombart for integrating me into the mission in Taiwan and giving me a good and warm community atmosphere to think and write. Most of the ideas in this book were debated at table during meals with Frs. Joseph Okoro and Cyr Ntadi; their disagreements and apprehensions helped me to sharpen my ideas. God bless you all.

There are three key players who sacrificed a lot when this work was in the state of becoming without which this book would not have come into being in this present form. They are Fr. Patrick Palmer C.S.Sp, Fr. Maurice Jiwike and Fr. Iheanyi Enwerem OP. I and the reader of this book owe a huge debt of gratitude to three of you.

Very Rev. Fr. Patrick Palmer C.S.Sp., did not only give me the formal authority to send my work for publication as the Major Superior of the Circumscription of Taiwan-Vietnam where I am working, notwithstanding his busy schedule as a Superior he did a serious editorial correction of my manuscript. May the Joy of the Holy Spirit never depart from you.

Fr. Maurice Jiwike, a lecturer in Seat of Wisdom Major Seminary Owerri, Nigeria, but at this time residing in Germany; the thought that you read my manuscript in a challenging physical health situation and did a serious editorial work on my first draft, and also suggested I send for publication the pages we now have as published, will remain with me as long as I live. The Holy Spirit would continue to give life to your physical body and make you continue to prosper in health even as your soul prospers.

Fr. Iheanyi Enwerem OP., even with your very busy apostolate in Canada and at a time when you were preparing to deliver papers at two different conferences, you created time to read my manuscript and make serious suggestions and contributions. A very important one is what we now have as the title of this book. The Lord would continue to establish you for all your encouragements to me since I started this journey to the religious life and ministerial priesthood.

I also sincerely thank all those who made serious and silent contributions in making this book a reality. I thank all my online readers for their reactions to some of the ideas in this book I shared online on Facebook, Twitter and my website: www.onyeukaziriteachings.com. In a special way I thank Mr. Chinweze U. Ubadigha, a Nigerian graduate Student in one of the Universities in Taiwan, for his technical contributions towards the publishing of this book. God would make you bloom forever.

Finally I thank my dear publisher, Xliblis, for giving this book the professional publishing touch it requires. Many people would not stop admiring and praising the book design which is your handiwork.

There are some very important names I feel I have not mentioned, please just know you contributed greatly in making the dream of this book a reality. May God continue to bless us all, as we echo and re-echo the Good News of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, the Light and Joy of the World.

As much as all these people contributed in this work, I claim responsibility of the entire work, the ideas and arguments and including the mistakes.

INTRODUCTION

Inculturation is not only incarnating the good news of Christ in particular cultural traditional symbols: rituals and rites and thought processes; but it also means the incarnation of the good news of Jesus Christ into global ideas, thoughts, imaginations and realities; scientific discoveries and advancement in technology, of which most importantly today is our digital/virtual experiences.

The pulpit should be transformed from a place of giving moral instructions to a platform of entering into conversation with existential realities, the real world-experiences of the people of God using the word of God, the enduring teachings and life of Jesus Christ in such a way that the people of God would be challenged and empowered to confront their life realities with more sublime and invigorated Spirit-filled ideas and liberating joy in the Holy Spirit. Simply put the pulpit should provide the people of God with richer and forceful, more powerful and dynamic ideas grounded in the teachings of Jesus, to act against all manners of hopeless, inhuman and Christless ideas got from the media, the internet and social networks. Thus the battlefield of the mind must be reclaimed and fortified with the weapon of the word of God, diligently and effectively issued from the oracle of God.

