Today’s readings: Isaiah 22,19-23; Romans 11,33-36; Matthew 16,13-20.
With Waiting for Godot, Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in the 1950s put in a nutshell the emotional culmination of four centuries of European culture. In his book Something There. The Biology of the Human Spirit, David Hay writes that “one way of interpreting Godot is to see it as a snare to catch out unwary people and summarily demolish their illusion that they do know where they are”.
We need such provocations from time to time. In an age particularly critical of religion and at the same time keen on focussing on the essentials, it is understandable that the plausibility of religious belief persists as a major issue that cannot be faced superficially.
There are various ways of dealing with the contemporary crisis of religion. On the one hand there are surely the problems of the institution which cannot be ignored or minimised. But on the other hand, we also need to diagnose what some would label as the sickness of the spirit.
In Waiting for Godot, Beckett was describing brute reality for which, according to him, there is no remedy. From the standpoint of religion, we continue to preach and hope that someone will save us. That is the remedy. It would be tragic if we ourselves, as believers, are trapped in a closed circuit of hopelessness.
Atheism has many times been the logical consequence of the religious perceptions we promoted, and even of certain theologies we supported. This is the sense, in my opinion, of what Pope Francis writes, speaking of “eternal newness”, and “Jesus can also break through the dull categories with which we would enclose him and he constantly amazes us by his divine creativity”.
In today’s gospel, Jesus elevates the faith discourse to where it belongs. At the time of writing Matthew’s gospel, the Christian community, mainly made up of newcomers rooted in the Jewish tradition, was still confused about the real identity and significance of Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew is seeking a refocussing beyond the religion on offer.
In the Judaic religion, faith had been reduced to mere ‘flesh and blood’ reasonings which hardly left space for novelty or for the Father in heaven to reveal something new. The flesh and blood faith of the Jews could not in any way come to terms with who Jesus really was, and hence the confusion regarding his identity in spite of them acknowledging his special qualities and gifts.
Religious faith, as very often transmitted to us and as we experience it, is the human journey towards God. It is a process whereby we argue our way towards the divine. But St Peter’s confession in today’s gospel breaks definitively with all the human and presumptuous deductions of who Jesus might be. The genesis of faith is very particular and lies somewhere else.
It is this faith sparked in the depths of our heart by the Father in heaven that makes us “penetrate God’s motives and understand His methods”, as St Paul writes to the Romans. It is this faith that sparks in our interiority the light and wisdom that come from the anointing we received and which, in Isaiah’s words, “invests us with authority”.
St Matthew’s text today stands for a radical turning point in the faith of the community. It marks a very important transition within Matthew’s community from a religious faith received as a tradition to a faith revealed personally and which constitutes the solid ground on which true Christian experience is built.
In our social and ecclesial context today, we badly need this refocusing, this return to what is essential in belief beyond the conventional religion we have all been imbued with. Unfortunately we still invest mainly on maintaining the status quo of religion with the illusion that it is traditionalism that at the end of the day saves religion.
We hardly realise that it is this brand of traditional religion itself that ultimately kills God and ends up being a sham.