Mysteriously at work

Today’s readings: Acts 10, 25-26.34-35.44-48; 1 John 4, 7-10; Jn 15, 9-17.

We often speak of living in a culture that lacks the touch of God’s presence. If we continue to address the issue of God from the standpoint of our theological jargon and merely on the level of rationality, we can only arrive at such conclusions. But God has His own ways of making Himself present in the lives of people and in history which may be remarkably different from ours.

In theology we call this mysterious way of God making Himself present and touching people, ‘grace’. Unfortunately, we’ve succeeded in turning grace into something mechanical, which we automatically receive because we deserve it for good behaviour. But grace is much more than that. It is the mysterious way God works in our lives.

One of the basic problems and major drawbacks of religion, any religion, including Christianity, is precisely that with God, we may feel too domesticated, too sure of what the issue is all about, and ignorant of God’s mysterious presence in us.

‘Mysterious’ doesn’t mean complicated, incomprehensible. It means God simply reveals Himself in and through our human experience. Judaism had a problem with this; so did early Christianity.

This was the first and basic conversion the Apostles themselves went through after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Before that, their relationship with Jesus was turbulent because they were still struggling to grasp things from an old frame of mind.

In a post-paschal scenario, they are on different ground and their minds and eyes are opened. Things

start to fall into place. “Peter came to realise,” we read in Acts.

From the reading about Peter and Cornelius in Acts, we gather two basic truths which on this Sunday we would do good to revisit. First that the Church, important and necessary though it is in bringing the Gospel to the world, is not the destination. The second is that God’s love always precedes us, it is always unconditional and much greater than we could imagine.

In the reading from Acts, Peter and Cornelius represent the two opposing worlds at the time when the Gospel of Christ was being proclaimed for the first time. The relationship between these two worlds was then meant to worsen with centuries of persecution and eventually end up in a happy marriage for more than a millennium.

Today the Church everywhere is burdened, tired, even at times confused in a world which has changed and is changing fast, where it is becoming ever more difficult to transmit the faith, to continue to refer to a tradition received in a de-traditionalised situation, to even speak of a growth in faith when what counts is today.

Today’s readings make it clear that the Church in the world has reason to exist only if it facilitates the possibility for people to be touched wherever they are by God’s love. It is only that love in our hearts that makes it possible to bear fruit that lasts and that is capable of recomposing the distorted images we often have of life or even of ourselves.

The good news of the Gospel is not only a message to be communicated to people out there. The Church in the first place needs to be touched by that good news.

We still find it so difficult to cross over and reach out to people like Cornelius in our culture. But people are just thirsty and it is that thirst that we need to address. Nothing more, nothing less. Like Cornelius, if and when their connection with the true God is facilitated, people become simply fascinated.

The risen Christ we mainly talk about these Sundays is not the God of theologians and moralists but rather the God who can be ultimately experienced in the hearts of people, even most simple people.