Today’s readings: Isaiah 49, 3.5-6; 1 Corinthians 1, 1-3; John 1, 29-34.
The relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist was a lifetime one. Theologically, the gospels take us back even before their birth. John was meant not simply to prepare the way for Jesus, but also to identify him for who he was. It was a time of transition on various counts but mainly it was a very important threshold from the point of view of religion.
Both Jesus and John were leaders in their respective senses. They both had their disciples at a time when people had great expectations and long-standing frustrations. Yet John was to indicate Jesus as no common leader, but much more than that.
Perhaps the times we live in are similar to those times in that we live in a transition of epochal dimensions from the perspective of religion. Culturally we live in times of greater fragility and ambiguity. Religion no longer addresses with assurance the inner questioning of the mind and heart. There is discontinuity with the past and we’ve become too differentiated both from the point of view of society and religion.
In this context, and in order not to throw away the baby with the water, in some sense we need to save Jesus from the grips of a rigid and at times weary religion. There are clear indications, even in the Church of Pope Francis, of a threshold we seem to be nearing. Change always instils fear and the desire to retreat to the securities of the past.
With great liberty, John the Baptist was ready to let go and pass on his own disciples to Jesus. It is a passage we all need to go through at some point in our lives to come to experience who Jesus truly is. In the gospels, and to many people around him, Jesus represents the unknown, the new beyond a threshold. The old religion of the Jews was in no way any longer addressing the restlessness of the multitudes. Something radically new was called for.
We find the same story in the first reading from the prophet Isaiah. He is addressing Israel in exile. Israel believed that the fulfilment of God’s promise to them consisted merely in their return to the homeland. But, in the words of Isaiah, that was not enough, that was too inward-looking. Israel was to be the light of the nations so that salvation may reach out to the ends of the earth.
Isaiah is practically speaking of a collective messianism. This says a lot today on what our collective consciousness as Christian believers may bring about in our times. The Church is called to usher out of the temple, to reach out “to the ends of the earth”. The world is my parish.
Jesus came at a time when his people were dominated by a sense of nationalism, by the need of feeling secure and that put emphasis on identity. Identity, in turn, called for exclusivism. But Jesus was meant to bring about a radical shift towards universality, that same universality envisaged much before by Isaiah.
It is the same radical shift the Church has been undergoing in these past decades since Vatican Council II. And in spite of what many say, that shift implies also discontinuity, rupture with our past. Not rupture with the living tradition of the faith of the Church, but with our past. Until then, the Church presented itself as God’s kingdom on earth, as a point of arrival, as destination. Consequent to this, it became exclusive and too intimately linked to one particular culture.
The Church was never meant to be a closed system, separate from the world and with a dominating sense of exclusivity in the face of the other. The Council went beyond all this, spoke of a pilgrim Church, and of the need for the Church in the first place to be healed from its own sclerosis which made of it a rigid system at times blocking the Spirit.
Jesus’ proclamation is universal. His Church is meant to be the home of so many homeless today as well as of the homeless mind that in our post-modern condition longs to belong and to find a home. “The Church is called to be the house of the Father,” writes Pope Francis, “with doors always wide open. Frequently, we act as arbiters of grace rather than its facilitators”. Maybe the Pope at this point in time is the Baptist indicating to us and the world alike who the true Jesus is.