+ Once you have tasted the Gospel, you will never settle for something less.
Once you hear the call of Jesus, nothing else really makes sense.
There is something so total and real about Jesus’ teaching, you just know that this is real God-stuff, and though difficult, it is the only way to live — that is, to really live.
Paul must have come to that conclusion as he also then tried every way possible to help the Corinthians to see it.
Example after example was an attempt to show them that no matter how hard it was, it was not only possible but most fulfilling to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
He put it simply, “We commend ourselves through much endurance … in afflictions, hardships, constraints, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, vigils, fasts.”
No matter how difficult, they would just keep trying. It was a kind of “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”-saying that, when lived, just kept giving more life.
An athlete’s dream! And no doubt, anyone who met Jesus as he taught and lived his Gospel message saw this being lived and giving that life that Jesus promised to those who “got it.”
This is where the nonviolence teaching of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day, and countless others was surely birthed.
This is the preparation for the endurance and the surrender to the cross.
This is the example that, once it was tasted, one could never go back, one could never settle for anything less.
This is simply what has been referred to as the truth — the Gospel truth.
Father Perry D. Leiker is the 13th pastor of St. Bernard Catholic Church. Reach him at (323) 255-6142. Email Father Perry at pleiker@stbernard-church.com. Follow Father Perry on Twitter: @MrDeano76.
