Today’s readings: Isaiah 8, 23-9:3; 1 Cor. 1, 10-13.17; Matthew 4, 12-13.

Karl Rahner described the history of the Church in a threefold scheme: the epoch of Jewish Christianity, relatively short but fundamental for the origin of the Church’s identity; then the very long epoch of European culture and civilisation up to recently; and finally, the epoch of a culturally polycentric world Church as launched by Vatican Council II.

Culturally provoked as we all are today, we belong to the last epoch as described by the eminent theologian. In our response, we cannot afford these days to lock ourselves up in a futile nostalgia or in forms of neo-exclusivism that at times crop up. These are dangerous temptations to which we can easily give in, in our way of dealing with hot issues that surface from time to time.

Today’s gospel narrative takes off from the Baptist’s arrest, Jesus leaving Nazareth and returning to Gali­lee, and his preaching: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand”. These words can easily be taken as referring to recycled examples of conversion, giving little or no attention to the gospel meaning of conversion as ‘change of mentality’.

If we want to survive as believers and disciples of Jesus, fear may be the worst enemy in our dealing with present-day culture. In the story of the first disciples called to follow Jesus, the nets, the boat, and all they were doing, stand for tools and methods that now, in Jesus’s presence, became obsolete. They were being called to let go of their past and embark on something radically new.

This is our perennial difficulty in history: to be rooted in a living tradition that is our faith but at the same time to remain open to innovation.

Jesus was not simply a teacher of doctrine. He was an educator, in the sense of leading people from darkness to light. Often, growing up and maturing brings with it the feeling that something in the religious education we received is collapsing. Whenever there is the depth of perspective so needed in one’s life as a believer, this feeling is natural.

If there is something challenging and provoking us as the Church today, it is internal pluralism and heterogeneity of Christian living. Not the pluralism of religions, values, beliefs and cultures, but pluralism within the Church itself, the variegated ways of understanding faith.

For some, this is seen as confusion. They confuse unity with uniformity. But for the Christian community to be alive, diversity is healthy. The Church has been experiencing internal fragmentation since the 16th-century Reformation, and attempts to suffocate that with imposition were always futile.

In today’s first reading, Isaiah speaks of a people walking in darkness and seeing a great light. Ushering from darkness to light is never something achieved. It is always something longed for. Darkness and light, in the life of faith, never simply and suddenly replace each other. Life resembles the ‘shadowlands’, a sort of middle-of-the-road positioning that characterises most of our wandering in the lands of the Spirit.

The call and response of the first set of disciples was not that simplistic as Matthew depicts it. It was not so instantaneous, automatic, almost hastily that Peter and Andrew, James and John left their nets, affections and belongings to follow Jesus.

They went through a process of thoroughly examining who this Jesus was who was presenting himself by the Sea of Galilee with such an unusual proposal. This discernment process included and still in­cludes shadows of grey and afterthoughts. It was a process meant to continue afterwards and to keep characterising Christian communities and Christian living for all time.

At their inception, the first Christian communities, as St Paul says, were still taking shape and coming to terms with a faith received and in constant need of being culturally translated. The serious differences of which Paul writes to the Corinthians were simply the outcome of this process, of this long and winding road that faith by nature takes.

Christianity can survive in this day and age not by simplistically overcoming divisions or ruling out difference of opinions but by being an open Church longing genuinely to pursue the conversation that took off with Jesus.

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