Passion for the possible

Today’s readings: Isaiah 42, 1-4.6-7; Acts 10, 34-38; Mark 1, 7-11.

Today the feeling is that we’re at a make-or-break point. This applies to the economy as much as politics, and to ethics as much as to religion. At times like these our understanding of faith is always crucial. Prophets are needed at these junctures and roadmaps need to be laid open.

It is inevitable that at moments like these, many question the relevance of belief. Belief becomes relevant or irrelevant only when measured against its ability to transform our lives, to have an impact on the social milieu, and to give us the possibility of hoping even against hope.

Isaiah, in his first Canticle, re­minds how firmness can be coupled with goodness. He speaks about the restoration of direction, of what can provide vision to God’s people when they lose track. We may easily be in a very similar situation and fall victim to disheartenment, losing grip on the vision that gives us stability.

Soren Kierkegaard speaks of the passion of possibility: “If I could wish for something, I would wish for neither wealth nor power, but for the passion of possibility.” We need to be passionate about what is possible. It is something we must learn to do.

As John Caputo writes in his book, On Religion, “the force of the future is to prevent the present from closing in on us, from closing us up. To have a religious sense of life is to long with a restless heart for a reality beyond reality, to tremble with the possibility of the impossible.” With God, as Gabriel told the Virgin Mary, all is possible, even the impossible.

What does it mean in our days that the Jesus who was born in Bethlehem in quite strange circumstances came to be acknowledged as saviour of humanity? Can we still hold on to that? Surely we cannot risk letting that become a cliché. It needs to be translated and mediated to people in the concreteness of their needs, aspirations, and feelings.

Mark today introduces Jesus as the Messiah who brought about a major shift from religion to faith, from baptism with water to baptism in the Spirit. As the Baptist said, Jesus is “someone more powerful” than all who came before, than all the religious traditions that meant so much.

It is this powerfulness of Jesus beyond religion that we are called to recover in our personal lives. As long as we remain disciples of the Baptist, baptised in water, simply practising what may be at a tangent to what really and deeply concerns us, we continue to be peripheral Christians.

Karl Rahner was right when he said that the Christian of the future is either a mystic or no Christian at all. Our times need substance. In one of his essays on the Church’s future, he writes: “In the year 2200 the Church in her visible features will look quite different from what we are used to. Is this transformation of the Church something unwanted and unforeseen but that will happen anyway? Should it not also be a duty of the Church to foresee and, as much as possible, to plan in advance this coming transformation?”

This demands of the Church a major commitment to re-establish the connection between the Gospel and culture, between what we celebrate in our liturgies and the major pains and wounds of everyday life.

Isaiah in today’s first reading mentions three times the term ‘true justice’. St Peter’s proclamation in Acts is about Jesus who “went about doing good and curing all who had fallen into the power of the devil”.

The feast of the baptism of the Lord makes it clear that baptism is not simply what we’ve reduced it to be, namely, a rite administered to babies to be washed of what we’ve always held to be a sort of hereditary evil that marks us all at birth.

That is also true, but if we stop at that it would be too reductive of the true meaning of baptism. We may be rendering religion too simplistic and too good to be true.

In our pastoral and religious set-up, so much has happened that is actually a distortion that robs religion of its power to transform. The Spirit descending on Jesus in the Jordan is the same Spirit we all receive. Yet in many, that Spirit remains sadly inactive. It needs to be reactivated to let loose the power of Christ as saviour.