Without a sure knowledge of God’s Love for them, mankind may despair and give up hope.
I was watching a movie today and I had an idea of a way of looking at sharing the Gospel message. The movie was “Angel Eyes”, with Jennifer Lopez …. as Sharon Pogue and James Caviezel …. Steven ‘Catch’ Lambert.
The story is about Jim Caviezel’s character being involved in a car accident where he was the driver and his wife and small son died. Jim “Catch” as he is known in the movie has shut out the accident from his mind and is living his life without any concrete knowledge of what happened the day of the accident or his life before then.
He meets Sharon, played by Jennifer Lopez, a Chicago Police Officer. They fall in love with each other. Catch doesn’t share much about his life and Sharon falling in love and wanting to know more about Catch finds out about the accident.
She decides on her own to try to shock him out of his denial of the truth of his life by confronting him with the truth at the cemetery where his wife and son are buried.
Back to my “idea” on whether we should “evangelize”.
Some people watching this movie would think that what she did was the correct thing. Catch was living a good life, yet not a full, vibrant life. He was not living the best life that he could. Sharon could have left him in the “dark”, so to speak, about his former life and what many people would count as his “real” life or “reality”. Yet others would say; “Who is she to just indiscriminately decide that Catch should be brought to the “truth”.
What Sharon did she did out of love of Catch.
In some way this movie demonstrates Christianity and evangelization. It does this by the way the character Sharon brought Catch to the knowledge of the Truth with Love. Catholics become missionaries to bring the “best” life to others. To show those who want to know… “reality”, because the ultimate reality is mankind’s relationship with God.
CCC 843 The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved. Thus, the Church considers all goodness and truth found in these religions as “a preparation for the Gospel and given by him who enlightens all men that they may at length have life.”332
844 In their religious behavior, however, men also display the limits and errors that disfigure the image of God in them:
Very often, deceived by the Evil One, men have become vain in their reasonings, and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and served the creature rather than the Creator. Or else, living and dying in this world without God, they are exposed to ultimate despair.333
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