Sharing Our Faith Through Mission
April 4, 2024
When we talk about mission, the images of missionary martyrs, like the opening scene of the 1986 movie THE MISSION readily come to mind. In ancient times up to the twentieth century when transportation was still slow and hazardous, the chances of missionaries returning home were extremely slim. Most of them died and were buried abroad. Thus, when priests decided to become missionaries, their departures were literally permanent. On the other hands, migrants and even refugees still cherish the hope of returning home one day. They must leave home for various reasons in order to improve the livelihood of their families. The Holy Family fleeing the murderous attempt on the life of the Messiah was a prime example (Matthew 2:13-15). As for me, my parents were refugees fleeing from the turmoil of the Communist Revolution in 1949. Like many of their kinfolks, my parents would return to mainland China to meet their relatives who were unable to flee and to bring them provisions. I was born here in Hong Kong as a second-generation refugee and she was a British colony before the handover in 1997. I still remember how my parents put layer upon layer of clothes on me to enter mainland China and stripped me nearly naked when we returned to Hong Kong! Poverty was rampant in those early days! Thus my emotional bond with kinfolks in mainland China is weaker because my paternal siblings and I did not grow up together and did not share the same cultural background.Nowadays, thanks to the convenience of transportation by air, missionaries are able to enjoy their sabbatical leaves at home or, to be buried at their home countries after death. Thus, the boundary between missionaries and migrants blurs. We migrants are also missionaries! What mission do we migrants/refugees have towards the land we have come to live? As for us Chinese refugees in the 1950’s, we are proud of ourselves because we have been able to transform Hong Kong into an international cosmopolitan. Before the British took over Hong Kong as a colony in 1842, she was only a fishing port. In order to open up China to do business, the British government turned Hong Kong into a trading centre. The Communist Revolution closed the China market for some time but a lot of money and labour fled to Hong Kong and transformed Hong Kong into an industrial and financial city. During the Vietnam War in the 1970’s, a lot of Vietnamese refugees arrived in Hong Kong, but their final destination was USA. They were locked up in refugee camps in Tuen Mun and Kai Tak to wait for migration. The Vietnamese refugees failed to contribute and integrate into Hong Kong. After the decade long Cultural Revolution in China, she began to open up. Hong Kong needed to catch up with the economic growth of mainland China. She needed to release the female labour from families. Then you arrived in Hong Kong to help.
As Christian migrants, not only do we contribute to the economic growth of this city, but we also should share our faith with the local people. In other words, we migrants are also missionaries. But we should not be too ambitious. Some of us are only able to stay here for one or two contracts. It seems that there is little we can do within such a short time-span. This mentality is wrong because it underestimates the power of God’s grace. Allow me to share my experience with a missionary who died 47 years ago tomorrow after sustaining fatal injuries in a car crash while looking for activity facilities for the underprivileged! He was Fr. Enea Tapella, PIME, serving in various parishes for a few years each. His dedication to the service of the physically and mentally handicapped children has inspired and planted the seed of diaconate vocation in my classmate and I within the two-year time span he served in the Holy Family Parish of Choi Hung where our alma mater resides. Both of us were ordained permanent deacons separately nine years ago. As for the physically handicapped children we befriended, one of the girls became a member of the Hong Kong Paralympic Table Tennis Team. Another three run their own businesses, yet another one engages in the advocacy for the rights of the disabled etc. Therefore, your two-year contract is good enough for sharing your faith with the people you meet. No doubt, we migrants can be missionaries.
The Catholic faith is very broad. We can only share the most important article of faith with people we meet. Here, I would like to draw your attention to the gospel reading of the coming Sunday, the Divine Mercy Sunday. This is the story of the “Doubting Tom” with which everybody is familiar. To be fair, Thomas was only a more demanding disciple among disciples who easily took things for granted. When Jesus appeared to the ten apostles while Thomas was out, He took the initiative to show them His wounds (John 20:20a). When Thomas returned and the ten testified that they had seen the risen Lord, Thomas rejected the testimony of the ten though for a Jew, two witnesses would be sufficient to establish the truth. Thomas was more demanding in the sense that he wanted to be a witness himself and he wanted hand-on experience! He was left out last time. He did not want to be excluded again. Jesus Christ is a model teacher. He would not disappoint such a demanding and serious disciple (20:27a)! Furthermore, Jesus Christ corrects Thomas’ mistake, “Do not be unbelieving, but believe” (20:27b). However, this teaching is too abstract.
