Today’s readings: Numbers 11, 25-29; James 5, 1-6; Mark 9, 38-43.45.47-48.
For far too long we’ve been thinking and acting in religion in manners that exclude, discriminate and fear diversity. So with time, religions developed more as identifiable with cultures that found it impossible to transcend borders and overcome differences and conflicts to convey to the world and humanity God’s universal love.
In Christianity we celebrate God as having become incarnate. That should have never made us believe that in some way Christians are superior to others or that we possess the whole truth while others lag behind or are simply deficient. God reveals Himself in ways and means that we can never define or encapsulate dogmatically.
This is a truth that comes across clearly from today’s scriptures. Moses and Jesus intersect perfectly to confirm that God’s spirit can never be bound or even imprisoned in any one form exclusive of all other expressions.
God’s way of revelation is always a heart matter, very personal, spiritual and mysterious.
When it was reported to Moses that two people were prophesying outside the camp, Moses did not restrain them. On the contrary, he augured that all may be prophets.
It was the same experience with Jesus when the apostles were arguing from a standpoint of ‘us and them’. Jesus affirms that no one who claims to do things in his name can then go against the spirit of what he stood for.
This is a standpoint that is particularly inclusive. It is a standpoint free from merely institutional constraints and open to that spirituality that belongs intimately to the human spirit and that always craves to come out. It is this standpoint that should open our churches to a more humane and hence spiritual viewpoint.
It was a basic tenet of the Eastern church fathers of the early centuries of Christianity that God became man in order that man can become God. There is a very rich anthropology at the basis of this, and one that at times differs substantially from that which underpinned our view of the Christian life for ages.
The Church is today at a crossroad precisely because it is in this area that it needs refurbishment.
At the basis of how people manage their lives, how they perceive and what they expect from the institutions they belong to, there is an anthropology which encapsulates how we grasp the depth of our own humanity.
People today see their access to God as no longer exclusively conveyed through the set parameters of organised religion.
Autonomy is not synonymous with arbitrariness, or as we label at times, relativism.
People are autonomous as individuals and particularly as seekers. The Church needs to take stock of people as grown ups, as well as respect their adulthood rather than be suspicious of it. Christian living is basically about spirituality, not about obeying rules and commandments. These can be two very different things.
Spirituality is very personal, it is about being virtuous rather than just about being religious.
Both readings from the book of Numbers and from Mark today are about people who have come of age, people who appropriate responsibly the Spirit with which they have been anointed, and who then behave and operate accordingly.
This is what makes of our Church communities places where people can grow up, rather than clubs where the focus is on the rules that need to be absolutely and universally observed with no discretion whatsoever.