Past and present

Today’s readings: 1 Kings 19, 4-8; Ephesians 4, 30 – 5, 2; John 6, 41-51.

The more we realise how fragile life is, how rapidly our biological existence rises and declines, how open we all are to risks that instantly dump us in anxiety and loneliness that kills us, the more we can grasp the deep meaning of today’s readings.

Both Elijah in the first reading and Jesus in John’s gospel were confronted by a cultural change that made faith incommunicable. Their respective responses carry weight in the way we are called to live the faith today.

The biggest tragedy the prophet Elijah experienced was that he could not communicate with his people effectively. His journey towards Horeb, the mountain of God, represents our striving to reach out to God in situations where God seems totally absent.

Elijah, who had his share of a glorious past when his faith was solid and effective, now is in despair with nowhere to go. The most sensible option he could think of was death.

Elijah is the man of God literally torn between the past and the present. He had moments of glory as a prophet among his people. But now he was faced with a nation that was evolving. Under the reign of Omri, who came to power through a coup d’etat, the nation was flourishing, rapidly changing in culture and becoming prosperous.

As normally happens, this prosperity was replacing religion in people’s lives. This put Elijah in crisis.

We are also experiencing the crisis that faces the new world being born with a faith we received from the past and which very often, in the way we perceive it and transmit it, no longer holds ground.

This is a most serious problem for believers, because the faith received demands fidelity, but calls also for mediation and interpretation.

The Jews in John’s gospel were complaining because Jesus was torn between a people bound to its past and the novelty of what he was proclaiming.

Jesus was proclaiming eternal life, which in biblical language stands for fullness of life rather than just for what comes after death. So his words and signs were not at all comprehensible and were lending themselves to confusion in the minds of those listening.

As believers today we have to endure similar complaints in the way faith is received. Times have changed and the mindset of people has changed. Faith is put to the test precisely by prosperity, by the rapid developments in all aspects of everyday life, by the advances in the sciences and in technology, by the new times which radically change the universe we live in.

Our major challenge today is precisely to establish meaningful links between a faith received and these new times. It is a make or break situation because the shocks of change can easily shatter the faith.

Yet the way we speak is many a time reminiscent of past times. So there is simply no connection.

In a radically changed context from a rural way of life to a nation becoming prosperous and organised, Elijah was lost, and the only option he could see was to call it a day. So he flew into the wilderness from where he started his mission.

It is the same sense of despair, frustration, helplessness that we often experience today in a culture that offers us a myriad of opportunities for connecting and yet we seem to be miserably failing.

Our mindset remains the old one, and in spite of the disconnection we see, we seem happy simply analysing our culture and diagnosing how different it is from the past.

Elijah went through all this. But after his first reaction of despair, his sense of discernment led him to a deeper experience of the footprints of God in that same culture he considered godless.

It is in the nature of faith itself that it rises and declines. The constant is not the content of faith, which time reshapes, but its sustainability. Otherwise the journey would be too long.