Over at Whispers in the Loggia, Rocco has posted excerpts from a recent talk by the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin. I found it moving and wanted to share some passages that particularly touched me:

Christian faith is not just a faith about doctrines or about rules and regulations or about ethical standards against which we have to measure our own moral behaviour. It is not just about reforming structures. It is about the ability to preach and witness to the message of Jesus. The leader in the Church is not a manager, but a witness and a prophet. Reform in the Church is not in the first place about the redistribution of power, but about the redefinition of power in terms of the way in which Jesus revealed who God is.

The message of the Church is the message of God who loves us before any merit on our part. It is a God who reveals; who speaks to us, engages with us and allows us to understand something of the inner life of God, which is a life of communication and of love. It is a faith which is about truth, but truth which is to be discovered in the life of a person, Jesus Christ, who revealed himself through total-self giving. It is about a God who is generous and whose followers should witness in their lives to the fact that being truly human has much more to do with giving and sharing and loving than with possession and power and dominance.

The God of love is revealed in the life and the works of Jesus Christ. I have often mentioned how in my own religious education in the sixties we were taught that Jesus proved that he was God by his power to work miracles. I do not deny that miracles prove that Jesus was God. What was not stressed was that miracles of Jesus prove to us above all what God is like, that he is a God who reveals his power as one who cares and has mercy, who heals and wants to free people from the burdens and addictions and obsessions that bind them, so that they can be taken up into the inner life of love of God and experience salvation and freedom.

Amen.