Wednesday,
April 25, 2018
5TH Week of Easter
1st Reading: 1 P 5:5b–14Gospel: Mk 16:15–20
Jesus told his disciples, “Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News to all creation. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; the one who refuses to believe will be condemned. Signs like these will accompany those who have believed: in my Name they will cast out demons and speak new languages; they will pick up snakes and, if they drink anything poisonous, they will be unharmed.
They will lay their hands on the sick and they will be healed.”
“So then, after speaking to them, the Lord Jesus was taken up into heaven and took his place at the right hand of God. The Eleven went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs which accompanied them.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
Knowing that human beings embrace hard truths only when substantiated by hard evidence, Jesus gave his disciples extraordinary capacities to empower their work of evangelization. They needed these powers to establish their authority.
The same mandate to evangelize was handed down to the Church minus the power to perform miracles. This is no longer necessary. Having established our identity as the Body of Christ what we need is witnessing in charity, not spectacular performances by evangelizers.
Evangelization is even more effective when backed up by a life of charity. Charity touches lives more than spectacular performances do.
Admittedly, miracles are still relevant to the ailing faith of many people. It cannot be denied that miraculous healers bring lots of people back to the Lord. The danger, however, with miracles is that they catch people spiritually unprepared and transform them into instant believers. Then as soon as the extraordinary event dies down, curiosity mellows. As the heightened desire to know subsides the person no longer bothers to deepen his faith.
But we cannot summarily condemn those people clamoring for miracles today as “men of little faith”? If evangelizers do not live what they preach, people have the right to ask that at least they back up their preaching with miracles, if only to establish that what they preach is genuine teaching from above. For as long as evangelizers fail in the task of true witnessing, there will always be people clamoring for miracles. As most evangelizers today cannot perform miracles, the only way they can authenticate their preaching is to live what they preach. If they cannot, then they should shut up, and perhaps just pray in silence. –(Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., D.M.
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