Serving oneself and "the public”

(Lk 11:42-46)

The conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities takes on violent overtones, as the poltronists get hung up on the details and neglect the essentials.

In particular, the experts disdain the experience of Communion - which is indeed a project, but on the contrary a life insurance [with power and privileges].

According to the young Rabbi, the religious choice itself can be burdensome and intolerable.

Unfortunately, the devout option is not infrequently lost in the formalism of those who endlessly discuss petty precepts and forget the goals of inner commitment, in favour of a sort of circus show (v.43).

Indeed, there is no shortage of official notables who disdain service and choose honours, so that simply passing by them causes them to contract the same impurity of soul: average and normal life, internal corruption.

In short, the divine Law has been so burdened as to make sacred practice all artificial, asphyxiating, out of scale or preoccupied with minutiae.

For those who can stand the rigmarole, then, perfection in external things can feed pride even in inter-human relations.

The ancient spiritual fathers used to say that pride is a thief, because in the case of good deeds, self-love steals gratuitousness and feeds arrogance. Thus the Grace that enriches us no longer dictates our conduct.

Our readiness to build the Church in Christ demands that we be authentic and simple, not dehumanised; a sign of the Covenant, not hateful.

There is a counter-witness that stifles the growth of life and curtails the freedom of those who are animated by the Spirit of God: that of the popular leaders [Pharisees] and the hard-line jurists [scribes].

Not for nothing do they willingly leave privacy out of the arrangements they impose on others (v.46).

The experience of Love is 'law', not for the sake of a body, a pack, a group of interests, but for a rich conviviality of differences.

This is the 'norm', the 'canon' - if you like - but not to construct the impersonal good of the pressure group, and to be protected by it.

Although it would guarantee prestige in society - even ecclesial - it would become a sprawling, intrusive imposition.

The abstract, overly cerebral, ideological or fanciful gaze, and bigoted mummies, make the environment arid, dissipate energy, and make the experience of faith vacuous.

They insist on fulfilments, models, designs and penances, or conversely dissipations that drive love away, and discourage attempts to read oneself and dispositions from within.

Perhaps in every religion, observances - or 'big ideas' - have created that 'ancient' hypnotism of habitual mechanisms and enveloping atmospheres that make God a reassuring totem, a sacraliser of established positions.

He is a corrosive, punishing worm of passion, ruining people and the destiny of the whole people.

It is a matter, then, of running the utmost risk united with Christ - not to give in to the always lurking temptation to feel better: in favour of a long inner adventure; to touch those spaces where the Call by Name resembles no other.

It is in the intimate and in the candid relationship that we encounter our profound Calling, the unexpressed talents, the divine Author's signature.

In the uniqueness of character, from the Core, the Seed that does not lie guides the vocation; the Risen One who is present reveals himself to be understanding, gentle, attentive, absolutely genuine, personal.

Attention to details and trifles is only good and propulsive (v.42) if it is united with the intimate discovery of one's own singular Mission and Calling, a character that promotes growth, and our future.

Here the call to values that do not grow old, substantial - attentive to situations - does not imply contempt and disregard for what may seem secondary (but is unrepeatable): recognising the concrete woman and man.

Otherwise, the motive for our actions would remain the concern for our own fictitious fame. This would render petty and discredited the experience of Faith that activates us to explore, to make Exodus.

When the Law does not evolve within us and with us, in our inwardness and personality without measure, it will find a way to impose itself, torment us and slow down our experience of life, or contaminate and devastate it.

While Mt 23:27 speaks of whitewashed tombs, Lk speaks of hidden tombs, which cannot be seen (v.44).

The simple, naive, pure people who approach it do not realise that they are insisting on dead idols.

Even false teachers codify everything, and would like to normalise even belief and its expressions.

In the Semitic mentality, touching or treading on a tomb meant contracting impurity.

Jesus means that one must be very very careful of these very dangerous people.

Even in the primitive Christian communities, they gherminated and plagued souls, leading them away from God in the name of God.Manipulative guides, they diverted people away from the sense of the Good News in our favour, inoculating drop by drop a mentality that annihilated growth.

The recitation of disembodied, confusing, narrow and empty holiness (folklore and undergrowth) still retains deviant appearances.

But the proponents of the death of the soul are immediately recognisable: they are the ones who insist on sophisticated worldviews, on abstract ideas; on the quirks of idle pleasures, or of disciplinary appearances - and forget the objectives of the Kingdom.

The issue is crucial.

As Pope Francis reiterated in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, quoting one of his homilies (in Santiago de Cuba):

"We want to be a Church that serves, that leaves home, that leaves its temples, its sacristies, to accompany life, to sustain hope, to be a sign of unity [...] to build bridges, to break down walls, to sow reconciliation" (no.276).

Decisive work, achieved in a laborious and "artisanal" manner (no.217).

Even among his own people today, the Risen One does not mince his words, and he speaks out decisively against certain insuppressible diseases - abstract [too big] worldviews or attention to the unimportant - that bring people closer to the skeletons.

The living Christ strikes out in invective at the formalism of doctrines and outward practices, which delude themselves into extracting and chiselling lofty earthly situations, obsessively attending only to themselves.

The only thing that Jesus condemns without appeal here is the vain ambition in the exercise of pretended authority - by pomp - considering it a narcissistic workshop (by washed-up histrions).

Let us therefore help ourselves to bring the Word back inside, so that it becomes our factual face, without duplicity, with a broad hope, separated from the present scene.

To internalise and live the message:

Have you renounced the law of death, of manner and quiddity, preferring the law of life?

Or do you serve yourself and 'the public'?