The Church along with her leadership has three munera, three offices and duties: teaching, governing, and sanctifying. These three responsibilities are prominent in last Sunday’s readings. The munus docendi (the office of teaching), on which I’ll focus, is prominent in the Gospel. The details of Jesus’ arrival on the other side of the Sea of Galilee is in some ways a setup for the following five weeks when we put aside Mark’s Gospel in favor of an extended reading of John 6, containing Jesus’ Teaching on the Eucharist. That extended treatment is a fitting continuation of the just-concluded National Eucharistic Congress. But it’s not today’s topic.

Jesus has gone off with His Apostles so they can “rest a while.” As the Sunday Gospels of the past few weeks have shown (and is very apparent if one reads Mark’s Gospel straight through rather than in our Sunday excerpts), Jesus is very much in demand. He’s especially in demand for healings, but not just. People have recognized in Him something they want, something that strikes and appeals to them, and they are hungry for it.

So, while Jesus and the Apostles might have gained a brief respite, they find that the crowds have preceded them to the other shore. It looks like the confessional line on Holy Saturday (at least in some parishes). And what does Jesus do? He doesn’t point to the parish schedule. He doesn’t indicate office hours. He doesn’t indicate when the next service is planned. “When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” They are hungry and they are receptive. Jesus meets that need. He teaches them many things.

Jesus teaches, and His audience recognizes something. What is that something? “He taught as one who had authority, and not like their teachers of the Law” (Mt 7:29). He does not pull punches. He does not “pastorally accommodate” His message to what His audience might expect. We’ll see that at the end of the next few weeks when, at the conclusion of His Eucharistic discourse, listeners announce “this is a hard teaching” and leave. Jesus does not then try to calibrate what He says. He instead asks His Apostles if they want to go too.

We do people few favors when we apologize, temporize, or anesthetize the Catholic message. People aren’t looking for that. We have the best wine to offer them; they aren’t seeking watered-down lemonade.

I’ve recently been reading an old book, Réné Ludmann’s Cinéma, Foi, et Morale (Movies, Faith, and Morality). Written in 1956, it’s interesting because Ludmann wrote it as theaters apparently were spreading in postwar France and he tries to envision what a future world with screens in it might be like.

What interests me here is an observation he made. Trying to present a balanced view of the plusses and minuses of the film genre, he tackles the question about the impact of movies on morality. Already in his day the claim “movies undermine morality” was abroad and he doesn’t dispute that happens. But what opened my eyes was his insistence that the negative influence of film was not first of all a moral problem but a problem of faith. Would we be so readily inclined to accept negative moral models if our anthropology — the way we see the human person — was not weak?

I’ll not try to resolve that problem — let’s agree, for practical purposes, they are mutually conditioning. But let’s also note two things: (i) it opened my eyes because, as a moral theologian, I might be inclined to default to moral explanations when problems also lie elsewhere; and (ii) there’s no doubt that much of the problem of today’s Catholicism comes mutually from faulty moral theology and faulty theological anthropology.

Yes, Jesus began His public ministry — as did John and the prophets who preceded him — with a call for repentance, for changing one’s behavior. But we should never forget that the word for “repent!” in Greek is μετανοεῖτε, which literally means “to change one’s mind” or “to change how one thinks.”

The Christian message is not just one about how to behave, important as that is. The Christian message is first of all a different way of seeing reality, shaped by the grace that God loves men and came in our flesh to save us from what we had done to ourselves. That is our “Good News.” Obviously, it needs to explain what we did — and do — to require saving, but the Christian “welcome” starts from that first point.

That is what Jesus does, with “pity” for the lost and exhausted sheep He finds on Galilee’s opposite shore — and on so many human shores. He taught them “many things” that, summed up, are a whole different way of seeing themselves, the world, the meaning of their lives, and God.

St. John Paul II argued correctly that, in the natural human order, culture was upstream — and therefore, more important — than politics or economics. Our culture conditions how we see many things and what we do about them. Yes, how we “think” about reality conditions how we engage with it. Our world is not different — it arguably is more pitiable — than the crowd that preceded Jesus to Galilee’s other shore. Shouldn’t we “accompany” it by offering it a different way of seeing, thinking, and doing (which is also ultimately the work of grace, the focus of the Second Reading)?