Mission Week 2007
Challenged to Choose: The Courage to Act
February 2-10

Mission Reflection - Thursday, February 8, 2007

Dr. Thomas A. Bausch
Department of Management

The Gospel of Jan. 28, 2007, (Luke 4:21-30) in the liturgical readings of Catholic and many Protestant churches presents an image of the people of Nazareth attempting to hurl Jesus over the edge of the cliff on the outskirts of Nazareth after expelling Him from the Temple. The image is very appropriate as we approach Mission Week this year and consider the consequences of principled action. Christ had the courage to accept the risks and dangers that he asks us to accept as we live what Paul calls a ³love that endures.² Our moral action can also impose a cost on those who love us. For instance, Mary, the mother of Jesus, must have witnessed the attack on Jesus, the son of the carpenter, and experienced a mother’s anguish for her son. In that small village, her friends were the ones attacking her son.  Pain to self and those we love is often a consequence of right action in the name of justice. It is a cost that must be paid, a cost our leader paid.

Those like the Enron criminals, tobacco company executives, crooked politicians, sex purveyors, unethical lawyers, medical mal-practitioners, even incompetent professors and those who are less than principled in all fields of human endeavor will not go away with new laws and external pressures. Progress will only be made and justice accomplished when each of us understands and acts according to two truths necessary for integrity and credibility. First, each of us as a person is a unique act of God and is of infinite value and instilled with gifts to be used to give glory to God through service to others. Wonderfully, as Desmond Tutu reminds us, this is how we become self, for a person becomes a person through other persons. Second, as John Henry Newman reminds us, each of us has a unique vocation to do what no one else can do, including Christ in his humanity who was constrained to his time and place.

Our reward? Ignatius showed us when he prayed, “Give me your love and your grace, for that is sufficient for me.”

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