This was exactly what Jesus did throughout his earthly ministry. He was always seizing every opportunity to enter into conversation with people of different ideas, especially with the Scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He transformed every situation as an opportunity to teach and instruct. Jesus knew clearly that conversion starts from the mind not from the heart or the senses. It is only when the mind is converted that the heart would be converted, followed by the senses and then finally our human appetite and desires would be converted. This was exactly the evangelistic approach of Jesus; it is this same approach that we see in the great missionary to the gentiles, Paul, when we read his Letters, especially his letter to the Romans and to the Galatians. The same approach was employed by the patristic Church; this is why it is very difficult to distinguish the Sermons of most of the Church Fathers, such as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Augustine and so on, from their theological treaties, because when they preach, they teach and instruct aiming at the minds of their audience.

This is exactly what this book attempts to do by echoing the teachings of Jesus Christ from the pages of the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In these four gospels we see how Jesus preached from realities or based on the realities before and of his audience in a given world-context and not to the realities of people as the scribes and the Pharisees did. Let us imagine how Jesus would teach and preach to us or how the evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would have accounted the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, in our digital/virtual age, in our age of smart and android phones; in our world of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and many other Social Networks, blogs and millions of good, bad and ugly websites. Definitely all these developments would have conditioned the packaging of the good news of Jesus which is the Kingdom of Heaven, that is, the Reign of God. He would have definitely taught and preached from these realities and not to these realities. He would have entered into rational-faith dialogue with these realities.

As Christians today we need to enter into dialogue with the context of the world of which generation we are. The Four gospel evangelists present to us, the Jesus who always engages his contemporary in an intelligent conversation not only on matters of faith and morals but on the entire existential life situations of the people at his time. In the constant conversation between Jesus and his major interlocutors: the scribes, the Pharisees and/or the Sadducees, Jesus demonstrates and establishes that Christianity should have the nature of a rational/intelligent faith and morals not an irrational/blind faith and moral. Whenever we fail as Christians to act or react to the realities of our world with a rational or intelligent faith and moral attitude we always end up not only becoming inhuman, cruel, exploitative, manipulative and hypocritical like the scribes and the Pharisees of Jesus’ time; but we also become predators, persecutors, fanatics, enemies and killers of gifted and ingenious people in the name of God. We become stagnant and remain in the past, making Christianity unattractive, sterile and a gathering of people of weak minds, who nourish themselves with fables and superstitions. Thus, Christianity would be erroneously conceived as an enemy to science, enemy to technological advancement, enemy to politics, enemy to Economic growth and entire human development and societal advancements.

Christianity with the nature of rational-faith has the capacity to listen and dialogue with any person, any idea, any life style, any ideology, any science and any other field of human learning or epistemic enquiry; any race, any class, any religion, any gender and sexuality, and so on. Whenever we fail to listen to and dialogue with the realities and ideas in and around us using rational or intelligent faith, we would repeat the terrible, unfortunate and regrettable mistakes of our ancestors during the middle ages; a time when we persecuted pioneers of the experimental sciences and burned to stake people with unfamiliar and untraditional spiritual experiences and theological ideas, through the instrumentality of the Great Inquisitor. We have to note that just as Christianity exists today because of the intolerance of Judaism at the time of Jesus and the apostles due to its inability to have an intelligent and reasoned-faith attitude towards the word of God, the Law and the prophets; so systematic Atheism exists today due to intolerance of Christianity as a result of the inability to enter into open and docile rational-faith dialogue with great and deep philosophical and scientific thinkers during the latter part of the middle ages.

