Today’s readings: 1 Kings 17, 17-24; Galatians 1, 11-19; Luke 7, 11-17.
One trait that in our times has become characteristic of the culture we live in is that it is becoming harder for whatever we see happening around us to rock our conscience. Without being that much aware of it, we’ve become immune to the suffering of others, to injustice and even to death itself.
There is nothing around us that really scandalises us. This is a dear theme for Pope Francis, who with the passing of time is assuming more and more the role of someone who shakes the foundations and arouses the collective conscience.
In the so-called age of reason, one major argument and justification for atheism, for quitting belief in the existence of God, was His apparent indifference in the face of suffering. This is the thread underlying great classics in literature ranging from the Book of Job in the Scriptures to David Blumenthal’s The Abusing God in our times. It has always been unacceptable to believe in a God who is indifferent to human suffering. But now the problem we face is the indifference of humans.
Today’s Scriptures, particularly that from the first Book of Kings and Luke’s gospel, address precisely this issue. The woman who gave hospitality to Elijah was rightly complaining with him as a man of God because her son was left to die. Elijah was moved and confronted God on the issue with determination. Jesus was also moved at the scene of the funeral of an only child.
The prophet Elijah restores a son to his mother, and Jesus does the same with the widow of Nain. For the Jewish mentality, this was fully expressive of God’s kingdom. In these contexts coming back to life means manifesting God’s dominion over history.
The gospel is a proclamation of liberation not just of a spiritual nature. It has a historical content, it is meant to impact on life as it evolves and in the face of which we very often seem to be helpless.
In Luke, Jesus is the prophetic proclaimer of good news to the poor. Jesus is the prophet through whom God is visiting His people. He is mercy and love in action. In this Jubilee Year of Mercy willed by Pope Francis, this is what Luke’s gospel mostly proclaims and invites us to: mercy in action.
The humane encounter of Jesus with the funeral cortège in today’s gospel is an icon of a prophecy the Church is called to recover in today’s troubled world. The Church’s mission to evangelise is not in the first place to preach the gospel, but to bring back to life all those who in our culture are practically buried alive.
Mercy apart, today we are confronted with very reasonable world views other than Christianity. As Rupert Shortt wrote in his recent book God is No Thing, Christianity gets dismissed too readily in the West today. While acknowledging that there is grandeur in alternative visions that present genuine challenges to the believer, very often, as Shortt warns, easily disposable certainties form one of atheism’s assets.
At a time when we seem to be faced with the tragedy of the banality of death itself, the challenge ahead as believers is to reaffirm in this context that death has been conquered. Do we dare repeat, for example, all that we feel comfortable to preach during a funeral Mass in the face of all other death narratives we encounter daily in the headlines?
As long as we are constantly faced with the tragedies of those described by philosopher Etienne Balibar as the “superfluous” and “disposable” people along the peripheries of the contemporary world, it would be extra hard for us all to make sense of what we preach.
The resurrection we believe in is the beginning of a new time, a new creation. And from a faith perspective we cannot afford to sound utopian in proclaiming this. We not only believe and proclaim it; we are called to witness concretely to it, to give account of it to those who demand of us the reason of our hope.
Christianity is still a potent force for making sense of our existence and for guiding us in our foggy landscape. Yet, though an intellectually robust case for Christianity can still be made, at its centre, Christianity is “the story of love’s mending of wounded hearts”.