Today’s readings: Jeremiah 31, 31-34; Hebrews 5, 7-9; John 12, 20-33.
The Greek converts who wanted to see Jesus as reported in John’s gospel mark an important turn in the ministry of Jesus which from here starts heading towards his crucifixion. He had already struggled hard with the Jews and with little results.
The incident reported today recalls what St Paul elsewhere writes about the Jews who demand miracles and the Greeks who look for wisdom. The preaching of Christ crucified was an obstacle for the Jews and foolishness for the Greeks. But Jesus affirms that God’s power is made manifest in our dying to live, in our giving up our lives for what is bigger and worth living for. But this always provokes a contrary reaction in us.
In the first reading, Jeremiah himself had foreseen this hard-headedness with sadness and acknowledged that the first covenant with Moses was insufficient to change the hearts and to pave the way for people to connect with their God in truth. What was needed was a change of heart.
Even today, if we want to really come to terms with the crises that besiege us as believers from within and on the outside, what is needed in religion is a shift from an obsession with moralism to a softened heart that can be touched by the divine.
What is needed in religion is a shift from an obsession with moralism to a softened heart that can be touched by the divine
It is no use in this day and age to concentrate on rules of morality as the basis of Christianity and of our connection with God. It is virtue that moulds the heart, making it more humane in the first place and, secondly, more desirous of God.
“We want to see Jesus” was the expressed desire of those Greeks who had come to worship at the festival in Jerusalem. This same desire, even without our acknowledging it fully, may be underlying the same culture we inhabit and which, rather hastily and superficially, we may judge as indifferent or even Godless.
Many people, young and not so young, are turning their back today on religion, on church attendance, and on our liturgies. But they may not be turning their back on God. There is a deep desire for God in many people who actually are fed up and bored with mediocrity in religion, which eventually many a time takes the form of idolatry or superstition.
In this regard, what we read from Jeremiah and John’s gospel today, sounds very much in sync. We need a shift, a radical one.
This is a call on the Church at large to let itself be shaped by this deep desire in the hearts of so many. The Church needs a pastoral and missionary conversion to shift from an institution seen as service-provider to a community of disciples that provides more to the needs of the hearts of people. This is the shape of the Church to come.
This is the ‘hour’ of the Church just as Jesus spoke of his hour when faced with the desire of those Greeks who wanted to see him. It is the hour for the old Church to die and give way to something new.
It is the new formula we need to decipher today so that on the ashes of what seems to be a tired, frail and dying institution, we may discern the signs of a risen Christ, of a faith that may be alive and kicking, but not the way it used to be.
God inhabits more the hearts of those who genuinely seek Him rather than those who take His presence or existence for granted.
The metaphor of the wheat grain that falls on the ground and dies is applicable not only to Christian living on an individual level. It applies also and fully to the Church, to religion as we know it and which badly needs, not refurbishment, but literally a dying out.