Today’s readings: Jeremiah 20, 7-9; Romans 12, 1-2; Matthew 16, 21-27.
We live in times when standards in public life need to be written black on white. In other times, though not all was glaring, there was some sort of unwritten tradition that to some extent impacted on public life. Human nature is what it is, and the tendency to be corrupted and to corrupt is so powerful that nowadays the mainstream perception seems to suggest that the virtuous life is sidelined.
Jeremiah’s text today is about the typical prophet in the city. His message was systematically ignored, and he was accused of being negative and lacking understanding of life as it is. He struggled to bring to the people’s attention what was actually corroding public life, but they insisted going their own way, business as usual.
In the gospel, Jesus is at a turning point when he had just been acclaimed as Messiah and was heading for Jerusalem where hard times awaited him. He did not want to deceive his disciples, and at such a pivotal point in his ministry and in the life of those following him, he felt the need to establish clear standards of discipleship. Take it or leave it, but compromise here is never an option.
Yet today, compromise seems to be mainstream. In a context like ours, where belief has been integral to the culture we breathe, it is easy to live in two separate worlds and to separate public life from personal faith, which is thought to be private, if not reduced to devotional. We’ve been honestly brought up to think we can still belong to the community of faith with the minimum of efforts.
This is light years distant from the gospel standards of renouncing oneself, taking up one’s cross daily and losing one’s life for Christ’s sake. In today’s short but incisive text from St Paul’s letter to Romans, Paul speaks of “true worship”, which is not just churchy liturgical worship, but the authentic worship of non-conformation to the standards of the world. So many strange gods find their space in our daily life and demand our allegiance.
We often trivialise talk about conversion. Paul envisages the authentic Christian life not as leading to conversion but rather as the outcome of conversion. Conversion is a change of mind and heart; it involves the integral person and it impacts on the public commitments and business of the individual.
Nowadays we are used to blame our secular age for the difficulties to live up to a faith commitment. Little do we realise it has always been like that.
The problem is not coming from a secularised culture disenchanted with belief. The problem is rather within our own selves and with the Church itself, which over time has held on to diluted versions of Christianity, domesticating the Gospel to accommodate a simpler way of following Jesus.
Jeremiah felt he was deceived in accepting to be a prophet without counting the cost. In the gospel there is no deception. The deception is all in our marketing of Christianity and in making believe that carrying one’s cross is a Good Friday devotion and that believing is reducible to the sacramental life. We need to go back to the drawing board and reinvent ourselves as believers especially now that this diluted version of Christianity has shipwrecked against COVID-19 and we have discovered ourselves completely lost.
The lowering of standards of Christian life only promotes religious schizophrenia, with lip-service liturgies coexisting with criminal practices and devotional life comfortably interspersed with a corroded public life. Even being charitable thanks to money laundering poses no question. The public manifestation of our faith and private behaviour cannot be envisaged as two separate worlds.