(Lk 17:7-10)
Increase Faith? The Gift is not a material alms, but an Appeal. Therefore Jesus doesn’t even answer - nevertheless he makes us reflect on the results of the eventual adhesion.
A minimum involvement would suffice and extraordinary results would be produced in the world (v.6); in communities, in families, in personal life.
We would achieve the impossible and important. The real problems would be solved. Even the simplest actions would be transformed.
Very provocative words, those of Jesus, that neither condemn a priori nor demonize the Way contrary to his.
But he puts us on notice about how things work in the pyramidal environment (vv.7-9).
«When you have done all that you have been "ordered"...» (v.10).
The Lord alludes to the obedience of the Torah, and would like to free us from the obsessive, limiting, petty and anxiety-inducing yoke of the ancient Law.
It produces impoverishment of souls.
It’s as if the Lord were saying:
«Try along to follow the predictable, plastered, shock-free model... Try and you will see on your skin what inconclusiveness, what lacerations and disasters it produces!».
In a perspective of Faith and human growth in Christ, the standard scheme (limiting) «subjected-Sovereign» must be abandoned.
It removes expressive richness from the Announcement and from life.
The welcoming-likeness Faith will lead us instead to grow from ‘useless’ slaves to Sons; collaborators and allies of the Father.
From narrow submissive and obedient slaves, to family members, friends and consanguineous-resembling.
Otherwise we will remain in the childish condition of big kids and roundsmen «of no account» (v.10) who do not express themselves or reinterpret, but remain subjected and do only "what they must".
The religion of merits and roles is deleterious; it produces malaise, it goes on by inertia and with a defensive attitude.
It does not reinvent the present, nor does it open the future.
It does not listen to needs, rather it pushes us to imprint relationships on the basis of selfishness, even spiritual.
Here we no longer look at what spontaneously appears - forcing our faculties to all predictable, conformist assessments.
Life therefore impoverishes, desertifying itself, because it’s intimidated.
Becoming an absurd farce that Jesus doesn’t want: a jumble of swampy attitudes, unable to reactivate us - inattentive to special actions that turn routine into adventure.
To paraphrase the encyclical Brothers All, in those conditions it would sound «like madness» also to elaborate «great goals for the development of our entire human family» (n.16).
There would be no sense of the Mystery, never perceiving it in the furrows of history: we would drag ourselves into remedies, protecting only the usual grind newspaper.
Therefore no unexpected change, no unexplained transformation, no exceptional recovery (v.6).
No unpredictability would see the ‘sacred’ in the thousand situations that Providence invents, stimulating new answers.
The mystic Ibn Ata Allah - Master of the two Sciences [wisdom of analysis and experience of mystical inebriation] - argued:
«If you want that the door of the fear is opened to you, look at what from you goes to Him. If you want that the door of the Hope is opened to you, look at what comes from Him to you».
[Tuesday 32nd wk. in O.T. November 12, 2024]
