Today’s readings: 1 Kings 19,16.19-21; Galatians 5,1.13-18; Lk 9,51-62.

The backdrop of Luke’s gospel is Jesus’ journey towards Jerusalem, which was where his words were to come true, particularly his an­nounced death. The disciples could never grasp that. They were totally on a different wavelength. Their non-comprehension is epitomised in their reaction to the fact that Samaritan villagers refused to receive him. It is from here that we have a sharp turning and the true journey starts.

The disciples asking Jesus “to call down fire from heaven to burn them up” stands for the gulf between what Jesus wants to do and what they still had in mind. It stands also for all anachronisms we still perpetuate in times which call, strictly speaking, for the conversion of the Church rather than that of the world. We still have ‘fire-and-brimstone’ reactions and outbursts from time to time.

Radicalism in public life is the political orientation of those who favour revolutionary change in government and society. It is also the quality of the Christian, because the Christian calling is radical, drastic, without compromise. This radicalism can be read in the three declarations of Jesus: “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”; “Leave the dead to bury their dead”; and “No one who looks back is fit for the kingdom of God”.

No looking back is afforded. No ifs or buts are accepted. It’s almost a take-it-or-leave-it business. Considering the way we’ve distorted the demands of Christian living over time, a rigorous stocktaking exercise is called for. Following Jesus has nothing to do with fulfilling religious duties. It goes by far beyond that, to the extent that they are two radically different things.

Christ freed us and meant us to remain free, writes St Paul to the Galatians. But unfortunately, religion has an innate tendency to legalism. We’re still stuck in our Canon laws, which still enjoy pride of place in our handling of people’s lives, in spite of the fact that that legal frame of mind is no longer tenable today.

Marcel Gauchet, in his extraordinary work The Disenchantment of the World, tries to understand religion in terms of “the exit from religion”. If Jesus is calling for freedom from the rabbinic law of his time, he surely never meant a changing of the guards exercise or the substitution of one religious frame of mind with another.

God is not bound to any cultural or historical tradition on which faith should rest. This is the basic and radical difference between a Church that is legalistic, guided by the tyranny of the law, and a Church that listens to the Spirit and which is guided by constant discernment not in view of its survival instinct as institution but to safeguard people.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops like the universe itself only by perpetual discovery”. This is the essence of discipleship, it is adventure and conquest. When Elijah threw his mantle over Elisha, that was a gesture of transmitting to him his prophetic legacy. From then on, Elisha no longer belonged to the old circle and was no longer bound by old loyalties.

When things settle down and religion turns cultural, we need to start afresh with passion. This is what the desert fathers were after in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages when they opted for radical lifestyles in solitude and away from city life.

As Carolinne White writes in the book Early Christian Lives, which she recently translated and edited, with the accession of Constantine, dying for the faith became less of an option, the numbers of the lapsed were increasing and many others went into hiding.

On various counts we are still a Constantinian church, making the faith rest primarily on the remnants of a Christian culture. The future lies in our capability of capturing the imagination of the world we live in, just as Elijah did with Elisha, and the monks of the desert did with a Church that already had symptoms of fossilisation.

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