Today’s readings: Wisdom 9, 13-18; Philemon 9-10.12-17; Luke 14, 25-33.

Christianity has survived for over two millennia now. It has a history with its bright and dark sides just as everything else under the sun. Yet very often in the wake of modernity and with the process of secularisation, many questioned its capacity, like any other religion, to survive the cultural earthquake of postmodernity. For those who believe, there are the words of Jesus himself in the gospels that are quite reassuring. But we cannot take those words for granted.

But Jesus never meant Christianity to be what we’ve made of it. We think of Jesus as the founder of a new religion among many others, some of which are much older and very similar in terms of the wisdom traditions they represent. But standing by the way Jesus spoke and behaved, Christianity was basically meant to be an exit from religion.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor killed by the Nazis in 1943, advocated a ‘religionless Christianity’ and faith’s radical approval of the secular world without religious crutches. His positions did not ma­ture in a university, but in a prison cell with the constant thought of  impending death. Throughout his life he gradually shifted from his earlier notions of moral renewal of the West to a harsher critique of Christianity which  had lost its capacity to bring  healing to the world and was degenerating as solely to blame for its own marginalisation.

For too long we thought atheism, Marxism or other ‘isms’ were the major threats to religion and specifically to Christianity. We even imagined the commitment to the new evangelisation as consisting mainly in reversing the historical process to re-Christianise culture. But that was not the main thrust of Vatican Council II. That was not reflected in the optimism of John XXIII, nor in the openness with which culture, politics and the signs of the times were perceived and judged at large in the documents of the Council.

The worst threat to Christianity in the face of the radical culture of modern times was the way Christianity was perceived and perpetuated. We impoverished the idea of discipleship Jesus projects in the gospels to a mere sacramental mechanism that has always been perceived as automatically producing what we call grace, or as magically mediating the experience of God.

The Church’s mission consisted mainly of distributing sacraments to people, of making sure that people are baptised, that they come to Church on days of obligation, that they eventually get married in church, and that they behave in ways not to make the  Lord angry. In this manner we created generations of nominal Christians, Christians who by today’s gospel criteria, were meant to build a tower without first working out the costings and without providing feasibility studies.

That is the tragedy of Christianity, by far worse than what happened in the West since the Enlightenment and the emergence of atheist ideologies. Like Bonhoeffer, we are called now to make a paradigm shift. It is now the turn of the Church and of believers who really mean business to sit down and work out the cost to see exactly what it entails to be a Christian. The cost of discipleship according to Jesus does not match the cost as stipulated by the Church.

We have focussed too much on the crisis of meaning resulting from the refusal of the truths of faith. We even went so far as to believe that it is only by reconquering culture that the world can be saved. I am in no way denying the evils and malaises that befell humanity and that contrasted heavily with the gospel truth about humanity itself. I am also in no way denying the social role the Church can still play in today’s scenario where culture is concerned.

But what we mostly and badly need today in our social and cultural context is to translate culturally what hating one’s own life may mean and what carrying one’s cross entails in a world that is hungry for remedies but which is also diffident about the short-cut solutions offered which many a time lack the wisdom that can really save the world and that deeply respects who we are and who we are called to be.

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