Ever since Pope Francis unexpectedly came onto the scene, he has challenged us to reclaim the spirit of the Gospel. For him, it has little to do with security, comfort, complacency and mediocrity. A self-serving and self-preserving mentality goes against the very nature of what it means to be a Christian and church. He makes no qualms about the need to take the risk for the sake of accompanying those at the margins. “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security”.
In promoting a church of engagement and accompaniment, the pope has embraced a bold fresh way of being church. For a long time, the Church had been understood to be on its way to becoming a perfect society in and for the world. It was a defensive, fortress Church. Other Christian Churches were considered aberrations from this road map, not to speak of other religious movements. However, Gaudium et Spes – the guiding document of the Council – presented a new paradigm: the church is not an enclosure which protects its members against the sinful world. It is a fellow pilgrim with the men and women of our age. It is a church incarnate in the world. Therefore, it is time not of fearful retreat, disengagement and self-referential pomp, but of accompaniment and engagement.
Pope Francis’ image of the church as a field hospital initiates a dramatically different model of church. His strategic visits to other Christian denominations, most recently to Lund in Sweden where he remembered Martin Luther and the beginnings and legacy of the Protestant Reformation, and his encounter with other world religions, demonstrate his determination to lead the church away from the model of the perfect society toward a model of a pilgrim church. He understands the church’s mission in terms of responding to God’s call to participate in his great project of creation and reconciliation.
Francis declares: “The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity”. That is his vision of the ideal Church. Not a perfect society, nor the enclosure for the privileged but a refuge for the poor, an oasis for the weary and a hospital for the wounded.
The field hospital is not concerned about defending against threat of encroachment and loss of its status and privileges. Instead, it goes out of itself to respond to the needs of those whose lives are at risk. It engages with the world rather than withdraws into enclaves. Indeed, as Pope Francis reminded us, we need to be in prisons, hospitals, the streets, villages, factories. If this is not so, the church will be an institution of the exclusive that does not say anything to anyone, not even to the church herself.
The Pope describes the missionary outreach being paradigmatic for all the church’s activity. In other words, it pertains to the very nature of the church to embody the missionary journey of Christ. Therefore, he continues “we cannot passively and calmly wait in our church buildings”. We need to move “from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel”. Later on, in the Exhortation, Pope Francis recalls Mary as a model missionary. She is the woman of prayer and work in Nazareth, and she also sets out from her town “with haste” (Lk 1:39) to be of service to others. Her being one with the poor and the lowly makes her the Christian model of solidarity and accompaniment.
Like Mary, we are called to leave our comfort zone and to be in the peripheries in order to offer nearness and proximity. We are sent to the strong and the weak, the wholesome and the broken. We are to be a “Malcolm in the Middle” who occupies in betwixt and between, liminal, peripheral and precarious places. Like Jesus in his ministry among the sick and the lost, we are called to meet God in the most unlikely people and places. Like him who often immersed himself at the margins, we too must be in that frontier space. It is that precarious liminal space where the true cost of our discipleship is counted, because we dare to walk with the Samaritans of our time, just like Jesus did before us.
