St Luke reports how at one point in a journey which Christ was making from Galilee in the north southwards towards Jerusalem, they passed through a Samaritan village which refused to receive him “because his face was set toward Jerusalem” (such was the mutual hostility between Jews and Samaritans). On seeing this James and John asked Jesus if they should call in an “airstrike” and zap the village: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” The response they received was a rebuke from Jesus, and undoubtedly an interior sigh from Jesus thinking that he had a long way to go with these men. The “airstrike” reaction to the stubborn rejection of Christ is a perennial temptation, and I would suggest it has been on the increase since our terrible abortion referendum result last May. It is the temptation – which I suspect we all feel – to grow bitterly dismissive of the establishment figures set on dismantling the last vestiges of our Christian heritage. And with the temptation comes a grim defeatism: the conviction that there is no way back for our little country, that after a millennium and a half the Christian project has finally floundered in Ireland.
After the “airstrike” comes the circling of the wagons, or maybe the digging of a catacomb in which to sit out the final days of our tottering civilisation. This is the temptation to disengage from a society which seems so to want the final disappearance of Catholics from its midst. The hostility is not violent of course – at least here in Ireland – but is grindingly relentless. The media commentaries during the visit of Pope Francis to the country in August is a case in point: even non-practicing friends of mine were startled by the wall-to-wall denigration of the Catholic Church during those bitter-sweet days. What happens on the air waves is a constant feature of our universities, and other institutions I’m sure as well. People young and old speak of the unabashed hostility towards all things Catholics voiced in their social circles.
In the face of this, one could be forgiven for bowing out, for disengaging from social life to spare oneself all that unpleasantness. We feel that there’s nothing to be done in a society which appears to have become tone deaf to anything beyond an animal existence; all that is left is to disengage from an irredeemably sordid and hostile world. But for the Christian, this is simply not an option. Christianity is a religion of engagement with the world, for the simple fact that it is the religion of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is “the greatest love story ever told”. Each Christmas we try to get our heads around it: God comes into our dark, savage little world. But God doesn’t come “holding his nose” as it were, he comes into this world loving it. What a declaration of love is contained in the Gospel line: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (John 3:16). And what a world God declares his love for: the world of the bloody Roman amphitheatres, of Corinthian brothels, of human sacrifices on Irish bogs, of Julius Caesar’s gruesome wartime atrocities in Gaul…. God’s declaration of love for the world is not conditional on a big clean up. That kind of love we might be able to get our heads around, but such love for such a sinful world surpasses our comprehension. And in Bethlehem Christ came into just such a world. And God’s excessive love pays off; from the very outset it melted the cold hearts of sinful men, and has been melting such hearts ever since. Christ does not so much abolish the sin of mankind as drown it in an abundance of good.
And it appears to me that one of the most important things about the Incarnation is that through it God tells a dark world that he has not given up hope on it; even more, he continued to love it. The very presence of Christ in a fallen world is an infallible statement that the world is capable and worthy of redemption.
We, as followers of Christ, must be the continuation of this divine engagement with an apparently irredeemable world – through our families, jobs, friendships, social circles, cultural interests, political action etc. God’s infallibly restorative love is present now in each Christian’s continued presence in – and love for – the world. If we were to respond to the hostile environment by disengaging, we would in effect be condemning it to death.
Sometime in the second century a Christian apologist penned a brief letter usually entitled The Letter to Diognetus. It may be one of the earliest example of such Christian writing. In it the anonymous author compares the Christians to the soul in the body:
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together.
The whole letter is wonderfully simple, and of course unmistakably relevant, even two millennia later. But one of its key points is that Christians love the world – otherwise they could not play the role of soul to the world: “Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body”. These words could have been penned for Ireland of the twenty-first century.
The soul – Christians – love the body, because there is so much that is lovable in the body. Sometimes our disappointments might lead us to a pessimism which blinds us to the good in society. It is not all bad! It strikes me that the insights of St Josemaría Escrivá in this regard are more necessary than ever for Catholics tempted to despondency and disengagement in hostile times. However in hostile times it is more important than ever for Christians not to abandon the world, as he puts so clearly here:
Many things, whether they be material, technical, economic, social, political or cultural… when left to themselves, or left in the hands of those who lack the light of the faith, become formidable obstacles to the supernatural life. They form a sort of closed shop which is hostile to the Church.
You, as a Christian and, perhaps, as a research worker, writer, scientist, politician or labourer… have the duty to sanctify those things. Remember that the whole universe — as the Apostle says — is groaning as in the pangs of labour, awaiting the liberation of the children of God (Furrow, 311).
And in doing this, the Christian becomes a great source of hope for others who are otherwise tempted to think that whole fields of human endeavour and experience are simply rotten:
“It is a time of hope, and I live off this treasure. It is not just a phrase, Father,” you tell me, “it is a reality.” Well then… bring the whole world, all the human values which attract you so very strongly — friendship, the arts, science, philosophy, theology, sport, nature, culture, souls — bring all of this within that hope: the hope of Christ.
This is the task that awaits us Christians in the Ireland at the end of 2018: to be the continuation of the inextinguishable hope that Christ brought into the world with his humble birth in Bethlehem.