Sunday, April 26th, 2020

What is the Holy Spirit saying to us for our Plenary Council? In today’s readings he says: Firstly, hang your plans on the structure I gave you. Hang your plans on the Kerygma. This makes sense: by making up our own structure, instead of using the one the Holy Spirit has given us, the plenary council will be a bureaucratic hot air festival of people pushing their own ideas instead of the Lord’s.

Kerygma is a Greek word which means “proclamation” or “preaching”. As the Catholic Bible Dictionary defines it, it is “The announcement of the message of the Gospel as preached in the New Testament. The core of this message is the Kingdom of God and redemption of man by Christ...a basic summary of the Gospel message as preached by the earliest Christian evangelists.”

Monsignor Charles Pope gives us a summary of the seven elements of this basic summary of the Gospel, which leaps out at us in the First Reading today: (cf http://blog.adw.org/2012/10/what-do-we-mean-by-the-term-kerygma/)

God loves you and has a plan for your life. "Jesus the Nazarene was a man commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you, as you all know."

Sin will destroy you. "you will not abandon my soul to Hades nor allow your holy one to experience corruption."

Christ Jesus died to save you. "This man, who was put into your power by the deliberate intention and foreknowledge of God, you took and had crucified by men outside the Law. You killed him,"

Repent and believe the Gospel. "On the day of Pentecost Peter stood up with the Eleven and addressed the crowd in a loud voice: ‘Men of Israel, listen to what I am going to say"

Be Baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. and

Abide in Christ and his body the Church. "Now raised to the heights by God’s right hand, he has received from the Father the Holy Spirit, who was promised, and what you see and hear is the outpouring of that Spirit.’"

Go make disciples. "all of us are witnesses to that."

Now this might sound like a brand new idea with no root in tradition or Catholic practice: but it is these very steps that we renew at the creed in every Mass!

One immediate practical consideration this pushes the Plenary Council, and ourselves, to consider is: are we proclaiming the Kerygma in what I do?

For example: does it become obvious in time to those around me that these beliefs constitute for me the foundation of reality, my central principles of life?

A second thing to consider is - if I’m Catholic, do I allow this to shine through all my apostolic projects. A major temptation and trap we can fall into is making our particular projects the centre while leaving the kerygma at the edges. Being Catholic is not first of all an opportunity to push social activism, politics, conservatism or liberalism, liturgy or devotions or even catechesis - as good as these things may be. It is first of all to live and proclaim the Kerygma as the central trunk, with the creed, sacraments, commandments and prayer as the four branches, of the Tree of Life.