Witness Is Personal

(The following little story has been slightly edited in its facts in order to tell it in front of an audience and to protect the guilty.)

I think if we're honest, we have to admit that children grow up in a universe inhabited by other small criminals. Bullies are part of their lives. There are a lot of things we got into, growing up, that we never told our parents. This is one of those stories I never told my parents.

When I was in fifth grade, there was a bully from the other school in town who used to shake down kids from my school for their lunch money. He must have been in seventh grade or so, and was much bigger than us physically. One day, when I was walking home with a friend from my class, we met him on the road. I have to admit that his technique of grade school robbery was practiced, effortless, and even elegant. He came up to the two of us, and, without saying a word, punched my friend in the face, and then turned to me to begin his explanation of his financial needs, and the difference between our fighting weights. I'll always remember my friend's face, as he turned away from me without a word and started walking in another direction. The look in his face said :" Sorry, but I can't stay. I'd like to, but I don't have the heart for it. Right now it's too hard to be your friend. Good luck." And he left me alone, with only my enemy for company.

In the Gospel for this Sunday, Jesus continues to instruct his disciples, whom he is sending out to preach. He tells him, "Do not fear." What they have heard in secret, from his own lips, they are to proclaim on housetops. And yet these are the same men who will leave him alone and bereft in the Garden of the Agony, while they run to save their skins. Yet after the Lord forgives them, and brings them back in the glory of Easter to the intimacy of friendship with him, and finally welds their hearts to his own in the fire of the Pentecost, they will go forth and preach without ceasing what they have heard from the heart of him whom they love. Peter and Andrew, who will die crucified themselves, will preach even from the crosses on which they die what Jesus had done for them, faithfully eager to the end to testify to him who loved them even when they betrayed him.

It is this kind of testimony that changes other people's hearts. It is this kind of testimony that the Lord is talking about in this gospel. It is this kind of testimony that he wants you and me to give when we talk about him to other people, when we witness to him by the shape of who we are and what we do. He is not asking us to give testimony in this gospel to the teaching of the catechism , to the shape of authentic morals, or to the fact that the fullness of grace and teaching about God is to be found in the Catholic Church. All these facts are true and important, but they are not the heart of the testimony we need to give. The testimony you and I must give about Jesus is first of all about our own personal friendship with him,- our knowledge of him, not our knowledge about him. And we can only give his testimony if in fact, we know him from the heart; if we are standing with him in friendship.

The secret room of our heart is where we come to know him, and where he will speak to us if we let him. It's our personal knowledge of his presence that enables us to testify with authority and authenticity about him. The testimony we give about Jesus , which we shout "from the housetops," is given in words alone, but even more powerfully in our actions. We show that we really know him and his heart when staying close to him costs us. And that's why the world never gives up trying to separate us from Christ and his friendship. Like the seventh grade bully, the wicked spirit that rules this world punches us in the face, regularly, to distract us and separate us from standing with our Jesus.

This assault comes in many ways: it can come through our own weakness and attachment to habits of sin, the way Judas' treason began in his greed for money. It can come through our own laziness and distaste of putting ourselves out for Christ - the reason some people stay in bed on a Sunday, or, if they attend, make no effort to make the Mass their own act of worship. Sometimes a crisis seems to get too hard for us to handle: the unexpected pregnancy, an addiction to drink or drugs or sex, infertility, a marriage that's failing,-and the world tempts us to go in a different direction than Jesus leads us, to find an easier way through it than the path of the Gospel and the Cross.

The assault on our friendship with Christ can also come from outside us, by making our testimony to Christ harder, sometimes subtly harder - by making us pay a price for being publicly recognized as Catholic Christians and friends of Jesus. Many of the people in my parish are descendents of English Catholics who suffered centuries of persecution, fines, and even martyrdom to retain their Catholic faith. My own Kerry Irish people can take you out from our village of Killorglin out towards Cahirsiveen and show you the Mass rock where our ancestors worshiped, risking arrest by soldiers, the Mass being said by a priest with a wolf's bounty on his head, dead or alive.

It's more subtle in our own day. A friend of mine was once applying for a position with a big Boston law firm. The interviewer noted that my friend had included his service with the Knights of Columbus on his resume. "You realize," he said, "that at this firm, we leave religion at the door. You work when we say to work, and you take the cases we tell you to, regardless of your religious sympathies or personal morality." My friend thanked interviewer for being so upfront. " Obviously," my friend said, " You're really not the kind of people I want to spend my professional life with." He got up and left. He stuck with Christ at the expense taking a job most young lawyers dream about. But he would not desert his Jesus; he would not turn away from his heart's best friend.

By clinging to Jesus and his way in good times and bad, we show ourselves the personal friends of a risen and living Lord whom the world would prefer to be still dead; and we give testimony to his power to bind our hearts to his by standing with him, no matter what comes.

That's why our time with Jesus every week at Mass is so important. In this blessed hour when Heaven bows low to Earth, this holy banquet contains Jesus himself present to us under the appearance of food and drink to feed us really and truly in the depths of our person, at the core of who we are. In this sacred meeting, he knocks on the door of our heart, - that secret room the Gospel talks about, - and asks us to let him in; and not only him, but the other friends of his heart as well. The life of holy Communion is not just an individual thing; it is for building up the body of Christ we call the Church. He calls us together to eat as one family, one body, one community formed from his own Heart, and strengthens us there so that we may stand by him as each other's hearts' best friends. That common life with him and each other as the Church is where true testimony about Christ begins.