Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
by Gianni Valente
"The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus" (EG, 1)
The Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (the Joy of the Gospel) was drawn up by Pope Francis in 2013 to "present some guidelines which can encourage and guide the whole Church in a new phase of evangelization, one marked by enthusiasm and vitality" (EG, 17). But his first sentence is not about proclamation, about the Gospel, about mission. In the opening words of the text, Pope Francis simply attests that the joy of the Gospel is that which "fills the hearts and lives of those who encounter Jesus".
Evangelii Gaudium is an intense encouragement to "proclaim the Gospel in today's world". But throughout the text, as in an insistent keynote, Pope Francis acknowledges and repeats that there is something that comes first. Before the proclamation, before the Gospel, before the missionary zeal. Something without which there would be no mission, no evangelization, no Gospel. Something that the Bishop of Rome indicates by referring to a quotation from his predecessor Benedict XVI's Encyclical Deus Caritas est: "Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (EG 7).
The mission of proclaiming and proposing the way of the Gospel to others is not a self-produced performance. It is not released by its own force, by self-affirmation suspended in the void. The experience of the personal encounter with Christ - Pope Bergoglio repeats, after quoting Pope Ratzinger - is "the source of evangelizing action". Because "solely to this encounter – or renewed encounter – with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption" (EG, 8).
The first to experience and witness that missionary strength has its source only in the encounter with Christ were the Apostles. Pope Francis, quoting John's Gospel, in Evangelii Gaudium recalls that the Apostles "never forgot the moment when Jesus touched their hearts: 'It was about four in the afternoon'." (EG,13). They did not expect it, never dreamed of it. Yet the impact on their hearts and lives of the encounter with Christ's divine humanity, as it happened, was something very simple, elementary and gratuitous, something that happened before any reflection, any discernment, any spiritual effort. Something that could only be seen, experienced with awe, and then, perhaps, told to others.
The experience of the Apostles, recounted in the Acts - Pope Francis recalled in an interview - "is like a paradigm that is valid forever". The initial phenomenon - the Apostles' encounter with the living humanity of Christ, and the impact of amazement that arose in them - is not a "starting procedure", an initial push destined to be overcome, a mythical fable of beginnings from which to draw inspiration and then continue alone, with self-produced conjectural energy and inventiveness.
In the Christian dynamic, reproposed in Evangelii Gaudium, what happened at the beginning continues to happen throughout history of Salvation. Even today, the faith and charity of Christians can only be moved by the impact of the encounter with Jesus, with what He and His Spirit are working in the present. The same impact experienced by the Apostles
Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium, suggests all of this by insistently repeating that even the mission entrusted to the Church does not have the Church as its source and protagonist, but the encounter with Christ himself, and what He does.
To experience and propose to others the joyful salvation given by the risen Christ is the vocation of all Christians and the Church's own raison d'être. But no one responds to that vocation through his own effort. As in a keynote, Evangelii Gaudium repeats in countless passages, and in many different nuances, that evangelization can never be understood as "a heroic personal task, since the work is first and foremost His." Jesus is "the first and greatest evangelizer". In any form of evangelization the primacy is always God's". The real novelty "is that which God Himself mysteriously wants to produce, that which He inspires, that which He provokes, that which He directs and accompanies in a thousand ways".
In the whole life of the Church, it is necessary to recognize and manifest at every step that the initiative is God's, that "it is He who first loved us," and He alone makes us grow. (12), not only at the beginning, but in every step forward in the Christian life. "Whenever we take a step towards Jesus", insists the Bishop of Rome in Evangelii Gaudium, "he comes to realize that he is already there, waiting for us with open arms" (EG, 3). Pope Francis also coins a neologism in Spanish, "primerear", to describe the prevenient working of Christ's love. "The evangelizing community", he writes in paragraph 24, "knows that the Lord has taken the initiative, he has loved us first (cf. 1 Jn 4:19), and therefore we can move forward, boldly take the initiative, go out to others, seek those who have fallen away, stand at the crossroads and welcome the outcast".
An almost physical perception of prevenient grace irrigates Evangelii gaudium from beginning to end, like a keynote that resurfaces in infinite ways. Pope Francis also quotes Pope Benedict XVI again, and the words he chose in the opening address of the 2011 Synod on the New Evangelization: "It is important always to know that the first word, the true initiative, the true activity comes from God and only by inserting ourselves into the divine initiative, only begging for this divine initiative, shall we too be able to become – with him and in him – evangelizers" (EG, 112). The Bishop of Rome adds that in the apostolic work of proclaiming the Gospel "no words of encouragement will be enough unless the fire of the Holy Spirit burns in our hearts", and repeats that the Holy Spirit "is the soul of the evangelizing Church" (EG, 261).
The Pope, in Evangelii Gaudium, also recalls that the authentic missionary "knows that Jesus walks with him, speaks to him, breathes with him, works with him. He senses Jesus alive with him in the midst of the missionary enterprise. Unless we see him present at the heart of our missionary commitment, our enthusiasm soon wanes and we are no longer sure of what it is that we are handing on; we lack vigour and passion" (EG, 266).
In the paradigmatic experience of the first Apostles, the encounter with Jesus AND his impact on their lives has the connotations of gratuitousness and attractiveness. The Twelve, mostly unlettered fishermen, find themselves following him because they are struck and drawn by his diverse humanity. They sense, perhaps confusedly, that in being with Jesus there is a new foreboding of life, an incomparable promise.
In the mission of proclamation - Pope Bergoglio repeats - quoting his predecessor Benedict XVI on this point as well, "one proceeds forward not out of effort or anxiety to proselytize, but "by attraction". Attraction is found in the dynamic of every authentic apostolic work, in every authentic missionary act. Not as the effect of efforts and cosmetic operations to make the Church's image more "appealing", or acquire consensus through marketing strategies. The attractiveness recalled by Pope Francis and his predecessor is a prerogative of the living. It is that which Christ himself, the Risen One, can exercise today on the hearts of his apostles, his missionaries, and even those who do not seek him. (Agenzia Fides, 27/2/2023)