If the Pharisees, the Scribes and the Sadducees approached the Law and the prophets the way Jesus did and if they did not persecute the apostolic Church and excommunicated them out of the synagogues; perhaps there would never had been any reality known as Christianity. Because both Jesus, the apostles and even the first converts or fruits of the preaching of the apostles after the Pentecost experience, were still devotedly worshiping with other Jews in the Synagogues until they were driven out of the synagogue. This inevitably necessitated the unique gathering of those who believed that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ and the Lord, who died but is risen from the dead and now ascended into heaven seated at the right hand of the Father, to send the Holy Spirit to strengthen and comfort those who believe in him, until the time he promised to come back again in glory. In similar manner, if we as Christians had listened with open, docile and critical mind to the rational findings and thoughts of philosophical and scientific thinkers of the middle ages, tolerating their passion, curiosities and audacities to explore the world beyond the perceptions of the human senses and uncritical interpretation of the Scriptures, perhaps there would not have been systematic atheism today. Just as the authoritarianism and fundamentalism of Judaism gave birth to Christianity; so the authoritarianism and fundamentalism of Christianity gives birth to systematic atheism. Just as the persecution by the Jewish authorities activated the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the apostolic Church and gave them courage to stand against all Jewish authorities, in the same way the persecutions of early philosophical and scientific thinkers who thought beyond the status quo known and accepted by the Church during the middle ages gave rise to the Enlightenment period, which could be said to be the baptism of the Holy Spirit of philosophical and scientific free thinkers, that gave them the courage not only to challenge the Church’s authority but to derive joy and pride in challenging Christianity and everything religion at large stands for. This was actually the beginning of the systematic atheism we have today. The only way therefore is to correct the mistake of the past by engaging not only anyone who claims to be a systematic atheist; but to critically engage the human nature and the entire cosmos at large with a rational-faith. We must invest our faith and reason in understanding and interpreting our human experiences and the entire cosmic realities. This was what our Master and Teacher Jesus Christ did and this is what we must do always and everywhere.

To this effect, this work is a rational faith dialogue with our present human situation in a global context using the teachings and approaches of Jesus as presented in the four gospels of the New Testaments: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is not meant to be the best; but it is meant to be my own attempt to engage our present global context with the teachings and life of Jesus Christ; my own attempt to invest my Christian faith and my human reason in understanding and interpreting our human experiences and the entire cosmic realities.

My sincere hope is that this little reflection will challenge all Christians to exercise their God given capacity to believe and to reason, in a balanced way that would enable us to be authentic and uncompromising Christians in our radically changing digitalized world.

I hope it would be useful for individuals or group daily reflections, meditation or quiet time. It would also be useful for priests, pastors, deacons, evangelists, and catechists, religious and lay missionaries in the preparation of their homilies, sermons, group teachings, instructions and discussions. It would be useful for any one Christians and non-Christian alike, believers and unbelievers, for it is a conversation and every one should be interested in a conversation, especially a rational-faith conversation.

ECHOES IN THE GOSPLE ACCORDING TO MATTHEW

WHO IS HAPPY?

. . . Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account… . Matthew 5:1-12

In the gospel text, Matthew 5:1-12, Our Lord brings forth a theme, which is very ambiguous, and that theme is happiness. Uncritically many people think that they understand what it means to be happy and how they can be happy; in effect making happiness an idea that is grasped intuitively. But anyone who has been privileged to study the history of Philosophy would know that the term happiness has been a serious engagement in the philosophical enterprise of philosophers since the ancient Greek period. The question of what happiness is and what gives happiness to the human person is and remains one of the perennial problems in philosophy because it so concerns the human life yet is difficult to generalised the claim of it’s attainment. Hence, there is hardly any agreement on the understanding of the term happiness. In our world today, just like in every history of the human species, what everyone is looking for is happiness; even the person who commits suicide does that because of happiness, either for want of it or for lack of it. People marry, become priests, take up careers, professions, jobs, eat, drink, have sex, buy cloths, chat on social networks, and watch movies; in fact do everything for nothing but to be happy. I remember many years ago at the interview to be admitted into the religious priestly life, if you are asked why you want to be a religious priest or brother, if your answer was because you want to go to heaven, it is must likely that you would not be admitted. This is because one must not be a priest or a consecrated brother or sister, to go to heaven; in fact being one is never a guarantee to make heaven. On the contrary, if your answer is that you think being a priest or a professed brother or sister, would make you happy, you are almost at the door of the religious congregation or order.

