Today’s readings: Zechariah 9, 9-10; Romans 8, 9.11-13; Matt. 11, 25-30.

In a sort of comeback, the renegade priest Leonardo Boff, one of the fathers of Liberation Theology, speaks in a recent book on Pope Francis about the revolution of tenderness under way in the Church. What is happening now goes hand in hand with something very radical which Jesus in today’s gospel is inaugurating in the context of Judaism.

Jesus blesses and praises the Father for revealing himself to the poor and the least in society. It is a radical displacement of religion from the hands of those who believed they had a monopoly on everything spiritual, even on the way God communicated with His people. They knew it all and God was at their service. In contrast to the old religious system more concerned to set boundaries and perpetuate the law, Jesus’ credentials are gentleness and humility.

Religion is meant to rest the soul. At the time of Jesus, Judaism had reached a point when the numerous and intricate commandments of the law were becoming an insufferable burden to bear for many. When religion ends up being the imposition of a heavy yoke on the part of a dominating institution, it contradicts its own purpose and nature.

“Religion,” wrote Thomas Merton, “is most authentic when its primary function is to mentor a person’s spiritual liberty”. In modern times, with religion being constantly pushed to the margins of society and culture, and with increasing numbers abandoning the institutions of religion, we find it easier to point accusing fingers to what most comfortably we label a godless and hedonist culture.

But we seldom stop to think and acknowledge that what modern mainstream culture might be refusing is not God and belief, but the façade of a religion that has defeated its own purpose. To different extents, we’ve been brought up with a religion that haunts us with guilt trips, with the result that in the presence of God we experience discomfort and uneasiness rather than rest.

In the second reading from Romans, St Paul speaks today about the spiritual and unspiritual. Normally we find it easier to apply this in moralistic and manicheistic terms to issues of morality and more specifically to sexual morality. Yet it is high time we start discerning seriously how spiritual or unspiritual our religion and our churches are becoming. Is the religion we perpetuate spirit-driven? Is it the old-style power structures within the Church that we are struggling to save?

The struggle we are experiencing today in the Church is between on the one hand, true discernment of where the Spirit is leading the Church and, on the other hand, the power craze of the modern-day scribes and Pharisees who are afraid of losing their grip on the people whom they still love to dominate.

In the first reading from Zechariah, again the contrast is between the old-style abusive ways of governing the people and the king who is coming “victorious, triumphant, humble and riding on a donkey”. He will banish all semblances of power in the name of God that were utterly unspiritual. We still have clear signs and residuals of that old-style religion in our churches and in our way of dealing with people’s spiritual journeys.

If religion, as Merton writes, is not being instrumental to mentor people’s spiritual liberty, then surely it is being instrumental only to curb that liberty. We should not be afraid of speaking of spiritual liberty. That is not spiritual anarchy, not even relativism. God’s ways of revealing Himself can never be subjected to the rules or framework of religion because the end in view is not religion but God.

Unfortunately, many who come in touch with our churches are still experiencing a yoke that is not easy and a burden that is not light. This happens because in our minds what is still dominant is the fear of what we are bound to lose in letting go of the past, rather than the attitude of praise and thanksgiving that pertains more to any religion and that can make us discern God’s grace wherever people are in search of the spiritual.