And why Elijah

(Mt 11:11-15)

S. Augustine stated: 'In Vetere Testamento Nuvum latet, in Novo Testamento Vetus patet'. But on a different level.

It is true that the message of the second covenant arises from the humus of the first, just as the new reveals the meaning and is the culmination of the old.

It is also true that throughout the history of the Redemption, the Baptist was a crossroads of radical, unexpected, diriment proposals.

He refused to be part of the priestly class, which was corrupt and refractory to the newness of the Spirit.

He preached social justice and the forgiveness of sins outside the Temple - through a change of mentality that would unfold in real life.

Already according to John, the factor of salvation could not be a formal ritual, but concrete conversion and relationship: e.g. no longer thinking only of oneself.

But he did not reveal - like the Son - the depth of the Father's heart.

He believed that the work of the new prophets should do immediate (summary...) justice.

He dreamed of being able to recover the pristineness and strength of antiquity, patching up the ingredients of the religion of the fathers; in short, of returning to the origins.

Everything, purifying and updating the great Temple - not supplanting it in its juridical-theological configuration.

According to Jesus, however, it remained radically deviant, because it was prone to force and incapable of valorising frailties and insecurities.

The God of archaic beliefs disdained contradictions. He came to judge and chastise according to a cold code, as ideal as it was distant from each [even his own believers].

But a sovereign Most High who does not care for weak people or for things he does not like does not seem amiable: it triggers and accentuates the sectarian mechanisms of competitive, anxiogenic, demeaning devotion.

And the problem "Where do I find trust?" is not answered; it does not move an inch.

Well, we cannot draw energy from a strict, purist, forced and sterilising approach; contrary to the flowering of our precious uniqueness.

The constant mortification of eccentricities that would make us fantastic, demotivates.

Locked in armour that does not belong to us, we become sullen, enemies of life, instead of exceptional, unique, flourishing.

This is why Jesus announces the novelty of a Kingdom to be 'welcomed'.

Not to be set up with sweat and prepared with effort, according to cultural, legalistic, external dictates, but precisely to be welcomed and included; because it disorients, transcends, astounds.

New eyes to discover the meaning of a whole journey are only transmitted by the one who is Friend.

And Christ does this not when we position ourselves well or equip ourselves strongly - remaining in a dirigiste attitude - but in total listening (v.15).

In this sense John is inferior to any last of the last and weightless (v.11) who comes to the threshold of communities.

He wants to enjoy fraternal life, and learn how to internalise the transition from religious sense to Faith, to self-flourishing, to Love.

Even the Baptizer's idea of the Messiah was not that of the Christ willing to embrace, reclaim, value and favour even the voiceless, or those far away considered unclean.

On the contrary, our Master and Brother is a proponent of works of life alone with fullness of Happiness (vv.2-6). Not of rude and crude mortification - his own and of his enemies - or accusations.

For Jesus, the mikròi (v.11) - that is, the least, strangers and pitocchios - carry in their hearts and in the Kingdom the seed of the newness of the heavens ripped open forever.

Despite having little energy, they carry the dove of peace [Mt 3:16; Mk 1:10; Lk 3:22].

Icon of an energy that is no longer aggressive, although they suffer it (v.12) [cf. Lk 16:16].

And as Paul VI emphasised, at the price of a sonly style, open to self-rethinking, crucifying - in the intimate virtue of reversal:

"This Kingdom and this salvation, the key-words of the evangelisation of Jesus Christ, every man can receive them as grace and mercy, and nevertheless each one must, at the same time, conquer them by force - they belong to the violent, says the Lord - with toil and suffering, with a life according to the Gospel, with renunciation and the cross, with the spirit of the beatitudes. But, first of all, each one conquers them through a total interior upheaval that the Gospel designates by the name of 'metánoia', a radical conversion, a profound change of mind and heart".

[Evangelii Nuntiandi, no.10].

The man of Faith has temperament, passion and resolve - incisive above all with regard to the building of his destiny (by Grace).

Yet he will never be a standoffish shouter, nor a belligerent prevaricator. 

This is why, to the distinguished personality of the great and famous Saint of the desert and the Jordan - an incensed conqueror of crowds - the Son of God can place not one of his veterans, but any inexperienced, new, stammering, sinner, set free because regenerated.

This is the new age, where no longer is anyone pointed out and under siege. The different Kingdom is that of non-institutional (sometimes yawn-inducing) expectations.

The creative states of any infant - out of the loop, but sensitive - are welcomed and awakened, rather than pulled to one side and silenced.

The authentic engine of history is in a dedicated but open and quiet spontaneous, natural, innate power.

