It’s amazing how St. Paul and his companions weathered all kinds of trials and challenges just to proclaim the Good News about Christ and our salvation. Even when he was mocked by non-believers, he just persisted in preaching, trying his best to adapt his preaching to the way the people were, without of course compromising the integral truth of God’s word. He knew how to relate highly supernatural truths to common earthly things.
This we can glean in the first reading of the Mass on Wednesday of the 6th Week of Easter. (cfr. Acts 17,15.22-18,1) This example of St. Paul reminds us, especially the priests, to be creative in proclaiming the Word of God.
In this regard, we first of all should be properly spiritually prepared to carry out this duty. We really need to have the very mind and heart of Christ whose teachings blended very well the characteristics of forcefulness, charity and mercy, of articulateness, eloquence and fluency. We need to spend time meditating on the life, words and deeds of Christ if only to get an idea of how to preach the way Christ himself preached.
The goal to pursue is for us to make Christ words real in us: “He who hears you, hears me.” (Lk 10,16) Let’s remember that Christ imparted highly moral and supernatural truths in ways that can easily be understood by the people. He used parables, metaphors, similes and other appropriate literary devices just to reach people’s minds and hearts.
It is also important that we really know the people to whom we would be preaching. That way we would know how to calibrate our preaching—when to be forceful, even to the extent of throwing lightning and thunder, and when to be mild, poetic, using memes and what usually are referred to as “hugot lines.”
We certainly have to know the art of gradualness in our preaching. With our times getting more complicated and the discussions and exchanges on several concerns getting more controversial and conflictive, we should truly learn the art of gradualness.
For us priests, especially, we need to internalize God’s word, not in the way an actor internalizes his script. We should internalize it by making it the very life of our mind and heart, the very impulse of our emotion and passions. It should be the soul of our whole life.
Thus, when we preach we cannot help but somehow showcase the drama inside our heart, giving others a glimpse of how our heart is actually taking, handling and delivering the word of God.
Preaching should reflect the condition of our heart as it grapples with the living word of God. It should not just be a matter of declaiming or orating, reduced to the art of speaking and stage performing, a mere play of our talents.
Neither should it be just a display of our intellectual prowess or our cultural wealth. It should manage to show the actual living faith and love our heart has for God’s word, how our heart is receiving it and reacting to it.
Thus, preaching is a matter of how effectively we manage to show and teach Christ to the others. It’s never about us, the preachers. Rather, it can be about us in our effort to bring Christ to the others. Its success or failure depends solely on this.*
