Co-Workers of the Truth
April 20, 2008

Readings for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

Reading 1: Acts 6:1–7

Responsorial Psalm: Ps. 33:1–2, 4–5, 18–19

Reading 2: 1 Pet. 2:4–9

Gospel: Jn. 14:1–12

Link to Readings

By Father Roger J. Landry

Early in the morning, three years ago, the eyes of the world were all fixed on St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican where the Solemn Mass of the inauguration of the papacy of our new Holy Father was celebrated. Today, he is here with us in America, celebrating Mass in New York City. And today’s readings highlight the truths about the papacy in which Benedict XVI shares.

We see what the Pope’s central mission is in today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which involves the ordination of the first seven deacons in the Church. The apostles found that they were “neglecting the word of God” because the early Church was depending upon them to do too much, including ensuring that Greek and Hebrew widows received proper material support. They ordained the deacons to those tasks so that they could “devote themselves to prayer and the service of the word.” The chief ministry of Peter and the apostles—and of their successors, the Pope and the Bishops, respectively—is this prayer and service of the word. It is to put into practice Jesus’ command right before His Ascension: “Go and teach all nations, baptizing them . . . and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:18–20). To baptize and to teach, to pray and to preach, to celebrate the sacraments and to instruct people to obey God’s commands, is the principal ministry of the Pope and the bishops—and with them, their principal collaborators, the priests.

Preach What?

On other occasions, we have focused on prayer. Today I’d like to ask: What is the Pope—and with him bishops and priests—supposed to preach? They are supposed to preach Christ, who is, as He tells us in today’s Gospel, “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” They are to preach Christ not as “a way,” but as THE Way to the Father’s house. They are to preach Him as the Truth who sets us free to live in the REAL real world. They are to proclaim Him as the Life, who came from heaven to give His life to us and for us, so that we might have life to the full (Jn. 10:10). They are to say to all, with St. Peter, “Come to Christ, a living Stone!”

Preaching the Truth who is Christ is not easy, because many reject that Truth. Christ ended up being brutally executed on a Cross. St. Peter ended up dying crucified upside down in Caligula’s circus looking at the obelisk that is now in the center of St. Peter’s Square. St. Paul was beheaded. Countless others have been martyred as the supreme witness to the truth that Christ is worth living for and dying for. In the second reading, St. Peter tells us that Christ, the cornerstone, was “rejected by the builders” who were trying to construct their own reality on the basis of their own (false) ideas of the truth and of God. He says that Christ continues to be “a stone that makes them stumble, a rock that makes them fall.” This was just an expansion of what the elderly Simeon told Mary and Joseph when they presented the baby Jesus in the temple, that Jesus was “destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (Lk. 2:34–35).

All or Nothing

Anyone who faithfully preaches Christ will likewise be “rejected by the builders.” He or she will be a “stone that makes others stumble,” and a “sign of contradiction” that will reveal the thoughts in other’s hearts. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the week he was elected there were voices that came out in immediate opposition to Pope Benedict, whom they decried will not change the Church’s teachings on certain hot-button issues that, of course, no pope could or would change—issues like abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem cell destruction, the ordination of women to the priesthood, divorce-and-remarriage, artificial birth control, and a bunch of others. It’s no surprise that we hear those same voices now, as he visits our own country. The Pope is called to be faithful to Christ, to preach the truth, and to try to please God, not public opinion.

It’s no surprise that many of the same critics said that John Paul II’s papacy had a “mixed legacy” that was “full of contradictions.” In truth, however, Pope John Paul II—like the Popes before him and like his divine Boss—was not full of contradictions, but was a “sign of contradiction” revealing the contradictory “inner-thoughts” of his critics. Every disciple—from the Pope to the most recently baptized—is called to be 100% faithful to Christ’s teaching and 100% faithful to Christ’s command to love others, especially the most needy, as Christ has loved us.

Fidelity to Christ’s teachings will get most people labeled “conservative” today, and fidelity to Christ’s command to love will get most people labeled “liberal.” But the only label for which Catholics from the Pope on up should strive to obtain is the title “faithful.” We either believe and try to put into practice EVERYTHING Christ taught or we—not those who do!—are the ones who are living in contradiction. It’s those who subscribe to a pick-and-choose notion of the faith who are the ones with “religious schizophrenia.”

A History of Faith

At a time when many in the world and even in the Church are so confused about God, about themselves, about the meaning of human life, the Lord has blessed us with a tremendous gift. After the great papacy of Pope John Paul II, God has raised to the Chair of Peter the man who is probably the greatest Catholic theologian on the planet. Since his earliest days, he has been a devout student of Jesus, and since his late 20s he has been one of the greatest teachers of the Gospel he has learned. In his 30s, as a priest-advisor at Vatican II, he authored interventions for a famous German cardinal that changed the entire history of the Council and left his imprint on the Council’s most important documents. (If anyone has tried to get you to believe that Benedict will “turn back the clock on Vatican II,” please know that the person stating that doesn’t have a clue of the real history of Vatican II and the role the young Joseph Ratzinger played there!)

In later years, he was a famous university professor and prolific author on theology and prayer. In the past couple of decades, I have devoured more than a dozen of his books and have profited immensely from the clarity and depth of his insights. Over the course of my years before seminary and since, he has been one of my biggest heroes—as he has been for so many of my seminary classmates and other young priests.

