Today’s readings: Wisdom 9, 13-18; Philemon 9-10.12-17; Luke 14, 25-33.
In the face of a rapidly changing post-Christian society, we often feel discouraged and ask why we seem to have so little impact on mainstream society and culture. But one of the reasons for our decline is not that society has changed but that, as Christians, we often feel confused about how to respond to the new situations.
The demands of discipleship as laid down by the Scriptures do not make of us strangers in a strange world. We may think our Christian faith is all about getting moral issues right and bringing others to think and act the right way, as we do.
When society was homogenous and the Church had a firm grip on society and the winds of change, it was possible to skip people’s conscience. Now the challenge is how to help people grow and live integrated, transformative lives of faith.
Discipleship is what Jesus today speaks about. It is what constituted the core of the mission of the Church at its origin. It is the one approach most western churches have neglected for centuries, never calculating what “building a tower” or “marching to war” in changed situations would entail.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus turns to the crowds, and when he speaks of taking up one’s cross, he is not speaking about sacrifice or mortification, or even about the ascetic life.
Life, for Jesus, is a project; it is work in progress, on par with building a tower or marching to war, and accordingly, there are demands that need to be met and requisites that make us suitable for the enterprise.
In the first reading, wisdom stands for spiritual vision, understanding how God operates in lives already puzzling in themselves. The Book of Wisdom, written a century or two before Christ, is a synthesis of ideas from Jewish religion and Greek philosophy and literature.
Israel’s wisdom was in itself open to God’s revealing power. For Israel it was not a question, as we were made to believe in the wake of modernity, that the wiser you become the less relevant God is in your life, or the less you’re going to seek God and feel the need for Him.
As mortals, we have difficulty discerning who God is, what His intentions are, and His whereabouts. Today we need a new synthesis of faith and reason. Jesus does not speak of faith in terms of the proverbial leap in the dark, but instead speaks of the need to sit down and think, calculate, formulate strategies.
Unfortunately, for centuries we’ve sold a minimalist perception of what Christian life is about. The outcome is that our churches, by and large, are packed with people who fall short of living up to the demands of discipleship, for the simple reason that they’ve always been brainwashed with the wrong perception.
The Church was born from the proclamation of the Word and was based on the solid foundation of catechesis. But with time the process of becoming a Christian was reduced to merely being baptised and marking the focal moments in life with a church ceremony.
So Christ’s discipleship remains in many an unfinished symphony. That makes of us nominal Christians, not disciples of Christ. So in the face of society’s issues, we do well to take up Christ’s warning about marching to war unprepared.
The Church today needs, first and foremost, to project a model of Christian existence that responds not to the demands of a situation when religion was a sociological phenomenon. Faith, as we often repeat, is personal but not private.
Wisdom says “a perishable body presses down the soul”, and Jesus shows how compromised our daily living can be, referring in particular to our co-dependencies on situations, people and possessions.
In the midst of instability, it is wisdom that provides a sure point of reference in our personal lives, and it is discipleship as proposed by Jesus that provides us with a true spirit of discernment in our common struggle and mission to restore soul to the ‘city’.