Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter

Lectionary: 274

 So they said to Jesus,

“Sir, give us this bread always.” 

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life;

whoever comes to me will never hunger,

and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

 

The nineteenth century Cardinal Saint John Henry Newman predicted the decline of religion in Eurocentric societies as people moved away from Catholicism through Protestantism. The freedom to pick and choose, mix and match religious doctrines is a one-way street to irrelevance. Someone might develop a perfectly comfortable set of beliefs, but they won’t persuade their children of that custom-made concoction.

If your religion doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable often, it cannot be from God. The Truth must be larger, broader, more subtle, more substantial, and more dangerous than anything we can conceive or understand. We should worship Truth as it has been revealed through these several thousand years; a religion born of one moment in human history will die with its generation. 

We are seeing religion decline as society atomizes and polarizes; and we are watching the ominous rise of conspirituality, a convergence of conspiracy theories and personal spirituality. Where spirituality is consumer-oriented and hyper-individualistic, conspiracy theories gather well-meaning, but gullible people. They find mysterious  "patterns" in unrelated events both recent and historical, and persuade their followers to fear shadowy, diabolical influences. They are searching for a real world religion like Catholicism, where dogmas and life intersect. But they are looking without the help of divine revelation. They find only fantasies of their own making. 

Like the mystery religions of ancient Rome, conspirituality reveals arcane "secrets" to the initiated, and persuade them that they are -- or might be -- victims of dangerous multinational corporations. Energized, believers may strike out in self-defense; but when their "enemies" are everywhere and nowhere, the violence must be random and senseless. At best they are comically harmless. But, as we saw on January 6, they might kill people without a shadow of remorse or regret, while their Christian leaders look on in impassive consent. 

Jesus, the Revealed Word of God, through the Catholic religion, calls us back to our senses. In this moment when billions of people are like sheep without a shepherd, we hear the Lord speak, 

…whoever comes to me will never hunger,

And who ever believes in me will never thirst.

Jesus does not customize his teaching to fit our changing opinions and preferences. He has nothing to say to the cafeteria Christian who picks through a smorgasbord of religious practices and beliefs to find something to fit their needs. His becoming human, even to the point of dying on a cross, is compromise enough. His cross shows how far our God will go to accommodate our need for salvation. He can do no more; he can give no more for there is nothing more to give.