Today’s readings: Acts 6, 1-7; 1 Peter 2, 4-9; John 14, 1-12.

Before the Church got used to calling itself The Church, it was called The Way. It is not far-fetched to claim that at different times in its history, the Church lost touch with its origins and literally lost its way. That is why the Church constantly needed prophetic voices that called it to reconnect with its origins. This is what Vatican Council II mainly sought to achieve in the modern era and this is also what Pope Francis at this point in time is struggling hard to achieve.

Anxiety and uncertainty have characterised the Church’s life from its inception, as the Scripture readings show today, and this does not necessarily contradict the promise of Jesus to be always there. The community of believers always lives in tension between fulfillment and promise, or as John O’Donohue writes in his book Divine Beauty. The Invisible Embrace, “between awakening and surrender”. When the traditional structures of shelter are shaking, we need to hear again the reassuring words of Jesus: “Do not let your hearts be troubled”.

As long as the Church is in the world, it cannot think of the future just in terms of afterlife or reduce hope to an outer world virtue. There is also a future to be reckoned with in the present. And that, in itself, demands of the Church not to rely on preconceived dogma. It needs to learn from the emerging evidence about an emerging world. For the Church, the future lies in the Spirit, unfolding, not in a preconceived set of rules or a blueprint that simply need to be followed.

We are all children of a civilisation that wants to explain everything and pretends to leave no stone unturned when it comes to thorny questions. So we can easily identify with Philip in today’s gospel when he says: “Lord, let us see the Father and then we shall be satisfied”. Like Philip, we want evidence.

When Jesus says “I am the way”, that is not to be taken as a dogmatic truth which demands assent. It is not a truth you know and believe from the start, but a truth that unfolds along the way. It is only along the way, in discipleship and while listening to the Spirit, that the heart is warmed and the truth unfolds.

This is the discernment that characterised the early Church and that the Scriptures today invite us to. Faith is always connected to the mystery which can never be defined in conceptual terms. At all crossroads, faith needs reformulation and priorities need to be rethought. The book of Acts today confirms that from its beginning this is how the Church moved on. In the gospel we read how in moments of anxiety and fear, Jesus provided reassurance.

But throughout time, very often the Church sought and found reassurance in its own self, in its structures and statutes. Today we still suffer from a juridical perspective that suffocates. We seem to belong more to a Church of Constantine than to the Church of Christ. It suffices to see how our tribunals function, how authority is still exercised in our Christian communities, how we fail miserably to grasp that the Church is basically a priestly people not just because it has and needs priests.

For too long, the Church has focussed mainly on builders, ignoring that it is living stones that make the building. The focus has always been unilaterally on those ordained to ministry as those who exclusively have a proper mission of their own. It took quite some time for the Church to come to realise that ministry is not a prerogative of those ordained but a characteristic of the Church in its totality.

In his recent book The Future, former US vice president Al Gore writes about critical drivers of global change, and maintains that: “There is no prior period of change that remotely resembles what humanity is about to experience”. In the face of this, the Church is called to rethink its priorities and its understanding of mission. Failing to grasp this, we may be doomed to think of the future in terms of the past. That would be a perfect recipe for failure because it basically contradicts the trust that Jesus demands and the golden rule of the early Church that the vision and the way forward are gradually unveiled by the Spirit.