The true faith

Today’s readings: Joshua 24, 1-2.15-18; Ephesians 5, 21-32; John 6, 60-69.

The first reading from Joshua and the gospel today make us look backward and forward and ask very pertinent questions about the adequacy of the faith professed to the times we live in. The readings provide the right perspective for looking ahead.

Joshua at Shechem puts the people in a position to choose between the old faith which to date had distinguished them as God’s people and the faith that would launch them to the future. In like manner, Jesus in the gospel traces a borderline between the real motivations for which many were following him, and what from then onwards should distinguish true discipleship.

Statistics can say many things about the times we live in where religion is concerned. But they can also be telling about who we are, about our way of doing things, and whether we are really up to it where the communication of the gospel is concerned.

People can turn their back on religion because they find it difficult to reconcile God’s love and mercy with experiences they have been through in life. But they can also turn their back simply because they are put off by the way we communicate the message.

There is no doubt that secularism as a mentality and attitude is here to stay and that in the wake of the modern and post-modern epoch our judgment of it has been negative all along. But it is high time we realise that at the end of the day, secularism has been a blessing for our faith. If secularism succeeded in cornering the Church and make it reactivate in various ways its commitment to evangelise, then it is indeed a blessing.

In the first reading, Shechem and Joshua are powerful metaphors for us today. Shechem represents a place, a moment in time, a turning point or a crossroad where people are asked to make choices. Joshua, the successor of Moses, represents a different type and style of leadership from that which Moses provided.

At different junctures of history and in different times, people need different styles of leadership. Moses was synonymous with the exodus faith and journey; Joshua represents a new launching of the faith meant to look forward to where people were heading.

The more we as a Church confuse the faith with values and beliefs that responded adequately in the past to people’s needs, but which today might need to be looked at in a fresh way, the more we will be failing to lead.

This is a very delicate moment in time and it concerns very delicate issues where our faith is concerned. Many people today are put off by the Church or by institutional religion, and yet they genuinely struggle with St Peter’s question: “Who shall we go to?” That puts extra burdens on the Church’s shoulders.

There are different ways of seeing how Jesus related to people following him. We can present Christian disciple-ship as a package deal, take it or leave it, as if it were only black and white without any shades of grey, holding on to the truth of doctrine as if it was the ultimate truth of salvation. Yet, though Jesus definitively was never after numbers, many a time he pitied the crowds for having no one to lead them.

Why people leave the Church, and religion may continue to be analysed as a sociological phenomenon. But the Church remains in duty bound to ask itself conscientiously what makes people leave.

We cannot simply opt to just point fingers at culture and blame people for shunning commitment and sacrifice and for preferring what we term a pick-and-choose form of religion.

How are we managing the times we are in and the changes that affect people so intimately? Simply dishing out doctrine fresh from our catechism books without any cultural mediation is futile. It leaves much to be desired, not in the gospel message itself, but in the branding we give it.

The medium, not the message, is the problem.