• Home
  • Diocese
  • Bishop Burns
  • Synod
  • Columnists
  • Revista Catolica
  • Vatican
  • Subscribe
The Texas Catholic
The Texas Catholic

Dallas, Texas

Today is Wednesday, March 22, 2023
  • Home
  • Diocese
  • Bishop Burns
  • Synod
  • Columnists
  • Revista Catolica
  • Vatican
  • Subscribe
  • Follow
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Linkedin
    • Instagram
Home
Word To Enkindle

Father Esposito: The faith of the first followers, and ours

Friday, April 10, 2020

Father Thomas Esposito
Special to The Texas Catholic

When I read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry, I often pause to ask myself: would I have been brave enough to accept his invitation to discipleship if I heard him with my own ears? Had I been a believing Jew following his ministry, could I have embraced his vision of my ancestral past and future, so appealing and yet utterly jarring at the same time? On most days, I confess that I do not know. The radical nature of Jesus’ demands on his own contemporaries required, in some sense, a far greater act of faith than what is asked of us today.

A carpenter’s son from an afterthought province of the Roman Empire who asserted a divinely sanctioned reordering of Judaism’s central premises; an itinerant preacher who violated sacred practices and precepts while claiming to fulfill them (see Matthew 5:17-48); a master of parables who gathered a bunch of utterly ordinary fishermen and women to follow him; a wonder-worker who dared to declare that God was his father; a social revolutionary who died a most ignominious death on a cross, one that he insisted was necessary to fulfill the Law and the prophets (see Luke 24:13-35) – we should not underestimate the weight of such immense claims he placed on his earliest followers.

It is undoubtedly a blessing to live now, for many different reasons. One essential aspect of that blessing is our necessary reliance on the immediate faith of those first disciples in orienting our own lives toward the same Lord that they confessed to have seen with their own eyes. In the very act of faith that I make today, I do indeed encounter and respond to Jesus directly, just as they did; yet mine is inevitably a mediated faith, on account of the fact that I did not see Jesus heal the blind man on the roadside, or weep over the city of Jerusalem.
The more I question whether I would have perceived in Jesus the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel, the more I marvel at the awesome roots of the Christian faith planted by the initial witnesses: the apostles, cowardly at his arrest and then fearless after his resurrection; the faithful women who were the first recipients of the news that Jesus had triumphed over the tomb; the literary-minded men who penned the accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds that we call Gospels; the unique St. Paul, who persecuted Christians and then persevered in the Christian faith unto martyrdom.

The New Testament texts are fundamentally a gift of faith to us. They assure us that the men and women who encountered Jesus thought that we, their brothers and sisters in faith, should receive their musings and memoirs of the man who died so that all of us might live. They themselves came to terms, in the pages of their Gospels and their letters, with the fact that Jesus died with us and for us, taking upon himself the death of every sinful human being, in order to teach us how to die and therefore live by means of love. They unpacked for us, even as they implemented Jesus’ instructions about the Eucharist and the forgiveness of sins, the meaning of that act of love by the Son of God, who so deeply sympathized (that is, suffered) with our weaknesses that he taught us how to die so that we might live with him forever (see Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9, the second reading for the Good Friday liturgy).

I can hear the wonder animating the words of St. Paul as he sets the tone for our understanding of Christ’s life and death: “What, then, are we to say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not withhold His own Son, but handed Him over for all of us, will He not also give us everything freely along with him?” (Romans 8:31-32).

At a time in which the lungs of the world are struggling to breathe, our only response to the one who died asphyxiated on the cross can be gratitude, even as we implore him to heal our own wounds. Ours is a faith in Jesus Christ, the conqueror of death; but it is the faith of Peter, and Paul, and Mary Magdalene, and Luke that we have inherited. And to those who first bore the blessings and burdens of faith and therefore allowed us to stand on the rock of their witness, we should offer hymns of thanks to the God who orchestrated all this for love of us.

Father Thomas Esposito, O.Cist., is a theologian and monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas.

  • Tags
  • Faith
  • Father Thomas Esposito
  • Word to Enkindle
Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Pinterest
Next article Pope leads Way of the Cross in empty, torch-lit St. Peter's Square
Previous article Father Dankasa: Transcending Our Fears and Doubts

Related Posts

Father Esposito: Happiness as the blessed life Columnists
Friday, March 10, 2023

Father Esposito: Happiness as the blessed life

Father Dankasa: Two voices in one Columnists
Thursday, March 9, 2023

Father Dankasa: Two voices in one

Kevin, un monaguillo que  da lecciones de inclusión Revista Catolica
Sunday, March 5, 2023

Kevin, un monaguillo que da lecciones de inclusión

Texas Catholic Classics

A look at the five Dallas law enforcement officers who gave their lives while protecting citizens during a mass shooting in downtown Dallas in July 2016.

 

How a child with special needs inspired a high school volleyball team, community and a family who heeded God’s call to protect life.

 

After a young runner collapsed at a Dallas marathon, grace and providence unfolded for those involved in the valiant effort to help her.

   

In the summer of 2016, 50 students and 25 chaperones from Dallas Catholic high schools traveled to Nicaragua for a 10-day mission trip.

 

Early on a November morning, Kenndrick Mendieta bounded from the gym at Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep toward the campus’ athletic fields as clouds lifted on a fresh new day.

 

Subscribe

Get the award-winning Texas Catholic delivered to your door. Use the menu below to subscribe now.


Subscription length




 

Photo Gallery

Click here to find your favorite Texas Catholic photographs.

The Texas Catholic Newspaper

Catholic Diocese of Dallas
Michael Gresham, Editor

3725 Blackburn Street
Dallas, Texas 75219
(214) 379-2800

Our Affiliated Sites

Texas Catholic Youth

Revista Católica

Legal and Other

Contact us

Terms of service

Privacy policy

Site map

Site powered by TexasCatholicMedia

© 2013-2019 The Texas Catholic Publishing Company. All rights reserved.