for June 5
Memorial of St. Boniface, Bishop and Martyr

Given the context of what is going on around us in our city, our country, our world, today’s readings speak to me of the challenge of change, even righteous change. The experience of St. Boniface, whose memorial we celebrate today, is a good example of this. Let’s start with him.

Boniface was an eighth century English Benedictine who felt called to evangelize various lands that eventually united into Germany. He worked both among those who continued to worship other gods and those who were nominally Christian but interwove elements of that older worship into their new faith or slipped back into it. He worked tirelessly, encountered many frustrations, and had to play politics with people of power and means to sustain his missionary activity, but he did succeed in solidifying Christianity’s hold in Germany, eventually becoming the Archbishop of Mainz and earning the informal title of Apostle of Germany. Driven by a passion to save souls, he faced opposition and danger throughout his ministry and was ultimately martyred by a band of marauders on Pentecost at a distant encampment where he was about to confirm a group of the newly baptized.

Boniface’s story realizes Paul’s admonitions to Timothy in the first reading. Purpose, faith, patience, and love as well as persecutions and sufferings are part and parcel of bringing the Gospel of God’s love to people who may be far from it and may even be resistant to the message. Paul understands opposition is inevitable. He knows that though the message is such a positive one, people do not find it easy to change their beliefs. Beliefs can become so ingrained in our psyches that to challenge them seems to rock our sense of self and that makes us feel vulnerable. So we let ourselves be deceived by beliefs that may be more comfortable or ask less of us or offer more worldly rewards—and by people who play on our vulnerabilities.

Paul recommends turning to the truth of scripture to expose the deceit. In scripture is “wisdom for salvation” and “training in righteousness,” that is, the wisdom and righteousness of God. This is not, as Paul says elsewhere, the wisdom of the world or, as Jesus likes to say, the righteousness of external observance. This is the wisdom and righteousness of the Spirit that flows through everyone, in whom all share in one humanity and are entitled to be treated as full members of the human family. If our beliefs do not lead to this truth, then we have not fully embraced the Gospel. And if we are among those trying to embody that truth in the world, our best efforts might bring meager results or even seem to fail. Yet we’re called to stay the course, to follow Paul’s counsel to Timothy to “remain faithful to what you have learned and believed.”

The Gospel passage continues Jesus’s teaching in the temple, where he has been sparring with various religious authorities. Jesus always meets people in their own space, physically and psychologically. Here he engages in the kind of clever argumentation the scribes love in order to point out a fallacy in their thinking about the Christ as a human king like David. Of course, Jesus is the Christ, but he doesn’t make that explicit. The crowd loves to listen to him, but to accept him as Christ would be to change their expectations of Christ’s coming so Jesus doesn’t connect the dots for them. They’ll have to do that for themselves.

We are facing change today. Our beliefs in the stability of our world, in the sureties of our lives, perhaps in our moral certainties are being shaken. But this is also an opportunity to grow in wisdom, to consider whether some things we took for granted as right are truly righteous. Jesus, Paul and Timothy, and Boniface moved about their world bringing Jesus’s message of a kingdom rooted in justice, mercy, and love to the people. We now have people moving about our streets calling for us to commit to such a world. If we listen to them with the ears of faith, maybe we’ll hear something we’ve been missing.
—Christine Szczepanowski

The readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.