Share the Good News!

Sharing the Good News depends on prayer. We cannot share the Jesus experience, his own experience of God, if we do not have a relationship with God in Christ. To evangelize, or share the Gospel, we have to pray deeply and often. Proclamation of the Good News is born from the same experience of God that Jesus had. We access that experience in faith, in prayer. Without prayer we risk proclaiming ourselves, our ideologies and prejudices – basically, our egocentricity – rather than the Gospel.

Now, Jesus calls all of us to proclaim the Gospel. But how? Jesus offers guidance. First, he says, “take nothing for the journey.” Jesus asks us to abide in the infinite mercy and utterly transcendent mystery of God as we move about our days. He tells us to take only this experience – the experience of the divine nothing – with us, and to offer it to all we meet. In other words, we share the divine nothing by practicing nothingness within while we are going about our day.

We do not need to argue or change someone’s mind. We share the love of God not by trying to convince but only by bearing witness to the beauty, goodness, truth of the Mystery. We let God do the convincing on God’s terms and in God’s time. Jesus does not want us forcing the Gospel on anyone as that is a violation of the heavenly freedom he brings.

We can transmit the Gospel experience of God by our presence, by our bearing, by our words and the small, simple things we do. Washing the dishes, listening to others, walking down the street, and many other activities can be ways to share the Gospel when we do these ordinary things with faith. In these everyday ways, we communicate God through attraction, that is, through the attraction of holiness performed in simple, small gestures and moments.

Next, Jesus tells us, “Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet.” Many will not be open to the experience. Many are in so much pain that they cannot be receptive to anything, they are too hurt. Others may be trapped in their own opinions, like people from Nazareth in last week’s Gospel story. People, in other words, will resist the Gospel experience of God. Our response is to let it go. Shaking the dust off one’s feet is a marvelous image of letting go. That, in itself, bears witness to the Good News because to let go of the negative emotions that well up inside of us when we meet resistance is to showcase divine freedom.

Then, the disciples “went off and preached repentance.” They witnessed to God by living in a new way. We should recall that repent means go beyond your mind. We preach not only by saying religious things but, more importantly, by living from a new mind, a new spirit, which is the spirit of Jesus’ own experience of God.

“The Twelve drove out many demons, and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” As they preached, the twelve healed and liberated people. They healed by their sharing the good news, by sharing the experience of God that Jesus gave them. The experience of God heals by joy, by relieving burdens, by opening awareness to seeing reality as it is, by overcoming shame with the affirmation of divine love, and by the forgiveness of guilt and sin through mercy.

Furthermore, to heal the people, the disciples had to encounter them. We have to go to people and not sit around waiting for them to come to us. After all, Jesus “sent them out.” They had to draw near those lost or on the margins. Likewise, we have to go where there are people in pain and risk encounter. We have to enter into relationships with others, mingling with and getting to know people. Surely, this is a challenge to the introverted among us. But I do not mean we have to venture into dangerous areas, necessarily. Rather, the immediate challenge is to see people in one’s everyday life who are in pain. We start there by being spiritually present to them.

Sharing the Gospel experience of God means we take nothing for the journey: we take the divine nothing on the journey of daily life and give away the divine nothing to whomever crosses our path. We radiate God by abiding in the nothingness of God within, as we let go of ourselves in the normal interactions of human existence. Pope Francis agrees. He tells us that sharing the Gospel “is transmitting God who is living in me.”