Father José da Silva Vieira, Comboni missionary in Ethiopia: “The mission revives Christmas”

In the third letter, titled “Prophet’s mission”, he sustains:

Christianity’s missionary task cannot be centred solely on spreading a worldview or an ideology; it must be something quite different: the continuation of the mystery of the Incarnation, of the dynamic of Christ’s incarnation in culture and in society, “the yeast and the salt”.

This quote has inspired me to look at mission through the eyes of Christmas’ mystery. The mystery of Incarnation is the pattern of our missionary service, which revives Incarnation in space and time.

Mission is Kenosis

The Christian Scriptures present three narratives of Jesus’ Incarnation: the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and the Letter to the Philippians. John, through is Prologue, gives an insightful theological reading of the event from Creation to redemption.

Matthew and Luke narrate the annunciation to Mary and Joseph and the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. However, I prefer to read this great mystery through the Christological Hymn Paul inserts in the letter to the Christians in Philippi chapter two, verses five to eleven:

⁵Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus:
⁶Who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped.
⁷But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are; and being in every way like a human being,
⁸he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.
⁹And for this God raised him high, and gave him the name which is above all other names;
¹⁰so that all beings in heaven, on earth and in the underworld, should bend the knee at the name of Jesus
¹¹and every tongue should acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

This text is key for the understanding of the Christian mission of proclaiming the Gospel to all creatures to the ends of the earth.

The Church mission’s goal is that all beings in heaven, on earth and under the earth, should adore Jesus’ name and every tongue confess Jesus Christ as Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

How do we fulfil such a cosmic endeavour? Living and proclaiming Jesus’ good news that God loves us, that He is our Father and the Father of the whole of creation.

As Saint Teresa of Calcutta told her Contemplatives: “Jesus said: ‘I have been sent… Even now my Father is working…’ We too have been sent and we too have to continue the work to spread the Love of the Father”. This is our mission in a nutshell!

The method? Through self-emptying and self-giving, taking Jesus’ kenosis of self-humbling as model for our missionary service.

Jesus’ incarnation was self-emptiness: “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are; and being in every way like a human being”. He becomes one of us, our slave, he dies as a slave in order for us to become one with him.

“The more we empty ourselves, the sweeter will be the kiss of Jesus from the Cross”, Saint Teresa of Calcutta said.

We come to our missionary assignments full of ideals, technology, methodologies, aspirations, dreams and fears.

The local language is the first challenge we face. To learn a new language many times without the support of a language school and of a method in our twenties, thirties or forties, to accept to become a child again that struggles to say hello and mumble good morning in a language we did not know that existed is a big challenge. We become little children again!

Then, all of us are ethnically centred. We were born into a concrete culture and learned life through the dynamics of the culture we suckled with our mum’s milk. In order to become Guji with the Guji people we have to take off the sandals of our own ethnocentricity. Guji culture is the holy ground on which we stand now (see Exodus 3:5).

As Jesus became humanity’s servant, so we, too, have to become servants in our mission. This was Paul’s missionary methodology. To the Christians in Corinth, he writes: “So though I was not a slave to any human being, I put myself in slavery to all people, to win as many as I could” (1 Corinthians 9:19).

Mission is not proselytising, to grab for the Church as many people as we can we order to boost the annual growth statistics in competition with Islam. Mission is service to all. The missionary disciple is a slave of all, a server, a Samaritan that takes compassion of the wounded and battered people and bends over to heal and comfort them. To bend over is a very vulnerable position that can knock one out of balance easily.

Mother Mary is a great example for us. After that long and enlightening dialogue with Angel Gabriel she proclaimed: “You see before you the Lord’s servant, let it happen to me as you have said” (Luke 1:38).

Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, OP, commenting on Mary’s answer to Gabriel – and through the Angel to God who sent him – writes: “If Mary is the ‘slave’ of God, this means that she can be no one else’s ‘slave’. It is a declaration of her freedom from all human domination”.

In the same line of thought, the missionary-servant is exclusively at the service of the people with whom he lives the Gospel he announces. Mission is a spousal alliance between the missionary and the people he serves in Jesus’ name.

We, missionaries, are to repeat the words of the beloved to the people who host us: "I belong to my love, and his desire is for me (Song of Songs 7:11).

That’s what mission is about! We will come to it later.

Inculturation

Having self-emptied ourselves as missionary-servants, now we have to translate the Christian message to the local language in order for the Christian kerygma to be understood and lived locally.

Pope Francis dedicates three paragraphs to the “Challenges to inculturating the faith” in his first and programmatic exhortation Evangelii gaudium, Joy of the Gospel (68-70).

In paragraph 69 he writes: “It is imperative to evangelize cultures in order to inculturate the Gospel”.

Inculturation is a two-way system: the missionary disciple brings the Gospel to a concrete culture through the ministry of evangelization in order for the Gospel to evangelize the culture and inculturate itself in that cultural setting: to dress up in the cultural forms that are the seeds of the Word already present in the hosting culture, starting from the language itself.

The Pope explains it in paragraph 122: “Once the Gospel has been inculturated in a people, in their process of transmitting their culture they also transmit the faith in ever new forms; hence the importance of understanding evangelization as inculturation.”

This is a very important remark: once inculturated, the Gospel is part and parcel of the local culture and it is handed on with the culture itself.

In paragraph 129 he tasks the local Churches with the process of inculturation: “Particular Churches should actively promote at least preliminary forms of inculturation. The ultimate aim should be that the Gospel, as preached in categories proper to each culture, will create a new synthesis with that particular culture. This is always a slow process and at we can be overly fearful. But if we allow doubts and fears to dampen our courage, instead of being creative we will remain comfortable and make no progress whatsoever”.

