Children love playing “telephone.” You know the game. Children stand in a circle and one of them whispers something to the next person in line, who then whispers it to the next person, and so on. By the time the message gets back to the beginning of the circle, it has invariably changed beyond recognition. Why does the message change? Two reasons: either people did not clearly hear what was said to them or they did not clearly pass on what they heard.

In today’s second reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul reflects on his role as an apostle of Christ. Even though Paul did not meet Jesus face-to-face in his lifetime, Paul was sure that he was passing on the authentic teaching of Christ. Paul’s certitude is based not on the many visions of Christ that he enjoyed but on the teaching that he received from those who were apostles before him. “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” (1 Corinthians 15:3). In other words, Paul understood his ministry as essentially that of passing on the message. To succeed in doing this, two things are most important: how one receives the tradition, and how one passes it on. Using the analogy of playing the “telephone,” in order to transmit the message faithfully down the line, each person in the chain must endeavour to hear correctly what is being passed on to him or her, and then make sure that he or she passes it on faithfully to the next person.

Are we faithfully passing on the message of Christ to our people today? To answer this question we need first to ask ourselves (a) how faithful are we in hearing the message of Christ? and (b) how effective are we in passing it on to others?

To hear faithfully the message of Christ means to do everything possible to improve our understanding of the Good News that Jesus brought to the world. Here the Bible is of supreme importance. We need to do all we can to improve our Bible reading habits and skills. Parish Bible study groups are very helpful in this regard. The ability to read and understand the Bible is of supreme importance because, as St Jerome said, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”

The teaching of the Church, which is a distillation of the teachings of Christ passed on from one generation to the next by living witnesses, is equally an important channel for hearing the message of Christ. As Jesus himself said to his messengers, “Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me” (Luke 10:16). Yet we must hear the messenger with discernment, for as the word of God travels down the line through various times and cultures, it takes on the embellishment of those cultures. We must, therefore, try to discern what is the word of God and what the cultural clothing it has donned in its journey through various cultures. We must distinguish between the unchangeable word of God and the changeable traditions in which the word has been clothed and transmitted.

Having understood the essential message of Christ, we then take on the second phase of our duty as faithful messengers, namely, passing on the message. The unchangeable word of God is always expressed and celebrated in changeable traditions. Hence the need to understand the cultural situation of those with whom we want to share the message. Missionaries to foreign lands know the need to learn the language and culture of a people before they can share the word of God with them effectively. Similarly, in our bid to pass on the message to young people today, me must understand that they live in a different sub-culture. To effectively pass on the message of Christ to them we must use the vernacular, the art-forms, and the values that they can identify with. In so doing we do not change the message of Christ, we only change the medium through which it is expressed and transmitted.

Like St Paul, we are called to hear the word of God and to share it with others. Our duty is to ensure that we hear it correctly and pass it on without any distortions as the kids do when they play “telephone.” Let us resolve today to take steps to learn to hear and understand the word of God better, and faithfully to pass it on to those coming after us.