God’s politics

Today’s readings: Wisdom 14, 3-7; Acts 27, 16 – 28, 6; Mark 16, 15-20.

The 10th of February each year is a date with connotations that range widely from national to religious, political to cultural. Politics has by now come to saturation point. But today’s Scriptures speak to us of God’s own politics more unpredictable than those earthly.

God’s providence, as we read from Wisdom, opens pathways through the sea very different from what we can imagine. The reading from Acts takes us down theological lanes that are deep and overwhelming, narrating vividly how the Lord give shape to history and to our personal lives.

We need to ask questions about what we have received from those distant events and what we are able to conserve in ways that inspire and enlighten life today. Our proclamation needs to be confirmed by tangible signs in order to be credible.

Just as light breaks into darkness, the Christian faith touched our shores on that distant and turbulent night of Paul’s shipwreck. In itself that is not reason enough to celebrate. What would truly motivate celebration is the will to remain faithful to that first calling. This is a country which, while claiming Paul the Apostle of the Gentiles as Father, needs to reclaim its soul.

Conversion in the Bible, and that is what Paul brought to Malta, always involves a change of lords. What were the idols that lured Malta 2,000 years ago? Our contemporary idols may not be that different from the former ones. We seem to be at a turning point in time in what deeply concerns our social and political life.

We are experiencing a vacuum in the moral discourse on our public life. Paul the Apostle was bold enough to open the Christian message to the Gentiles from such an early stage. In like manner, our challenge at this point in time is to coin a moral discourse that would involve also those who identify themselves as secular, agnostic or even atheist. We badly need to work on a common ground between us if we want to safeguard the moral fabric of society.

The role of religion and moral values in our political discourse need to be relocated because of the essentially moral and spiritual character of many of the most pressing issues our society is facing. Moral values cannot be reduced to one or two contentious social issues. We need a wider and deeper vision of ethics which may not necessarily be Christian as long as it reaches out to a common ground that safeguards everyone’s dignity.

Christian faith is never confined to the inner self, personal morality, or intellectual belief. This is a country fast emerging from a regime of Christendom and calling on the Church, still in a position that commands authority and respect, to relocate itself in the historical and social processes that are shaping the country and people’s lives. To give credible account of the gospel it proclaims, the Church needs to reconnect realistically and persuasively with today’s society, particularly with the new demands and with people’s needs and sufferings.

On New Year’s Day, 1943, just before he was arrested and two years before his execution, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote what is considered a classic gem of wisdom written. It is a 15-page ‘Reckoning’, looking back on the lessons he and his friends learnt during Nazi rule in Germany. His Letters and Papers from Prison speaks of ordinary ethics and virtues that make us assume our share of responsibility and accountability.

He asks “Who stands fast?” in such an extreme situation. His answer: “The responsible person, who tries to make his or her whole life an answer to the question and call of God”. Central to his concern is the ethical importance of wisdom. Foolishness is ‘a more dangerous enemy to good than evil’. The only real cure for it is ‘a person’s inward liberation to live a responsible life before God’.

Like Paul in the midst of rough seas, we are called to stand up and remain focused. We know what we have received from the past. But what we want to pass on to the emerging generations is becoming very opaque.