In this gospel text Our Lord settles the problem on the debate of what happiness is. Though our Lord does not give us an explicit definition of what happiness is, he tells us who is happy and how to be happy. Our Lord tells us that the following people are happy: the poor in spirit, the gentle, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for what is right, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and those who suffer persecution in the cause of right. These people are not those we watch in the television celebrated by the world or make the headlines on our media. Rather these people are the most pitied people in the world. The world celebrates power in any of it forms: money, physical beauty, knowledge, talent and so on. In fact the world today sees those qualities given to us by Jesus as weakness rather than strength, and no one celebrates weakness.

Our Lord is telling us that happiness is an inside thing, a spiritual experience, a beatific vision of God. That happiness is not acquired materially but spiritually. Happiness does not come to you because of what you have but because of who you are. Happiness is beyond an emotional feeling, it is a transcendental experience. Happiness does not come by agreeing with the crowd but by living contrary to the standard of the crowd, the world. Happiness comes in excelling in what the world consider weakness.

To this effect, it is clear that only a negligible percentage of people are happy in this world, in our generation with all its scientific and digital advancements, with all its oceanic flow of wealth and its numerous creative centres of leisure and entertainments. We therefore earnestly ask Our Lord to give us the grace to be happy according to his own standard.

THE PURPOSE OF THE LAW

. . . Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them… . Matthew 5:17-19

The central discussion in this gospel text is the Law. We hear Our Lord saying to his disciples: do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them. We humans do not like laws generally. I personally have a natural aversion towards law generally and I know it is the same with you and every other human being. Generally speaking law is a rule guiding a society for the common good of the people. If laws are for the common good of the people, why the natural aversion towards it? A serious question needs to be pondered on. The point is that laws tame our animalistic instincts. Laws aim at bringing us out of the state of nature. Laws appeal to reason but not emotions and feelings; but as humans we are more controlled by feelings and emotions rather than reason. We do not act rationally spontaneously, we train ourselves to act rationally, we are born with the capacity to reason, but do not automatically by birth become rational or reasonable. Since every training is painful and we dread pains, we are more inclined to emotional and appetitive actions than rational actions. Laws challenge the formation of our wills, which is usually very painful and sacrificial.

But Our Lord in this gospel text is not talking about law in general but the Law. He did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophet. By combining the Law to the Prophet, it is clear that Jesus is talking about the Torah, the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures, which are also the first five books of the bible. The Torah simply means the instruction; the instruction of God through the prophet Moses to the people of God, the Israelites. The Law therefore is not just the Ten Commandments and the precepts or ordinances we find especially in the book of Exodus and Deuteronomy, it means the entire first five books of the bible. Our Lord says in Matthew 5:18, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved. I never understood the depth of this statement of Jesus until I started my traditional (Mandarin) Chinese classes. The Chinese vocabulary is written graphically by strokes. The number of strokes are so important that the meaning could be affected especially when a different tone strokes is used. So the strokes of the traditional Chinese character are counted, and not just that, they must be written in the proper conventional manner. So if one little stroke disappears from the Law, it definitely means a mutilation of the law, and subsequently an abolition of the law.

The reading of the subsequent parts of the chapter five to seven of the gospel of Matthew, would further clarify what our Lord meant when he says he comes not to abolish but to complete the Law and the Prophets. If Jesus Christ comes to complete the Law, it implies that before him the Law was incomplete, something is missing. What is it that is missing? It is the purpose and the spirit of the Law; the very reason why God gave his people the Law through the prophet Moses. The spirit of the Law is love and the purpose is to set us free from all kinds of slavery beginning from the slavery to our inordinate desires to the slavery of abused, exploitative and manipulative religion. A very good story to show how Our Lord comes to complete the Law and not to abolish it is the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery and brought to him to be condemned according to the Law in the gospel of John chapter eight. In the story Our Lord showed the adulterous woman the loving mercy of God and set her free both from those who exploited religion and from her inordinate sexual desire. To this effect Jesus takes the Law and the Prophet to a higher pitch; from a moral pitch to a spiritual pitch.

