Today’s readings: Acts 6, 1-7; 1 Peter 2, 4-9; John 14, 1-12.
The reading from Acts today depicts a Church vibrant yet at a crossroad with pivotal decisions to be taken. The number of disciples was increasing, there were already complaints of discrimination, and the order of priorities needed to be set right because the preaching of the Word was at risk. It was a community of humans struggling to let itself be under the power of the Spirit who so easily can be resisted.
The Church always needs to trace its own maps in its missionary impetus, treading boldly on uncharted territories and bringing the Good News to those who thirst for it. Jesus gave no handbook with set answers or rigid rules just to be followed. In today’s gospel it is again Thomas who voices the problem which surely was not only his: what direction to take now, we do not know the way. To date, this has been a perennial concern.
Jesus responds that he is “the Way”, a way yet to be explored, discovered and followed. Author Ruth Burrows writes that “the touchstone of God at work is the ability to recognise that God is trying to get us to accept a state where we have no assurance within that all is well, where no clear path lies before us, where there is no way; a state of spiritual inadequacy experienced in its raw, humiliating bitterness”.
This is what exactly puzzles us most when our theologies of God were all constructed in absolutes and in sure language, failing to represent to us God as a desert to be explored rather than a doctrine to be assented to blindly. The world we inhabit and life as we live it are too complex to be approached with clear-cut answers. Jesus as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” projects his life on ours and invites us on an adventurous journey of exploration surely not exempt of paradoxes.
The Philip in us often surfaces, turning to Jesus with pleas like: “Show us the Father, that is all we need”. We think all we need is to see, to be spoon-fed, to be freed from the torment of having to search and wait for God. There are moments when we feel so reassured, just to have the sensation moments later of grabbing a handful of sand.
Jesus’s reaction to Philip was “You still do not know me?” It happens that in the wake of a lifetime of religious practice we still do not know him. Knowing Jesus is not simply a question of knowing who he was. Jesus, as Peter writes, was “a stone rejected”, crucified, numbered among thieves.
As Christians we can belong to a culture which still looks up to Jesus as a great guru or prophet, yet having serious difficulties with his message.
We cannot separate Jesus from his message. We are “living stones” in a world which is work in progress, in a society which, as Pope Francis repeats, is governed by a throwaway culture excluding so many people and entire populations. Jesus in his time was not the Byzantine Pantocrator but belonged to this culture of exclusion.
Our dream of the world and of the Church may be so different from God’s own dream. In The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis warns about “a worldly Church with superficial spiritual and pastoral trappings”. We need to realign with the mind of Jesus as our way, truth and life, and ask ourselves, as Samuel Gregg writes in a recent book Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilisation, “what we are willing to fight and perhaps even to die for”. We are also a Church at a crossroad and in dire need to face pivotal decisions.