In a world, and in a church, in which young people often have encountered confusion and watered-down, uninspiring versions of the faith, Cardinal Ratzinger, through his writings, became a real beacon of light and hope. So many of us have, for a long time, tried to stand on his shoulders, so that we, too, could see things more clearly. Now the whole Church has that same grace, to profit from his deep faith and the immense gifts God has given him. There are no coincidences in God, and his election is a testimony to the fact that God knows that the Church and the world needs those gifts now.

Anchored to Truth

More than anything else, Pope Benedict will preach the Truth who is Jesus Christ, the truth that will set us free, the truth that will lead us on the way of salvation to the Father’s house. We live in a world in which there are so many Pontius Pilates, who ask “What is truth?” (Jn. 18:38) and who wash their hands of countless sins and atrocities that are based on LIES. If there is only “my” truth and “your” truth, then there is “no” truth, and hence no firm basis on which we can construct a society or have a meaningful dialogue about anything.

During his homily at the Mass prior to the conclave, then-Cardinal Ratzinger talked about the crises that come from having no firm anchor in the truth:

How many winds of doctrine have we known over the last few decades! How many ideological currents! How many schools of thought! The little ship bearing the thoughts of many Christians has frequently been shaken by these waves, thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so on. Every day new sects arise, and St. Paul’s words concerning the deception of men and the cunning that leads into error come true. Having a clear faith, according to the Creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. Meanwhile relativism, in other words allowing oneself to be “tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine,” appears as the only attitude appropriate to modern times, a dictatorship of relativism is being formed, one that recognizes nothing as definitive and that has as its measure only the self and its desires.

But then he proposed the “ever ancient and ever new” solution to this crisis: an adult faith in Jesus Christ, Truth Incarnate. An adult faith is one in which we still trust in God “like little children . . . who will inherit the kingdom” (cf. Mt. 18:3), but in which we bring our faith to MATURITY, so that it is capable of responding with hope to the questions and anxieties of the modern age. Pope Benedict, who has this adult faith, told us that such faith starts with a friendship with Christ that is alive and real. The Pope calls us to take our questions to this Friend, to let Him teach us through prayer, Sacred Scripture and the teaching of the Church He founded. Benedict calls us profit from the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and use the intelligence God gave us to STUDY, to LEARN our faith more deeply, so that, as St. Peter tells us, we may “always be ready to make our defense to anyone who asks for the source of the hope that is within us” (1 Pet. 3:15).

Working Together

The challenges that face the Church are not something that our new Holy Father can solve on his own. They are challenges that can be met only by the whole mystical body of Christ, working together with the Lord who has trusted us enough to make us participants in His saving work. But it is work, and hard work, that we must do together. Each of us first needs to see himself as a “humble and simple WORKER in the Lord’s vineyard,” as Benedict called himself when he first introduced himself to the whole world that Tuesday of his election. The Lord needs “workers” and not just “bodies,” in his vineyard, people who roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, who don’t pass the buck of passing on the faith to others. Then we need to work together.

Pope Benedict’s episcopal motto was a passage from the third epistle of St. John, “Co-workers in the truth” (3 Jn. 8). In a 1990 book by that title in English, then-Cardinal Ratzinger described why he chose that scriptural slogan to characterize his episcopal ministry. I think what he wrote then is just as applicable now to his episcopal work as bishop of Rome. It dovetails very nicely with today’s Gospel and with all that we have been meditating on up until now regarding Christ the Truth:

“Co-Workers of the Truth.” For John, these words signify the participation of all the faithful in the service of the Gospel and, by consequence, the “catholic” dimension of the Faith. . . . For me it has become another way of expressing the task of the bishop: he too, and especially he, is a “co-worker,” that is, he does not act in his own name but is always and totally linked to a “with.” Only when he acts “with” Christ and “with” the whole believing Church of all times and all places does he do what he is meant to do. It is not his task to fashion a community for himself, but, rather, to fashion the Church for Christ. That means that he must point to him who is the Way because he is the Truth (Jn. 14:6). For the simple reason that it comes from the truth and leads to the truth, the love that is the goal of faith is, in a very real sense, the hope and redemption of the human race. A mere community of interests without truth would be just a drug, not a healing. Perhaps, in the last analysis, the crucial element in the unfathomable expression “co-workers of the truth” is the relationship between truth and love.

It is my hope that this book [and here we can substitute “papacy”] will indeed prove to be a co-worker of the truth. It seeks your hospitality and invites you to co-think and co-believe with it. It would like to open windows through which we can look upon the truth of the Gospel. It would like to awaken in us the courage to become co-workers, and it would like to be an aid to that love that the Lord has laid upon us as his commandment (Jn. 13:34).

Our Holy Father calls us to be co-workers of Christ, the Truth, as the Way to love others as Christ has loved us, and enter most fully into that LIFE which is a love-life with God and all the saints. May the Lord who has called Benedict to the papacy and us to be his beloved sons and daughters help us, with him, to be diligent co-workers in His vineyard, so that we might all one day come to that eternal home, built of “living stones,” where Christ has gone to prepare for us and from which one day He will come to take us!

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua Parish in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. An archive of his homilies and articles is found at catholicpreaching.com. 

This is adapted from one of Fr. Landry’s recent homilies.

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