I have a simpler and more concrete question. Why does the almighty Son of God keep the wounds? He is powerful enough to wipe away the scars without leaving a trace. What does He want to teach us with those ugly scars? That Jesus keeps the wounds lest His disciples would not recognize Him is one such possibility but this reason is weak because Jesus is not the only person bearing such wounds. Tens of thousands were crucified by the Romans! Some were known to have cheated death! Moreover, the story of the Emmaus disciples totally refutes this explanation. It is true that at the beginning, the two disciples were unable to recognize Jesus (Luke 24:16) but when they recognized Jesus, it was not because Jesus showed them the wounds, but taking “bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him” (24:30b-31a)! Therefore, making use of the wounds as an identification aid is questionable.
What do those wounds mean to believers? They represent the sins of the world and the cruelty of human evils. The Son of God is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29) by taking all of them over and carrying them on His body! His resurrection tells us the mercy and the might of God. God’s love and mercy is more powerful than all evils. The wounds on Jesus, the Stigmata are not the same wounds of all others who were crucified. Like what the penitent thief says, “And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal” (Luke 23:41a), Jesus’ Stigmata are different because they are not His but ours! Paul says, “For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate” (Romans 7:15). As a righteous ex-Pharisee, Paul had to acknowledge the existence of a law of flesh struggling against the power of the Holy Spirit even after conversion (8:1-12). When we fail after baptism, we can look up the Stigmata of Jesus to draw strength and consolation.
What does Jesus want to tell us by keeping the wounds? When Mary anointed Jesus with an expensive ointment, Judas the betrayer complained that it would have been better to spend the money on the poor. Jesus answered, “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me” (John 12:8). Poverty is only a part of human evils. If poverty is perpetual, human evils will also be perpetual until the end of the world! God’s mercy and love shall sustain until the end when “He will wipe every tear from their eyes …” (Revelation 21:4a). Probably this would be the time for Jesus’ Stigmata to disappear when all evils are consigned to the past! Jesus Christ the King of the Universe would say, “Behold, I make all things new” (21:5b)!
Ladies and Gentlemen! This is our faith, namely that God’s love and mercy is more powerful than all evils. This article of faith is more tangible than the concept of the Blessed Trinity and the dual natures of the Son of God! Let’s be candid. The Son of God does not come to condemn sinners, but to help them reconcile with the Father, not by annihilating Satan but by bearing the sins of the world. So, don’t be too ambitious to eradicate abuses, addictions, exploitations and human trafficking etc. overnight. Instead, let us continue to show the people we meet that God’s mercy and love is more powerful than all evils. Take prison visits as an example. Though my emotional bond with my kinfolks in mainland China is weak, when as a young boy returning to my home country and heard the local dialect for the first time, an inexplicable emotion surged within. Similarly, in the Tai Lam Centre of Women I visited, there were Filipino inmates serving more than twenty years of sentence. When I organized Filipino volunteers to visit them once a month on Sunday, to do bible sharing and hymn singing, all the Filipino inmates were tearful because they would interact freely in their mother tongues! We are unable to reduce their sentences but life in prison would become more bearable when inmates have visitors or pen-pals!
Open our hearts to see the needs of the people we meet, including your bosses. Recently, a woman in her 70’s suffocated her husband of 80’s and later attempted to commit suicide herself. The couple or rather their children are able to employ a domestic helper to take care of them and yet, the old lady saw no future. Perhaps she suffers from depression and worries about her inability to take care of her beloved bed-ridden husband. I would ask where their children were. If the couple had no children, I would ask who should care for the mental conditions of the caretaker! Even if you don’t have the professional qualifications to handle such psychiatric cases, you are still able to pray! Beloved brethren! Prayer is powerful beyond our imagination. We are the first beneficiary because in prayers, we find peace and the will of God. We shall be able to see the impossible become possible (Luke 1:37).
Thank you and God bless!
Video Credit: The video is an excerpt from Facebook video of CFM Hong Kong at
https://www.facebook.com/cfmhongkong/videos/292159817305649 ; and
https://www.facebook.com/cfmhongkong/videos/761097256090776
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