Going global

Today’s readings: Numbers 11, 25-29; James 5, 1-6; Mk 9, 38-43.45.47-48.

Celsus was a second century Greek philosopher and opponent of early Christianity. For him, the error of the Christians concerns not only what they think, but how they live. Celsus recognises that Christians strive to follow Jesus, but in Celsus’ view, Jesus was an ignorant charlatan who led those more ignorant than himself into an immoral way of living. Origen, his contemporary and a theologian, responded vigorously to Celsus.

In an extraordinary passage in his Letter on Faith and Reason, Pope John Paul II engages in debate with this pagan philosopher and calls our attention to the fact that even today, one of our tasks is to rekindle in people’s hearts belief that the quest for truth is possible.

It is on the level that people live their lives that they seek fulfilment and to be happy. Part of the new evangelisation is to encounter people where they are and in the way they think. Otherwise, we may be on the wrong foot.

After the Second Vatican Council different ways of perceiving the Church’s commitment in the world emerged. There are those who see the Church as possessing the truth and commissioned to bring it to the world. There are others who perceive the truth as being in the world, which is God’s own creation and which has God’s imprint on it. The Church’s mission in this case is primarily to discern the truth out there.

If and when truth is institutionalised, it ceases to be liberating and we turn into fundamentalists. This is history’s lesson on political ideologies and Church alike.

Today’s first reading from the Book of Numbers is highly enlightening. We find it relatively easy to label people as outsiders. This is highlighted in the gospel by the way Jesus reacts to the Apostles who wanted to stop someone who “was not one of us”.

We set so many parameters wherein the Spirit operates instead of embarking on a discernment that opens up new horizons. The hard truth in today’s gospel is that Jesus is not asking the Apostles to cut off people’s hands or feet. The Church’s brief remains only to educate people to take action, even radical action, where and whenever necessary.

Educating people demands a very particular Church. It imposes on the Church to go global, to let go of fixed mindsets which arrogantly seek to impose limits on God’s ways of manifesting His love and infinite mercy.

Vatican Council II pulled down ‘the walls of Jericho’ to position the Church more shoulder to shoulder with the rest of humanity. At this junction of the Church’s history we should beware of not building those walls up again, something which unfortunately is happening.

Our mission is not to build walls but bridges. The aforementioned Origen and Celsus debate in the second century inspires us to struggle to grasp the several assumptions that might be common between non-Christian and secular thinking and the way of perceiving things proper to believers.

One thing the Church cannot afford to do in this day and age is to cut off discussion in the name of some possessed or achieved truth.

The Spirit’s ways and methods are of a different kind, to the extent that the voice of the Spirit can come to us from outside the Church’s boundaries. The Spirit is planetary. For the Church to be the creation of that Spirit, it has to be planetary and start thinking global, otherwise it remains territorial and it will be the cause of its own end.

Another basic truth forgotten and which Vatican Council II again put on the Church’s agenda is that the true point of reference of all our strategies is God’s kingdom, not the Church.

The Church’s mission is not in political terms to increase voters. The Church exists primarily to facilitate the search for God by people, whoever and wherever they are.

Morris West’s Lazarus gives an inkling of how things are and how they can be. It’s the story of an iron-fisted Pope who creates a wasteland but who, confronted with open-heart surgery, vows to change his ways.