Christianity is not a collection of moral codes but a spiritual experience based on a loving encounter with the Lord. Christians are supposed to be above every moral law, because Christians ought to be operating on a higher frequency of spiritual laws, the law of the ‘be-atitudes’, which is actually the completion of the Law. This means Christians are supposed to be the best people in every society where they are. During the Roman Empire, Christians were the best behaved people in the empire due to the richness of their spiritual life in Christ Jesus. This was actually what provoked the almost spontaneous conversion of the Roman Empire from its traditional religion to Christianity.

We therefore pray to be people who keep the completed Law and teach them to others in words and in deeds.

VIRTUE DEEPER THAN THAT OF THE

SCRIBES AND PHARISEES

. . . If your virtue goes no deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven… . Matthew 5:20-26

Anybody who takes his or her time to reflect on Matthew chapters five to seven would agree with me that Christianity is relatively the most difficult religion. In these chapters we see the teaching and the high moral and spiritual standards of Our Lord clearly spelled out. Whenever I meditate on them I kept asking myself if I am actually a Christian in the mind of Christ or something else in name of being a Christian. People erroneously posit Christianity to be the easiest religion in terms of moral and spiritual standards; so you see some Christians searching for what they call higher spirituality in Asiatic religions and New Age spiritualism. Such Christians’ spirituality is based on that of the custodians of Christianity, which in many cases are not exactly what the Lord intends; not on personal encounter of Jesus revealed in the sacred Scriptures.

In this gospel text our Lord tells us: if your virtue goes no deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven. Critically looking at this statement of Jesus it means that the scribes and the Pharisees are virtuous people contrary to what many of us think about them. A good number of Christians conceive the scribes and Pharisees as very unspiritual, sinful and evil people, but that is very wrong and misleading. The scribes and the Pharisees are very holy and virtues people among the Jews and according to the religious standard of Judaism at the time. They were the teachers of faith and morals at the time, and they zealously kept the Law to its letter. So they were very pious and virtuous people. But Our Lord invites us as Christians to have a deeper virtue than theirs. For many of us, our virtues are not even up to that of the scribes and Pharisees never mind talking of having deeper ones than those of the scribes and the Pharisees.

This challenge from our Lord is a very crucial one, for he said if we do not have a more excellent spirituality than the scribes and Pharisees, we should forget about the kingdom of heaven. Our Lord gives us concrete examples of what he meant: if the scribes and Pharisees do not kill because it is against the Law, we who are Christians are not supposed to even get angry with people; if the scribes and Pharisees are so virtuous that they do not call people fool and renegade because it is against the Law of the Sanhedrin, it should be unheard off that we Christians have issues or quarrels with our brothers or sisters; rather we should always initiate reconciliation and be ready to forgive and accept forgiveness from people. These help us to see how difficult our Lord’s standard of virtue and spirituality is for us Christians.

I keep telling some of my Christian friends who are searching for what they call deeper spirituality in mortal men in Indian and the Republic of China, and in other clandestine spiritual organizations, that if they could try to live out a quarter of the standard of the spirituality of Our Lord which is deeper than that of the scribes and the Pharisees then they would be in heaven already and become spiritual gurus themselves. People of other religions marvel when they come across these teachings of our Lord.

Friends, human beings such as Therese of Calcutta, Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, and many other saints lived and walk through this same earth as we are doing, yet they are examples that it is possible for Christians to have virtue that goes deeper than that of the scribes and the Pharisees. They are testimonies and witnesses of the excellence of the way of Christ. They were so united with God in Christ that they became friends to nature.

Let us therefore pray that the Holy Spirit would empower us to have deeper virtue more than the scribes and the Pharisees.

THE SWEET STUBBORN SINS OF SEX

". . . You have learnt how it was said: You must not commit adultery. But I say this to you: If a man looks at a woman lustfully, he