Today’s readings: Acts 8,5-8.14-17; 1 Peter 3,15-18; John 14,15-21.

There is something very specific and rich in today’s readings about the true meaning of Christian commitment in the world. This commitment is not simply a presence that translates itself as a social or political commitment. It is neither a commitment that shuns responsibility for what happens around us or that is relegated to the spiritual sphere.

In short, our commitment to change the world and struggle for the well-being of society should steer away from the extremes of becoming purely spiritual or purely political. There is a third way that, as disciples of Christ, keeps us bound to the source that empowers us and that gives us the wisdom of discernment to know for what exactly we stand and to be accountable for the world around us.

St John’s gospel reveals interiority as the basic trait of the believer. In a world that is so noisy and that can be so fake, even in the reading of the ground reality we breathe daily, we are called first and foremost to cultivate the interiority in our hearts and being that manifests the presence of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. This presence can be so luminous that it enables us to read reality with the eyes of God.

This presence, according to St Peter in his second letter, manifests itself to the world as transparency. It is never aggressive or coercive. Being always ready, as Peter writes, to give full account of the hope we proclaim is a matter of transparency. It can only transpire from the “reverence” for the Lord Christ “in your hearts”.

This is all very basic when we discuss the relevance we may claim to have as Christians in all the social and political struggles we engage in in the name of the common good. We can easily get caught up in futile and partisan talk at times, exchanging in fundamentalist terms personal or ideological interests for good and evil issues.

The reading from Acts, lastly but not the least, concerns St Philip preaching in Samaria, a region meant to be out of bounds for ancient Israel but which now ends up welcoming and embracing God’s word. Things were already turning upside down at this early stage of Christianity. It took us ages to learn the lesson that God has no boundaries and that His presence manifests itself first and foremost as interiority that is limitless.

With time, we continued to create canonical boundaries and set parameters to the detriment of many, boasting of exclusiveness as our trademark. Like the first communities, which even after accepting the word of God and believing in Christ, needed St Peter and St John to come and pray over them to receive the Holy Spirit, we may still be falling short of being a Church in the power of the Spirit, perpetuating instead a Church that remains simply an institution with ideological or self-referential interests to promote.

In his programmatic document The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis dedicates a full section on “Spirit-filled evangelisers”. It is the Spirit that suggests to us the best ways of mending the world and bridging the abyss between what is fake and what is true and sensible. It is this same Spirit, which in St John’s words “the world can never receive”, that can manifest concretely and historically the faith we proclaim.