Jesus invites us, his friends, to be part of his mission – Lk 8:1-3; Korean Martyrs

School Mass, Feast of the Korean Martyrs.

Imagine for a minute that you were God.  As you’re God, you’re really really loving.  You love the people you’ve created and you’re sad to see them trapped by sin and death so you want to rescue them.  You decide you love your people so much you’re going to go down to earth to rescue them.  How would you do it?

Well, I know how I’d want to do it if I were God.  If I were God, I’d be a Big Deal™.  How do  Big Deal™s travel around?  Maybe I’d go around in a limo, a stretch limo… no, better, I’d take one of the floats from the Macy’s parade and drive around in that, showing people how awesome I am all the time, dressing flashy, I’d have angels to be my entourage, no pesky humans who mess things up all the time, if the paparazzi got annoying, I’d zap them or something, then I’d actually rescue my people from sin and death (provided it wasn’t too much hassle), and then be back in heaven to have a cup of tea and go to bed.

Well, I’m not God, and that’s a good thing.  Because, I don’t know if I’d do what God did to save us.  Jesus didn’t have a float or a limo, or even a bike.  He was homeless: what’s called an ‘itinerant’ preacher, which is a fancy way of saying, he walked from village to village, because it was that important that all of those people heard the good news.  He made himself so poor, so vulnerable, that he needed help from the mortals whose creator he was!  He said to the twelve apostles: “I want you to be with me.”  I want you to be my friends.  I want you to help me, even though he knew they’d mess up at times.  And not just the twelve.  There were women with him too who he’d healed, who were his friends and helped him in his mission, and many more who didn’t go around with him all the time but gave him the support he needed.  God, the creator of all things, lived not knowing where his next meal was coming from.  He lived asking for help.

He keeps on asking for help from us, his friends.  Not because he needs to, but because it lifts us up to help.  Your math teacher doesn’t make you do exercises but she can’t do them, but because you become a better mathematician by doing the exercises.  God doesn’t ask us to something he couldn’t, but we do the exercise of helping his mission because it makes us better, it makes us citizens of heaven.

Today, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Korean martyrs.  The Church in Korea was built up by lay people who got hold of books from China.  By the time the first priest made it to Korea, there were 400 Christians there who had never seen a priest.  Can you imagine what that first Mass in Korea must have been liked!  Of course, there was no word in Korean for ‘Christian,’ so they called themselves “friends of the God of heaven.”  They knew that friends help each other.  This feast commemorates 103 Christians out of the roughly 10,000 who were killed for their faith in Korea in the 19^th Century.

They were identified because they were doing things to help Jesus.  Some were big things: St. Paul Chong, after the last priest left in Korea was killed, became the servant of an ambassador so as he could travel to China and ask the bishop there to send them another priest.  Some were little things: St. Kuan Tug-in was a woman who made crucifixes and crosses, some as simple as two pieces of wood joined together.  We talked last time about how a crucifix can grab you and remind you: God loves us this much!  She wanted people to be able to have those in their pockets, in their homes, and that was what she did to help Jesus.

I don’t know what Jesus is calling each of you to do to help him out.  But I know he values each of you enough that he wants to be your friend; he wants to help you get to heaven, and he wants you to help make him known, loved and served.