The gospel excerpt from Luke that we have today is a continuation of last Sunday's extract. It fact they overlap a bit. At the beginning of today's excerpt, we read, "He won the approval of all, and they were astonished by the gracious words that came from his lips." Writing of the same incident, Mark wrote: "And his teaching made a deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority." However, by the time he has finished speaking, it is a very different story indeed. .They were enraged, Luke tells us; they sprang to their feet and hustled him out of the town. It was actually their intention to throw him off a cliff, according to St. Luke. He had enraged the scribes and Pharisees, the religious authorities of the day, by saying that God might also have the welfare of foreigners at heart. After all, he reminds them, wasn't the great prophet Elisha sent, not the to the needy widows of Israel, but a to aliens like the Syrians and Sidonians. Jesus was attempting the expand the imagination and consciousness of Israel to accept foreigners as children of God too. This in a nutshell is what sparked off the clash between the Pharisees, Sadducees and himself. And then the small-town jibe: "Who does he think he is! He should reserve that old stuff for the crowd down in Capernaum. They know no better! But he is not fooling us. Sure we know his seed and breed."
Obviously, Jesus was born into a world and a religion where a crisis of authority was already a dominant experience. The Romans had lost credibility as civil rulers. The scribes and Pharisees were no longer credible witnesses to religious values. Long-established social groupings were coming apart while traditional values were being discarded as obsolete. As the questioning of old certainties intensified, and as old values eroded, the Scribes and the Pharisees sought refuge in the simplistic certainties of the law. The law was the authority they relied upon. They were all of course lawmen and they had a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo.
This was where Jesus parted company with them. The law was being used to protect established interests. Genuine religious values were being damaged, not promoted, by the law. The law is being used to conceal the truth, not to reveal it. It is the role of the prophet to rediscover the truth and reveal it anew. In one famous incident, Jesus accused the scribes and Pharisees of piling up burdens on peoples' backs and not raising a finger to help them. Jesus was prepared to take on the authorities of the day, to confront the vested interests. He took to heart the advice given to Jeremiah in our first reading: "Do not be dismayed at their presence or in their presence." This was the new authority that the people were quick to detect and willing emulate.
The circumstances of our own day are not at all unlike those existing at the time of Jesus. Political authority throughout Europe and indeed the United States is seriously discredited. We though that the fall of communism and the Berlin wall would solve most of the political difficulties of the Western world. In truth this development only added to our difficulties. Or at least the old Europe is being challenged in new ways. Tuesday last was the 59th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army. The world was not informed for another 3 months. And not until 1990 were the true figure released. 1.5 million people perished there, 1.1 million of whom were Jews. Ironically, it took a full fifty years for the full truth to emerge about history's most intensely researched topics. "After Auschwitz", Theodor Adorno said, "poetry is no longer possible." It seems that historians too had lost their faculties.
Auschwich commemorative speeches during this week contained new and urgent emphasis on the re-emergence of racism in Europe. It was as if Auschwich never happened. Primo Levi, the Jewish Italian novelist, foresaw a time when the horror of Auschwitz would be covered up or conveniently forgotten. Echoing Isaiah, he penned a warning and a curse:"Be mindful that this has been:He wrote this angry, anguished warning in Milan on the same day as he arrive home from Auschwitz, Friday April 16th, 1945.
I urge these words on you.
Carve them on your heart
At home or roaming the streets
Lying down or rising up:
Repeat them to your children,
or may your house fall,
Sickness lay you low,
Your offspring turn their face from you."The Church too is going through the same fragmentation that the religious authorities in ancient Israel experienced. The rules and regulations that sustained believers up to very recent time are now seen and experienced by a new generation as archaic, quaint and obsolete. And, as this questioning of old certainties becomes more widespread and intense, there is a tendency on the part of some Church leaders to react as the Pharisees of old reacted: to take refuge in the letter of the law. But in truth, this doesn't answer the questions asked; it merely allays for a time their own insecurity. In reality, each individual must now draw his own her own conclusions about life, about religion and about God. As M.P. Gallagher remarked nearly twenty years ago now, we have moved from a religion of convention to a religion of conviction. The Church must lead; but she can never again compel. The only authority she now has is the authority of her own experience and her own example. If she is not credible on that score, people will simple walk away.
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