Advent 2013
Leading with Love
Surely we will remember
2013 as the year in which the Argentian Jesuit priest Jorge Mario Bergoglio single-handedly
helped foster a different conversation between the church and the world. His elevation to Bishop of Rome,
taking the name Pope Francis, took the non-Catholic world by surprise, but
nothing was more astonishing (and refreshing) than his decision to re-imagine
what it means to be a highly visible Christian leader on the global stage.
I’ve been struck by how
many of my non-Christian friends have been so moved by Francis that they’ve taken
to social media to post stories and photos of him as he demonstrates genuine
concern for “the least of these.”
They find real beauty in this kind of love and humility. No doubt this is what drew many to
Jesus of Nazareth.
After his election as
bishop of Rome, Bergoglio’s assumption of the name Francis was a first clue. Then when he returned to his Vatican
hotel to retrieve his luggage, thank the staff, and pay his bill, we could
already see this was a different kind of pope. During Holy Week, he washed the
feet of prisoners and of a Serbian Muslim woman. Think of how shocked we all were that a Pope would act with such humility (then think how sad that this
was shocking).
The intervening months
have been filled with captivating stories and photos of his humility and his
concern for the ordinary and the outcast among us. We marvel as he continues to eschew so many of the trappings
of power, living simply and driving around Vatican City in a 1984 Renault 4
with 190,000 miles given to him by an elderly priest.
And yet how very fitting
that a man who claims to follow Jesus would act with humility, would embrace
the poor and the marginalized, would refuse to live within the boxes we’ve
created. Is he liberal? Is he
conservative? Is he traditional? Is he a radical? It’s hard to say. And thank God for that. These are confusing times to
those of us who have invested ourselves in creating and maintaining the order
and certainty that comes from hard lines, a monochromatic universe, ‘us vs.
them’ paradigms. For some
religious people, he is a dangerous man, one worth keeping an eye on.
All this just makes me
think that in our polarized age, it sometimes seem like the Gospel has become
very small, captive to the political, cultural and ideological struggles of our
day. And yet, if the Gospel is
truly the good news Jesus proclaimed, then it must, without equivocation, be
both relevant and transcendent in this and every age.
What do I mean by
that? Ideas matter. Culture matters. Politics matter. And the Gospel has much to say about
each of these things. But the
Gospel is much too large, infused with too much mystery, freighted with too
much hope and longing and meaning and beauty, to ever be fully captured by any
ideology, any culture, any political party or national experiment. If the Gospel is what it claims
to be, it is relevant in every age, in every culture, but it is captive to
none. It is transcendent over all. And if it’s not, it’s just one
more idea in the market place, one more ‘way to live,’ one more set of
‘values.’
Pope Francis seems to
know this, to believe that truth is not relative and each generation of
Christians has some obligation to steward that which has been passed down to
them. But at this stage of his
papacy he is refusing to be drawn into our rigid frames. And he has decided to emulate Jesus himself
by spending time with those on the margins of polite society, resisting the
trappings of temporal power, and incarnating a holy love for human kind.
And so he goes about defending
the sanctity of each and every human life; bringing good news to the captive;
reaching out to the marginalized, the weak and the vulnerable; challenging the
excesses of capitalism and the emptiness of materialism; and all the while
holding firm to the orthodox faith handed down from the first apostles. Attempting to incarnate a Gospel that
is both relevant and transcendent. In short, he is leading with love.
May Advent prayer is that I would find a way to
understand the age in which I live and incarnate a Gospel that speaks into it
but that also transcends it. I
pray that I would have the discernment to allow the truth of the Gospel to
inform my views on politics, economics, vocation, history art, and culture, not
the other way around. And I
pray that I would always lead with love.