Whether in reversals (even epochal ones) or in the quest for integral human development, or in the relentless pursuit of peace, such a baptismal attitude knows how to start again from scratch.

"If it is a question of starting again, it will always be from the least" [cf. encyclical Fratelli Tutti n.235] not from the already accomplished.

Resigned energy is in fact the typical resource of even the least capable and most irrelevant of authentic disciples.

It is a unique virtue, and an incomparable spirit that does not deprive existence of space.

On the contrary, it loosens real knots and does not impoverish things.

To internalise and live the message:

What, to you, means everything?

And added value?

What if the smallest in the kingdom is Jesus himself?

That you are miserable and unable to triumph, do you consider it nothing? or does it block you?

Does the community accommodate your desires or pull them to one side?

Because Elijah

At the time, in the Palestinian area, economic hardship and Roman rule forced people to retreat to an individual model of life.

The problems of subsistence and social order had resulted in a crumbling of relationship life (and bonds) both in clans and in families themselves.

Clan nuclei, which had always provided assistance, support and concrete defence for the weakest and most distressed members.

Everyone expected that the coming of Elijah and the Messiah would have a positive outcome in the reconstruction of fraternal life, which had been eroded at the time.

As it was said: "to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the sons and the hearts of the sons back to the fathers" [Mal 3:22-24 announced precisely the sending of Elijah] in order to rebuild the disintegrated coexistence.

Obviously the recovery of the people's internal sense of identity was frowned upon by the ruling system. Let alone the Jesuit figure of the Calling by Name, which would have opened the people's pious life wide to a thousand possibilities.

John had forcefully preached a rethinking of the idea of conquered freedom (the crossing of the Jordan), the rearrangement of established religious ideas (conversion and forgiveness of sins in real life, outside the Temple) and social justice.

Having an evolved project of reform in solidarity (Lk 3:7-14), in practice it was the Baptizer himself who had already fulfilled the mission of the awaited Elijah [Mt 17:10-12; Mk 9:11-13].

For this reason he had been taken out of the way: he could reassemble a whole people of outcasts - outcasts both from the circle of power and of the verticist, accommodating, servile, and collaborationist religiosity.

A watertight compartmentalised devotion, which allowed absolutely no 'remembrance' of themselves, nor of the old communitarian social order, prone to sharing.

In short, the system of things, interests, hierarchies, forced to take root in that unsatisfactory configuration. But here is Jesus, who does not bend.

Whoever has the courage to embark on a journey of biblical spirituality and Exodus learns that everyone has a different way of going out and being in the world.

So, is there a wise balance between respect for self, context, and others?

Jesus is presented by Mt to his communities as the One who wanted to continue the work of Kingdom building.

With one fundamental difference: with respect to the bearing of ethno-religious conceptions, the Master does not propose to all a kind of ideology of body, which ends up depersonalising the eccentric gifts of the weak - those unpredictable to an established mentality, but which trace a future.

In the climate of the clan that has been strengthened, it is not infrequently those without weight and those who know only abysses (and not summits) who come as if driven to the assent of a reassuring conformation of ideas - instead of a dynamic one - and a forge of wider acceptance.

Those who know no summits but only poverty, precisely in moments of crisis are the first invited by adverse circumstances to obscure their view of the future.

The miserable remain the ones who are unable to look in another direction and move, charting a different destiny - precisely because of tares external to them: cultural, of tradition, of income, or 'spiritual'.

All recognisable boxes, perhaps not alarming at times, but far removed from our nature. 

And right away: with the condemnation within reach of common judgement [for lack of homologation].

Sentence that wants to clip the wings, annihilate the hidden and secret atmosphere that truly belongs to personal uniqueness, and lead us all - even exasperatedly.

The Lord proposes an assembly life of character, but not stubborn or targetted - not careless ... as in the extent to which it is forced to go in the same old course as always. Or in the same direction as the chieftains.

Christ wants a more luxuriant collaboration that makes good use of resources (internal and otherwise) and differences.

Arrangement for the unprecedented: so that, for example, falls or inexorable tensions are not camouflaged - on the contrary, they become opportunities, unknown and unthinkable but very fruitful for life.

Here even crises become important, indeed fundamental, in order to evolve the quality of being together - in the richness of the "polyhedron" that as Pope Francis writes "reflects the confluence of all the partialities that in it maintain their originality" [Evangelii Gaudium no. 236].

Without regenerating oneself, only by repeating and tracing collective modalities - from the sphere model (ibid.) - or from others, that is, from nomenclature, not personally re-elaborated or valorised, one does not grow; one does not move towards one's own unrepeatable mission.

