Today’s readings: Acts 3, 13-15.17-19; 1 John 2, 1-5; Luke 24, 35-48.

The way we interpret the Scriptures and let our life be shaped by them is the key to an adult and mature faith. This is a truth that the Church itself painstakingly grasped and which for centuries was feared. Scripture was a closed book, alien to everyday life of Christians, and which eventually ended up being difficult to understand, let alone to interpret, for the vast majority of believers.

Throughout these Sundays after Easter, the Scripture readings constantly demonstrate how the early disciples and communities were gradually processing all that they had gone through. The emphasis in St Peter’s first discourses in Acts is on what had already been foretold by the prophets of old, witnessing to its truth and verification.

In the gospel, particularly today’s account from St Luke, Jesus is “opening their minds to understand the Scriptures”, just as he did with the Emmaus disciples on their way back home, disheartened as they were.

Opening our hearts is not enough. The ideal, at both the individual and communal level, involves, for Cardinal John Henry Newman, a union of ethical and devotional praxis on the one hand and critical self-reflection on the other. In short, the union of clear heads and holy hearts.

Adult faith cannot simply limit itself to devotion. That explains the gradual processing by the early Church of the turning point that Easter brought about and that made more and more disciples join in by a deeper grasp of what had been transmitted in the written Word of God from generations past.

This is the major challenge ahead which all faith communities need to face today. We are so distant in time from that experience we read about in the Scriptures and which has been foundational for entire subsequent generations. Yet we can also be so near to that same experience, which transcends time because Christ risen is beyond time and space.

We may lament the fact that too many shifts in the culture we live in may make us feel estranged to the possibility of belief. We’ve become too technological, digital, scientific in outlook and in our understanding of the world and of life experiences to the extent that believing may sound too out of this world.

Yet our pathways still cross dark nights and open questions which call for light and answers that can give solace both to the mind and heart. We still need to experience the risen Christ in our journeys in order not to give in or falter in the wake of the numerous Good Fridays that continue to mark our days and the unfolding of history.

This is the challenge of evangelisation today. As so often affirmed, evangelisation is not about teaching but about facilitating the encounter with Christ in life. We need to radically rethink our way of doing things, of proclaiming Christ, of speaking about his divinity and resurrection, or about forgiveness, humility, and mercy.

We are called upon in our times to reinvent new styles of proclaiming the gospel. A new language is needed, otherwise we continue to repeat what can never connect with what people feel and think, and the way people envisage their daily living. Indifference, pluralism and diversity may be hailed as what deeply marks today’s living. Yet those marks should not be taken as hurdles to evangelisation but as golden opportunities.

The style of evangelising already suggested by Vatican Council II was that of a Church in the company of people with so many diverse world views and beliefs. What needs to be put at the centre in this context is the good life, beyond all the boundaries of religion, belief, race, or even sex and gender. Evangelisation is basically education for the good life, where more and more people can be enabled, whatever their situation and context, to grasp what Richard Rohr writes in his book Immortal Diamond where he likens true self to a diamond.

This diamond many a time is buried deep within us, formed under the intense pressure of our lives, needing to be searched for, uncovered and separated from all the debris of ego that surrounds it. Like Jesus, the true self must be resurrected and, as Rohr writes, that process is not resuscitation but transformation.