From the Director - Can you not see it?
I once heard a theologian describe some Christians as "so heavenly-minded they were no earthly good." There are many Christians who live for heaven. Popular devotion has encouraged us to look on this life as "a vale of tears." But this was not Jesus' attitude to the world. He preached that "the Kingdom of God has come near" (Mk 1:15). It may await its consummation at the end of time but it was already present. He told John the Baptist's disciples, "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them" (Lk 7:22).
Reading the Gospels from our vantage point of faith and 2000 years of tradition, Jesus' miracles are impressive but I wonder how impressed the powerful and even the middle class of Jesus' time were with a few poor, lame and blind people being cured? Remember they were constantly asking him to prove he was God by working a God-sized miracle. It takes real sensitivity, insight and discernment to see where God is present, because it is rarely obvious. We can easily see where he isn't and get depressed; we don't always have the hope and faith to see where he is emerging. I think we need bifocals: to see the evil and to see beneath-the power of God breaking through. Unfortunately we cannot see the new with our old glasses.
Some years ago a wise Jesuit challenged me and the worldwide Columban leadership with these verses from Isaiah, "Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, can you not see it?" (Is 43:17ff). At the time we were depressed at what seemed to be our diminishing resources. It was difficult to see our future. We longed for the time when we had full seminaries and oodles of Columbans. Interestingly we were like the people Isaiah was talking to. They were exiled in Babylon and they longed for the good old days of the Exodus and the Temple. But Isaiah told them not to long for the former things because a new thing was happening, ‘can you not see it?' It's difficult to live at a time when the old certainties have been eroded and the new is not yet convincing. But if we are to be of some earthly good, then we need the bifocals that will help us recognise the power of God breaking through, the new things God is doing.
Fr Noel Connolly
director@columban.org.au
