Roman Catholic Info

The word gospel is a translation into Old English of the Greek words meaning “good news.” It seems, however, that our modern society treats the Gospels more like the bad news. The bad news is that you can’t do whatever you have a mind to do. Among other things, you can’t lie, cheat, steal, covet, murder, or commit adultery. The bad news is that God is always watching you, like a surveillance camera that follows you from place to place and never lets you out of its sight. The bad news is that your life is not entirely your own, and you have been purchased at a great price.

Modern society does not want to hear the bad news. It would rather hear the good news. Recently, there has been much commentary on the fact that books defending atheism have become bestsellers. These books attempt to show that belief in the spiritual is merely a delusion for the weak-minded. These books are meant to be the new good news. “Don’t worry,” they tell us, “the surveillance cameras you were worried about never really existed.”

We have to wonder, though. If modern society sees the Gospels as bad news, why were they seen as good news in previous times? Did not people in the past want to do as they pleased without worrying about God’s wrath? Perhaps we need to look at those earlier times, and understand the world into which the Gospels fell like a bolt of lightning on a clear and moonless night.

If we look through the stories about the gods in Greek and Roman myth, what kind of gods do we find? Largely, the gods are portrayed as rather self-centered and unpleasant people. The gods are generally interested in their own comforts and intrigues. Occasionally, they will do good deeds for human beings. However, there is no sense in which the gods love humans. There is no sense in which the gods would lay down their own lives for humans.

When we look at the pyramids in Egypt, we see an amazing feat of ancient engineering. These huge and impressive structures were built as
memorials to the Pharaohs of Egypt. We may look at them differently, however, when we think that they were built with the labor of slaves. It
was for the Pharaohs to live in palaces of gold and dream of a beautiful afterlife. The role of the common people was merely to live or die at the
whim of their rulers.

In 1956, C. S. Lewis wrote a book called Till We Have Faces, which is a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. In the book, one of the
characters says, “How can the gods meet us face to face until we have faces.” In ancient ideas about the relationship of god and man, human
beings did not have faces, meaning that they simply did not matter. People were unimportant, interchangeable, worth nothing. They were not
individuals with faces and personalities, known and beloved by God.

The good news of the Gospels is that we have faces and names. Each of us is called by name by God to be his beloved. In the stories of the past,
people went to the gods and knocked upon the doors of their temples, hoping to receive some favor. Now, the love of God has turned the tables around and made God Himself the one who seeks. Jesus knocks on the door of our hearts and asks only to be let in, only to allow Him to give us the eternal life that he wishes to share with us. Whereas supplicants in the past asked hardhearted gods for some small favor, now Jesus begs us to let Him give us everything we could ever want.

And what does modern society set against this? If we accept the arguments of the atheists that the material world is all there is, then we must believe that we have no souls, and that we are just a collection of neurons firing in patterns. Any understanding we have of ourselves, such as that we have free will and true knowledge and a real ability to reason, is merely an illusion. But it is our intellect and will that make us what we are. If those are illusions, then we ourselves are illusions. The atheists tell us, “Not only is there no God, there is also no you.” There is a certain kind of freedom that comes from this, but it is only the freedom of those who have lost all hope.

The ancient world told the lowly of the earth that they did not matter. It was only for the great ones who ruled over them to strive to be like gods, or even to be remembered after death. The modern world is just as bad, telling people that they are less than nothing, and that no one can strive toward God. The ancient world could not lift itself to God, so it waited for God to lift the world to Himself. The modern world rejects what God has accomplished, and seeks to cast itself down from God, and then pretends that this fall from grace is a victory for humanity. And so, we can see that what was good news in ancient times is still good news today. What society considers good news is in fact merely the promise of nothingness. But the good news of the Gospels offers us “every good and perfect gift.”(James 1:17)

Home schooling parents have taken upon themselves the spiritual teaching of their children in order to pass to the next generation the true Good News. The Good God, who makes Himself a supplicant of the love of mankind, will surely not refuse our prayers and entreaties for help.

Source: Kevin Clark. Seton Home Study School Newsletter, October 2007.