I found myself teaching today, to a class of 20-something students in my health care ethics course - students who couldn't answer the question, 'What is the Christian story?'  I told them that their answers to that question could be broad and open - but in the end, every one's story came down to two ideas: "God said let there be light," and "Jesus was born."  

 

While these two statements are true - there was so so much that was omitted.  Nothing about Jesus' death and resurrection, nothing about God bringing the Israelites through the Red Sea, nothing about why early Christians found Jesus so compelling.  And so on.

It was clear that the idea that anyone could find the Christian story attractive was very odd to them.  As one student put it: "Well, all those Christians were just in it to get power and money."  

It was with that student's words ringing in my ears that I sat down to write this reflection.  I'm so struck by today's first reading (1 Timothy 6:2c-12) for how it mirrors the kind of situation the students were thinking about.  Paul knew very well that there were indeed people who saw religion as being ALL about gain - material gain, gain of power.  

But then Paul does a wordplay on the idea of gain, to say: "Well, yes.  You're right.  Religion is about gain - just NOT in the way you typically think."  The gain that being Christian gave to him was a sense of contentment - a sense that through all the shipwrecks, imprisonments, tortures and eventual death that Paul suffered, he was content, knowing that Jesus was his.  Indeed, it was that very sense of contentment, and of NOT needing to seek money and power, that was compelling to so many other people who became Christians because of Paul's witness about Jesus.

What is key - and what we see in the gospel (Luke 8:1-3) - is how Jesus' own life is central to peoples' following him.  Like those early disciples - men and women both - who followed Jesus and supported his ministry, we are called to be disciples who witness to Jesus.

Today's memorial remembers Korean martyrs Andrew Kim Taegon and Paul Chong Ha-sang.  Both of these men died with sheer happiness over their knowledge of Jesus. Some of Taegon's last words were: "My immortal life is the point of beginning."  These men, from a vastly different culture than in Jesus' day, are so compelled by him that they are willing to lose their lives.

Today, let us be mindful of those who do not find Jesus' story compelling.  Let us seek to live our own lives in such a way that we show to everyone just how central Jesus is to us.

- Jana M. Bennett