The way of Jesus and the way of Caesar

Homily for the memorial of Saint Francis Xavier, 2024

Note: This homily was preached at the high school where I teach theology.

“Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.”
“Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.”
“If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast … woe to me if I do not preach it!”

Many of you know, I’m sure, that the word “gospel” means “good news”—but what is the good news that we hear about in these readings? “News” means that something has happened; the situation is changed. If someone says, “Did you hear the news?” you know that in some way things are not what they were before. What’s the new situation that Jesus in this Gospel reading sends the apostles to proclaim, and that St. Paul in the first reading boasts of offering free of charge?

Let’s imagine that we’re living in Galilee a little over 2,000 years ago: 2,010 years to be exact, in the year we now call A.D. 14. Jesus is a teenager, close in age to yourselves, growing up in the tiny village of Nazareth, probably assisting Joseph in his daily work, much like any other boy. It’s around this time that messengers from Rome arrive announcing what they call “good news,” or “gospel”: A new emperor, Tiberius Caesar, is now ruling in place of his late adopted father, Caesar Augustus.¹

This might not sound like “good news” to us if we were Galilean Jews, sick and tired of being ruled by Rome! But nobody asked us lowly subjects what we thought. Incidentally, another term for those messengers from Rome was “apostles”!

So fast-forward about 15 years. Jesus, now about 30 years old, has left Nazareth and begun announcing “good news” of his own: the gospel of the kingdom of God, the reign of God. In other words, God is going to be, in some new way, in charge from now on. And from among Jesus’ followers, his disciples, he chooses twelve whom he names as, yes, “apostles”—just like the messengers from Rome—calling them to spread his gospel of God’s kingdom.

You see the point, right? If Israel’s God is in charge—if, as the apostle Paul proclaims, Jesus is Lord—then in some way Caesar is not. Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world, and yet his claims are some kind of challenge to the claims of earthly powers and authorities. That they wound up crucifying Jesus as an enemy of Rome was not entirely a misunderstanding.

Francis Xavier: Respect and friendship

In the two thousand years since then, the gospel of Jesus has had no greater evangelist than the apostle Paul—but if there’s a runner-up, it might be the saint we honor today: St. Francis Xavier, cofounder of the Jesuit order with St. Ignatius Loyola. St. Francis Xavier has been called the “apostle of the Indies and of the Far East”; he wasn’t literally an apostle, of course, but he was a founding figure for Christianity in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor, Sri Lanka, Japan, China.

“I have become all things to all,” St. Paul wrote, “to save at least some.” St. Francis Xavier is noted for insisting that missionaries must adapt to local customs and learn local languages. Pious legends claimed that St. Francis had the gift that Jesus mentions in this Gospel of miraculously speaking new languages, like the apostles at Pentecost. Actually, St. Francis struggled with various Asian languages—Malay, Tamil, Japanese—but he worked hard at it. Interestingly, where St. Paul wrote, “To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak,” St. Francis was willing, if necessary, to do the opposite as well: Arriving in Japan, St. Francis found that the modest lifestyle that went with his order’s vow of poverty, which in India won respect, didn’t impress the Japanese—so he responded by dressing in fine clothes and presenting himself as a gentleman of means.

Above all, St. Francis promoted friendship, respect, and long-term commitment in service to the gospel. This was a sharp contrast to the way that Christianity had too often been forcibly imposed through intimidation and even torture—as if Jesus’ gospel weren’t so different from the “gospel” of Caesar. St. Francis’s charitable approach led to tens of thousands of people freely choosing to embrace the Christian faith.

Even so, much like St. Paul and Jesus himself, at times St. Francis’s work faced opposition from local authorities, especially in Japan. You see, Jesus’ way is not the way of Caesar, the way of power, but it does pose a challenge to existing powers, because our top commitment is elsewhere. God comes first, and everything else must be secondary. If God isn’t first in our lives, then what we call “God” is really just an idol, a false god of our own making.

Putting people in touch with Jesus

And if God is first in our lives, if we even we want him to be first, that’s going to impact our lives in countless ways. If we want to be followers of Jesus, then like St. Paul and St. Francis Xavier we are called to evangelize—to spread the gospel of Jesus. Not necessarily the way I’m doing it right now, by literally preaching! And certainly not by focusing on trying to change other people’s minds, or trying to change them in any way.

Instead, our focus should be on Jesus changing us. And if he changes us, then we’ll be able, in the words of Pope Francis, to “put people in contact with Jesus” and “let the Lord convince them.” What changes hearts, according to Pope Francis, is “the beauty of God’s love.” Has it changed you? Has it changed me? Without that change in us, evangelization collapses into trying to recruit other people for our team. Just a kind of tribalism. The opposite of Jesus’ gospel.

What does putting people in contact with Jesus look like? I want to leave you with one practical idea. First, you must believe and be convinced of your own inexpressible value in God’s eyes. Not as a truism or a cliché; you must know, deep down, that the eternal Creator of the heavens and the earth loves you specifically, and therefore you have an inalienable worth and dignity that demands the respect of all. And, second, you must believe that the same is true of everyone around you.

We may believe this in theory … but we don’t always act like we believe it. Sometimes we act in ways beneath our own dignity, and we treat other people in ways beneath theirs. And they do the same to us. You must believe that if anyone—a classmate, a teacher, a family member, a member of the clergy—treats you in a way that is beneath your dignity, that is wrong and it offends God. And the same is true if you do it to them, even if they do it to you first.

Sometimes we put other people down, laugh at them or whatever, because we enjoy the feeling of superiority. What does that say about how we feel about ourselves otherwise? If we really believed in our own worth and dignity in God’s eyes, why would we have any desire to try to feel superior? Especially if we believed in the other person’s dignity too? Or someone slights us and we respond furiously, as if their words were a threat to our dignity.

When we do these things, it’s a sign of the limits of our faith and how much room we have to grow in God’s love. Conversely, if we strive like Francis Xavier to consistently treat other people with respect and charity, even if they haven’t treated us that way, then there’s the possibility of putting people in touch with Jesus.

Saint Francis Xavier, pray for us!

1. This section is indebted to N.T. Wright’s Simply Jesus (HarperOne, 2011); this specific image of Jesus as a teenager at the time that messengers from Rome announced the “good news” of Tiberius’s ascension is on page 68.