Inculturation has to go beyond translations to the local languages. It is a task that has to be carried out by the local people with time and patience. We, foreign missionaries, are not able to do it, because although we learn languages and cultural expressions, we remain outsiders: its synthesis has to be done by the community that welcomes and hosts the Gospel.

God my mother

The missionary disciple comes empowered with the Gospel which he will live with the people he evangelizes and is evangelized by.

In my case, there was something that really marked the way I say God in an inclusive manner, helped by the way the Guji start their traditional prayers.

They invoke God as their Father and Mother, as their Grandfather and Grandmother, their Great Grandfather, the One who gave birth to them.

This is indeed a very deep insight into the Mystery of God. God is both male and female. This is attested by the Scriptures: “God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). We are God’s image when we integrate masculinity with femininity.

As for God who gave birth to us, the intuition is also found in the Scriptures: “You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you. You forgot the God who gave you birth” (Deuteronomy 32:18, African Bible translation).

Paul, in his visit to the Areopagus of Athens, tried out this form of evangelization when he told the Greeks that “it is in him that we live, and move, and exist, as indeed some of your own writers have said: We are all his children” (Acts of the Apostles 17:28).

While in South Sudan, the religious expression that most impressed me was “Allah Karim”, God is generous. People repeated it a lot.

Exchange of gifts

Christmas has become the feast of things through the exchange of gifts among relations and friends. However, the reason for such a joyous give-and-take sometimes gets out of perspective. In comes Santa – that fat, bearded old man dressed in red – and out goes Baby Jesus, the One whose birthday we celebrate with Christmas.

The wisemen who came from the East are part of the Christmas narrative. We say they are three because they offered three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh (Matthew 2:11). However, they could be much more or less!

It is good to note that they did homage to Jesus with their gifts. Their gifts, in turn, reveal Jesus’ own identity, give meaning to him: gold for a king; frankincense to God; myrrh to prepare the corpse for the tomb. So, through their three gifts, the wisemen are proclaiming that Jesus is the awaited King-Messiah, that he is God and the Suffering Servant: through his wounds he was to save us.

St Augustine, reflecting on the mystery of Incarnation places an interesting question: “For what greater grace could God have made to dawn on us that to make his only Son become the son of man, so that the son of man might in his turn become son of God?”

In the third Christmas Preface we pray: “For through him the holy exchange that restores our life has shone forth today in splendour: when our frailty is assumed by your Word not only does human mortality receive unending honour but by this wondrous union, we, too, are made eternal”.

The mystery of Incarnation is this awesome exchange of gifts between the Son of God and the children of men and women: Jesus became one of us in order for us to become one with the Divine Trinity.

Through our missionary service, we offer the Gospel, Church life, liturgy, education, health, women’s promotion, work, microcredit, language, cultural studies and many other things.

Yet, our most treasured gift is our own life offered through friendship. Presenting ourselves, we have to welcome the offerings of the hosting community: their friendship, their intimacy, their food, their way of life, their culture and language, their love and their wounds, to allow ourselves being cured by their own brokenness.

Once I had a running stomach and an old missionary commented: “You eat with everybody and then you get sick. When I was here, since I could not visit all the families, I did not visit any one of them and I didn’t get sick!”.

 “If this is the price for table fellowship with the people I live with, blessed price may it be”, I replied.

I do believe that the Eucharist has full meaning if it goes from the chapel or from the church to the houses. The Mass just goes on from the Eucharistic table to home tables.

Mission is an exchange of gifts: the missionary-disciple offers his life and his faith and the welcoming community accepts him somehow as one of their own and loves her or him that way.

Mystery of love

In the mystery of incarnation as in mission, love is ever bonding.

Jesus told Nicodemus in that night’s interview: “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Contemplating the mystery of Incarnation, we become aware of God’s awesome love for the world and his great design of salvation, not of condemnation.

Mission without love is not mission. Pope Francis writes in paragraph 208 of Dilexit nos, his Encyclical letter on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ: “As we contemplate the Sacred Heart, mission becomes a matter of love. For the greatest danger in mission is that, amid all the things we say and do, we fail to bring about a joyful encounter with the love of Christ who embraces us and saves us”.

As missionaries, we proclaim that God loves you and introduce people in the experience of God’s love through our loving ministry. In order to be facilitators pf God’s love, we, first, have to live that love ourselves. It is interesting to note that one of the key words to read the Final Document from the Synod on Synodality is relationship(s).

Jesus’ paschal mystery, the other side of Incarnation, is the expression of love to the full. The Fourth Gospel introduces the narrative of Jesus’ passion with the words “Jesus, knowing that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father, having loved those who were his in the world, loved them to the end” (John 13:1).

The highway of love is a two-way lane. We may be tempted by the reciprocity of love. However, love is a free gift that marks the quality of our missionary service. We love just because we love. Full stop!

Daniel Comboni, six months before dying, wrote to his formator in Verona (Italy), asking for missionaries that were saintly and talented for the mission in the Sudan.

He writes:

As regards religious education, therefore, please continue as you have been doing and as you mean to do. I say this because I know your spirit and your intentions very well indeed: holy and capable. Saintliness without capability or capability without saintliness are of very little value to a person who wants to undertake a missionary career. The missionary man or woman cannot go to heaven alone. [Alone they will go to hell – this line was left out of the English translation]. They must go to heaven in the company of the souls they have helped to save. So in the first place holiness, completely free from sin and offence against God, and humble. But this is not enough: love too is necessary to make these men and women do good work (Writings 6655).

It is love that capacitates us! In mission and everywhere in life!

Fr. José da Silva Vieira,
Comboni missionary working among the Gujis in Qillénso, Ethiopia