All Things to All People

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fr. Anthony and his sisters, (l-r) Amanda and Allison

    As any good parent knows, you can’t treat each child the same and expect the same results.  Each child is unique and has different personalities and means of motivation, even if there are similarities.  In my own family, all three of us children generally wanted to excel in what we did.  We generally all behaved, but we also all got into trouble in different ways.  For me, the oldest (the one whose perfection the parents kept trying to duplicate by having other children), usually simply setting out the expectation was good enough to keep me in line.  If not, a little punishment went a long way.  For the middle child, all my dad had to do was look at her the wrong way and she would start crying in penitence.  For the youngest child, telling her what to do usually led to some defiance, and then harsher punishments (she was the only one who had her mouth washed out with soap after mom told her not to say the word “punk” and she argued that it wasn't a bad word). 
    So as St. Paul says today, “I have become all things to all, to save at least some,” he is exercising good spiritual fatherhood.  He knows that each person responds to the Gospel differently, and so he had to tailor the tone and delivery of the Gospel, as well as his witness to it, to each person as best he could, so that some might convert to living as Christ has shown us.  Elsewhere in his letters he talks about using the power of the Gospel, and one can think of the miracles that God did through St. Paul (like raising a man from the dead who fell out of a window after falling asleep because St. Paul was preaching so long).  Or in another place we hear how he earned a living while preaching the Gospel (St. Paul was a tent-maker), so that they wouldn’t think he was trying to mooch off of them and get rich by preaching the Gospel. 
 

St. John Vianney

   This is still true today with my own spiritual fatherhood.  Some in this parish need strong words and the threat of divine retribution in order to change their lives.  Others are scrupulous, and don’t think that they can do anything right, that everything is a sin.  Some fall in between those two extremes.  St. John Vianney said that priests should be “a lion at the pulpit and a lamb in the confessional,” that is, strong words of preaching to bring about conversion, but gentle when a person comes to admit his or her faults to God in the Sacrament of Penance.  I may not always hit that goal, but I admit that, in my own estimation, that is the standard to which I apply myself.
    But being all things to all people in evangelization concerns not only priests.  It also applies to the lay faithful, you, in your work of sharing the Gospel in everyday life and transforming the secular world, the city of man, to be more like the heavenly world, the City of God.  Probably we all get this in principle, but do we apply it?
    When I was a seminarian I sure didn’t understand this principle.  It always perplexed me why people didn’t immediately convert after giving them a logical argument for the Catholic Church being the Church started by Jesus.  Or how self-styled Catholics could do things or promote things which were so antithetical to the Catholic faith.  To me, all a person needs is a good, rational argument, and they should convert.  And that works for some people.
    But for others, the truths of the faith are important, but only convince when they are lived out in practice.  You can give them every good argument from the Summa Theologiae, and still they would not be convinced.  But if they see a Catholic caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, comforting the sorrowful and afflicted, they are convinced that the faith must be real, because people actually do what they say Christ calls us to do.
    This can even go for the devotional life.  Some people love the warm, touchy-feely stuff.  They love the emotive nature of praise and worship music and need those emotional highs and lows to really move them in their relationship with God.  Others find the steady, metered pace of Gregorian chant more helpful to their prayer life.  Some just want to be still in silence and put the world outside.  Others need to use their imaginations and put themselves in the Gospel passages to envision how they would have responded and how they are responding to Jesus.  While the liturgical life has set standards that may come more easily or more difficult to us, based on our temperaments, the devotional life admits of a variety of expressions, based upon the individual desires and needs of each person or each type of person.  To pretend that Catholicism is monolithic in personal and devotional prayer, or that everyone should simply convert based upon intellectual arguments does not reflect the reality of the diversity of individuals. 
    So, our goal is the same as St. Paul’s: to be all things to all so that we can save at least some.  Again, this doesn’t mean that the Church changes her teachings to fit the times, or even that our common prayer, the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours, should have wide variations.  But it does mean that the way we present the Gospel, and the way that we help people to personally connect to Jesus through personal and devotional prayer will vary based upon the person.  May our diverse approaches, unified in the one faith given to us from God the Father through Jesus the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit transform our world to be more configured to Christ, and therefore a better place to be.