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Homily for the Ordination of Hien Van Do, MJ and Dao Minh Pham MJ to the Presbyteral Ministry, 03 August 2024, Jn 15:9-17
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MJ is your nomenclature for your identity as consecrated persons. Missionaries of Jesus. Let me share some thoughts on what, basically it means to be Missionaries of Jesus. It means you are disciples called to participate in Jesus’ apostleship. It means your mission is intricately connected to Jesus’ mission, which has to do with being sent. Before you can know what you are being sent for, you have to know, first of all, what Jesus himself has been sent for. He is the apostle par excellence. That is what he said when he appeared inside that upper room to his disciples who were huddled together in fear and hiding behind locked doors. First he said, “Peace be with you.” And then he said, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
To be a missionary is to be sent by the one who has been sent himself—Jesus the Christ, the Son of God. As the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus sends you. You are sent to represent Jesus whom the Father has sent. What has the Father sent him for? We get the answer to that in the words Jesus said to Nicodemus according to the writer of the Fourth Gospel. Remember that Pharisee who wanted to remain as a closet disciple? He wanted to follow Jesus but was not yet ready to come out in the open. And so he made it a point to meet with Jesus in the dead of night. He probably did not even realize Jesus was talking about him when Jesus said, “Those who hate the light are those involved in wicked things. They do not come toward the light, for fear that their works might be exposed. But those who live in the truth come to the light so that their works may be clearly seen as the work of God.”
It is the work of God that the missionary is sent to do. Therefore Jesus said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that all who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” This is the best summary of the Good News that you will always have to bring with you as missionaries. You have to reflect the merciful face of God in Jesus, the God whose mission is not to condemn but to save. It is never your mission to preach a fearful God who always threatens to throw people into hell if they do not live righteous lives. That kind of God has nothing to do with Jesus. No one can throw us into hell except ourselves, except our own deliberate choice to separate from God. And whenever that happens, Jesus is always ready to descend into hell for us, if only to get us out of the hell that we often make of our lives.
Having explained to you what it means to be a missionary, let me now proceed to give you three short reminders on what it does not mean to be sent, or what a missionary is not. One, You are not sent to substitute for the Messiah. Two, you are not being sent as supermen. Three, you are not being sent alone.
Let’s start with the first—You are not the Messiah. Don’t ever allow yourselves to fall into a state of delusion and develop a messianic complex. You cannot save the world. Only God can. But you can do the work of God by remaining in his Son Jesus like branches to a vine. Apart from him, you can do nothing. With him you can do everything. As St. Paul says, “You can be all things to all people,” but only if you remain in Christ.
Secondly, You are not being sent as supermen. Therefore you need not pretend to be what you are not. He does not call the qualified; he qualifies those whom he calls. He knows you more than you know yourself, as Saint Augustine once realized. It is what Jeremiah said in our first reading: “He knew me before I was conceived; he dedicated me before I was born…”. He does not send superheroes; he sends you in the very crassness of your humanity. You should therefore never apologize for being human; he himself embraced our humanity. And yet you will realize as Paul did that you bear with you a great treasure with a surpassing power in the very wretchedness, the earthenness of your humanity. St. Paul once despaired about his own humanity, about the weakness which he described as a thorn in the flesh. We are told that he begged the Lord three times to get rid of his weakness. But the Lord told him, “My grace is enough for you, for in weakness power reaches perfection.” Instead of despairing he was taught to boast gladly of his humanity so that the power of Christ may dwell with him. And so, remember this my brothers, it is only when you are in touch with your weaknesses, with your vulnerability, that Christ can be truly strong in you.
Lastly, you are not being sent alone. If you stay connected to Christ like a branch to the vine, you will also stay connected to each other as parts of the same body. Never treat the mission as your personal business. You are only a participant in the mission of Christ. And that participation is made possible by your participation in the life and mission of the Church by the grace of the same Holy Spirit that we all have received at baptism. The word for thst is Synodality. Your being an ordained minister does not make you more important than any of your fellow members of the faithful. By the grace of ordination, you are receiving a special gift—to exercise leadership, but always in the name of the one true head of the Church, the Lord Jesus Christ. You can never practice that leadership meaningfully by lording it over your fellow disciples. You can only practice it in servanthood, in utter kenosis. If you are to represent Christ at all as a missionary, you can only do it by being of the same mind as Christ, loving with the same love as Christ, being united in heart with Christ, having the same attitude as Christ—who humbled himself, emptied himself, immersed himself in our humanity so that he could transform it, raise it up and empower us to act in the name that is above every name.
Therefore in all that you will do as missionaries, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ who was sent by the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit, and who now sends you participate in his work of bringing to the world the sweet and comforting joy of the Gospel.