One does not fill the lacerating sense of emptiness.

By attempting to manipulate characters and personalities to guide them to 'how they should be', one does not feel good about oneself or even side by side. The perception of esteem and adequacy is not conveyed to the many different ones, nor is the sense of benevolence - let alone joie de vivre.

Curved or trial-and-error trajectories suit the Father's perspective, and our unrepeatable growth.

Difference between religiosity and Faith.

By His Name

(Kingdom of God, Messianic Kingdom, Divine People summoned in the Church)

1. We read in the Constitution Lumen Gentium of the Second Vatican Council that "believers in Christ (God) has willed to call them into the Holy Church, which . . . prepared in the history of the people of Israel and in the Old Covenant . . . was manifested by the outpouring of the (Holy) Spirit' (Lumen Gentium, 2). We devoted the previous catechesis to this preparation of the Church in the Old Covenant, in which we saw that, in Israel's progressive awareness of God's plan through the revelations of the prophets and the facts of its own history, the concept of a future kingdom of God, far higher and more universal than any prediction of the fate of the Davidic dynasty, was becoming increasingly clear. Today we turn to the consideration of another historical fact, dense with theological significance: Jesus Christ begins his messianic mission with the proclamation: "The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mk 1:15). Those words mark the entrance "into the fullness of time", as St Paul would say (cf. Gal 4:4), and prepare the passage to the New Covenant, founded on the mystery of the redemptive incarnation of the Son and destined to be an eternal Covenant. In the life and mission of Jesus Christ, the kingdom of God is not only "near" (Lk 10:9), but is already present in the world, already acting in human history. Jesus himself says it: "The kingdom of God is in your midst" (Lk 17:21).

2. The difference in level and quality between the time of preparation and the time of fulfilment - between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant - is made known by Jesus himself when, speaking of his forerunner John the Baptist, he says: "Amen, I say to you, among those born of women there has not arisen one greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he" (Matthew 11: 11). John, from the banks of the Jordan (and from his prison), certainly contributed more than anyone else, even more than the ancient prophets (cf. Lk 7:26-27), to the immediate preparation of the ways of the Messiah. However, he remains in a sense still on the threshold of the new kingdom, which entered the world with the coming of Christ and is in the process of manifestation with his messianic ministry. Only through Christ do men become the true "children of the kingdom": that is, of the new kingdom far superior to that of which the contemporary Jews considered themselves the natural heirs (cf. Mt 8:12).

3. The new kingdom has an eminently spiritual character (...)

4. This transcendence of the kingdom of God is given by the fact that it originates not from a human initiative alone, but from the plan, design and will of God himself. Jesus Christ, who makes it present and implements it in the world, is not just one of the prophets sent by God, but the Son consubstantial with the Father, who became man through the Incarnation. The kingdom of God is thus the kingdom of the Father and his Son. The kingdom of God is the kingdom of Christ; it is the kingdom of heaven that has opened on earth to allow men to enter this new world of spirituality and eternity (...)

Together with the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit also works for the realisation of the Kingdom already in this world. Jesus himself reveals it: the Son of Man "casts out demons by the Spirit of God", and for this reason "the kingdom of God has surely come among you" (Mt 12:28) (...)

7. The messianic kingdom, brought about by Christ in the world, is revealed and its meaning definitively clarified in the context of the passion and death on the cross. Already at the entry into Jerusalem an event takes place, arranged by Christ, which Matthew presents as the fulfilment of a prophetic prediction, that of Zechariah about the "king riding on a donkey, a colt son of a donkey" (Zech 9:9; Mt 21:5). In the prophet's mind, Jesus' intent and the evangelist's interpretation, the donkey meant meekness and humility. Jesus was the meek and humble king entering the Davidic city, where by his sacrifice he would fulfil the prophecies about true messianic kingship.

This kingship becomes very clear during the interrogation Jesus underwent at Pilate's tribunal (...) the one before the Roman governor

8. It is a declaration that concludes the whole ancient prophecy that runs through the history of Israel and becomes fact and revelation in Christ. Jesus' words make us grasp the gleams of light that pierce the darkness of the mystery condensed in the trinomial: Kingdom of God, Messianic Kingdom, People of God summoned in the Church. In this wake of prophetic and messianic light, we can better understand and repeat, with a clearer understanding of the words, the prayer taught to us by Jesus (Mt 6:10): "Thy Kingdom come". It is the kingdom of the Father, which entered the world with Christ; it is the messianic kingdom that through the work of the Holy Spirit develops in man and in the world to ascend into the bosom of the Father, in the glory of heaven.

[Pope John Paul II, General Audience 4 September 1991].