Making a difference

Today’s readings: Isaiah 58, 7-10; 1 Corinthians 2, 1-5; Matthew 5, 13-16.

While Christian tradition has from its earliest times held that religion is closely related to social, economic and political issues, this was not always how the Church and Christians saw themselves. In an era that can easily be defined as post-Christian and post-secular at the same time, the issue of religion’s visibility continues to be on our agenda.

The rise of individualism and rationality changed the nature of religion and its place in the modern world. As economic and political life developed, religion has diminished in public significance and is increasingly relegated to the private sphere.

We often say that values are changing, but we seem to fail to uphold what may reinforce, or even restore values needed for civic order.

In today’s Gospel it is highly significant that Jesus considers his disciples to be “the salt of the earth and the light of the world”. He also speaks about the city built on a hilltop that cannot be hidden.

It is clear that Jesus never meant faith in God to be something for private consumption only. Being the salt of the earth means, among others, being able to preserve, in the flux of change, that which safeguards the core of what makes us fully huma, and being agents of transformation.

This makes it more challenging for us to come to terms with the impact we as Christians are called to have on society. This is not to be translated as fundamentalism or some sort of imposition. It is neither disrespect for the rights of minorities nor contrary to religious freedom.

We are called to be the salt of the earth because ignoring the spiritual dimension of the human person and of life here on earth renders our existence tasteless.

In the first reading, Isaiah calls for integrity, which means maintaining internal harmony between our being and our doing.

The context of Isaiah’s words is a longer discourse of a liturgical nature where the prophet is making the point that religion without justice is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy in the life of a Christian is what renders the salt “good for nothing, but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot”.

When we discuss the current state of religion, politics and society, we tend also to bring in the relevance of worship, prayer and spirituality. As Scott M. Thomas writes, “the global resurgence of religion may well be a response to the crisis of the liberal state in the West as well as the crisis of the secular and modernising state in the developing world”.

God’s intention for His people, as it transpires from the Scriptures, is for them to provide a sign and be an instrument of justice in the world.

For the Christian community it remains always necessary to pray, reflect and think. Kenneth Leech, an Anglican priest and community theologian, writes in his book The Sky is Red, that we cannot avoid serious thinking and simply carry on doing what we have always done.

He writes: “It is particularly dangerous for us to operate a crisis ministry, binding up the wounded and responding to one urgent need after another, but never make time to reflect on what it is all about, what it has to do with the Gospel, what the wider social and political issues are, what God is up to in the struggles and upheavals which confront us.”

The worst that can beset us as believers is that while we continue to celebrate our rituals, we close one eye or both to the injustice and poverty around us. Isaiah writes: “If you do away with the yoke, the clenched fist, the wicked word... your light will rise in the darkness”. Likewise, the Gospel’s warning is always loud and clear whenever our faith in Christ risks being reduced to an empty and inert ritualism which would only separate us from reality.

The call not to estrange ourselves from the world was also one of the major calls of Vatican Council II.

As the young Joseph Ratzinger had written soon after the Council, now reprinted as Theological Highlights of Vatican II, “Either faith in Christ really concerns the centre of human existence, or else the world of faith is a world separate from the ordinary world of experience”.