Today’s readings: Isaiah 49,3.5-6; 1Corinthians 1,1-3; John 1,29-34.
The gospel reading from St John speaks of the identity crisis already facing the Christian communities in the first centuries. Will the real Messiah stand up? John the Baptist came first. He proclaimed God’s kingdom and baptised people forgiving them their sins. Even Jesus himself went to him to be baptised.
Now it was time to decide who’s who. John’s gospel is coming to terms with this crisis about who really was the Messiah. John the Baptist’s declaration left no doubt: “Look, there is the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. It was to reveal him to Israel that I came baptising with water”. Jesus was born in a cultural, religious, and political context that was very rigid, exclusive and inward looking. People in his days had almost forgotten all about the prophets of old who constantly and firmly appealed to the people to go beyond the law and stand for a religion of the heart. For the simple fact that Jesus stood in the prophetic line, that he sought to broaden the perspective and even disown a cultural religion, he was misunderstood and rejected.
Now John the Baptist is indicating him as the one who not only forgives sins, but who “takes away the sin of the world”. The concept of ‘sin’ in John’s gospel lends itself to various interpretations. It can be hard-headedness just as it can be myopia, lacking foresight and narrowing down God’s kingdom to an institution, to a people, to a land, to a culture.
Throughout the ages we ourselves have inherited and transmitted this sin especially by our unexamined religious attitudes. Many a time we fail to grasp God’s universality and instead we tend to create comfort zones where we can feel secure but which ultimately hinder us from seeing God and from letting Him be glorified in the way He is.
But now we no longer live in a culture that is sure of itself. Christianity, in the wake of how history and culture evolved in these past decades, has lost its identity and homogeneity. It is to no avail to persist in our nostalgic attempts to recover the distant past. As the prophet Isaiah today suggests in the first reading to Israel in exile, what we really need in times like these is not the recovery of that security that the institutions provided in the past. What we need to recover is rather the lost vision.
In the ruins that many a time transpire from the dwindling of numbers, sociologically speaking, it is not the Church that needs to be saved. It is the world that needs salvation and people that need healing. Isaiah is stimulating because while addressing issues of major concern for the survival of Israel itself as God’s people, he goes beyond the challenge of recomposing a dispersed people. After the exile, Israel was to discover a radically different sense of mission and identity.
“Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and fellows,” said by sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, who died a few days ago and who was probably the most attentive reader of our times. He enshrined this feeling of uncertainty in the concept of liquidity, speaking of liquid society, liquid culture and liquid love.
This liquidity explains the extent of the uncertainty and the lack of solidity that touches today even the way we live our beliefs. In these times we are experiencing even a liquid Church, a Church beyond the Church as we knew it, a Church that has lost its identity and homogeneity and which after its own exile is called to discover a new sense of mission.
What most probably we need now is a zooming in exercise, to get the picture larger and closer. We have narrowed down too much what is by nature broad and open and universal. Our faithfulness is not towards traditions and institutions, which at the end of the day are transient, but towards the prophecy of God’s kingdom as proclaimed by Jesus. This, of course, calls for a wisdom that gives us the capacity not to be the judges of the world but the light of nations.