Valson Thampu

Remember the notice on the forehead of the Nativity Narrative: ‘There was no room in the inn’? That banner sat in brooding silence grinning at the Holy Babe in Bethlehem. This seemingly matter-of-fact detail points, in the larger context, to a perennial truth. Institutions, including the church, that function ‘inn-like’, will have no room for human needs. The notice ‘no room’; need not mean, ‘no room for anyone at all’. It only means ‘no room for the likes of Joseph and Mary’, laden with two demerits. They are poor. Also, they have needs that are earthy and inconvenient to meet. Inns are not hospitals, after all.

But there are two conditions in which even hotels get transformed into make-shift hospitals: when the needs of the super-rich are involved. Secondly, in the face of the pressing needs of one’s own kith and kin. Every institution is stretchable; provided there are compelling reasons for it.

The church, if it is a spiritual institution, needs to go beyond the worldly, transactional model symbolised by the inn. Its radius of relevance and range of responsibility have to be large enough to enfold the ‘the alien and the stranger’. The logic for this is simple. Spirituality is predicated on meeting human needs; not on making profit. The mustard seed of the Kingdom, in Jesus’s parable, becomes home to ‘birds of the air’. Its religious counterpart is the ‘one true, universal, Catholic church’. How can church be catholic if it is not universal in its sense of responsibility? The challenge is to be Catholic and catholic at the same time. Arguably, the most crucial part of it is the duty to be catholic to the lost within the Catholic Church.

In this light, consider this striking feature of Jesus’s outlook. Unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees, he was positive and welcoming to everyone. He identified himself, as in the parable of the sheep and the goats, with the ‘stranger’. Jesus prescribed accepting the stranger as an essential strength for his followers. Those who lack it invite rejection, ironically, as strangers to God.

The issue here is not that the church is shrinking numerically. That does matter; but it is only the worldly aspect of a larger spiritual issue. That aspect pertains to what it means to be church. To the Catholic Church in particular, salvation is only through the church. Given that, the need to address the present state of affairs is compellingly clear.

Jesus stood the Jewish idea of church on its head. While the Jewish priestly outlook regarded the temple as the exclusive destination for insiders, Jesus envisaged the Kingdom of God as an outreach to all. While the religiously faithful trooped to the temple, Jesus remained the Siloam, or the one who is sent to all in need. It was a clear sign of the degeneration of Judaism that the nexus between the Temple of Jerusalem and the Pool of Bethsaida had snapped. Jesus restored it by way of attending ‘the Festivals of the Jews’ (Jn.5). The Temple can become ‘My Father’s house’ only when those who are languishing outside of it are incorporated into it. This incorporation is the festive essence from a spiritual point of view.

Now regard the three parables in chapter 15 of St. Luke’s gospel: the parable of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son. ‘Lost-ness’ is the core element in them. What is the essence of lost-ness? Is it not ‘belonging-ness’ that turned sour? Can you lose anyone, unless she or he belonged to you first? Strictly speaking, ‘stranger’ is a non-spiritual category. By being born, ‘in the image and likeness of God’, we become part of the web of humanity. Every baby is born universal. It is later that, as Wordsworth puts it, shades of the prison house creep upon human beings as labels of discrimination and alienation. Jesus was a living protest, as St Paul realized, against all walls of division. God is a seeker after the lost because God is Whole. So, those who seem ‘strangers’ to a limited human perspective also belong to us as ‘children of God’. To realize this, though, we need to be children of God, even as we belong to denominational confessions.

The embryonic Jerusalem community was instructed by the risen Christ to wait till they received the power of the Holy Spirit so that they could be witnesses ‘in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria and unto the end of the earth’ (Acts.1:8). Put simply it means, put your house in order first. Many a church is mindful –or, so they assume- of the duty to reach out and ‘preach to the nations’ (Mtt. 28:19). But, I doubt if churches are aware of the need to reach out to the lost in their own midst. Surely, it should concern us that the world is perishing. But it should concern us even more that we are in disarray ourselves. The un-reached are not only far away from the church. The churched un-reached is a greater symptom of pastoral pathology.

Consider this phenomenon from the perspective of church renewal. No church has ever been renewed by holding renewal meetings, evangelistic crusades, meditation sessions, miracle-healing jamborees, and so on. The most powerful catalyst for church renewal is the awareness of the need to equip the church to minster to the lost within. I call this the Bethsaida-model of church renewal. Labelling and putting aside the inside-strangers is an evident sign of spiritual debility. It runs counter to the vision of Jesus.

Why this is not addressed upfront is not far to seek. It cannot be done, without repentance. In her preoccupation to preach repentance, church has forgotten her need to repent. The goal of repentance is to become authentically oneself. The church is the Ark, reminiscent of the days of Noah. This Ark too must be all-inclusive. A church run for itself and its loyal members resembles an inn. It falls short of the role-model of Jesus Christ, who came to seek and restore what is lost (Lk. 19:10). No priority merits greater and more urgent attention today than the need to minister to the lost in our own midst: the many sons and daughters who are, in the words of the parable of the prodigal son, in ‘the far country’ of lost-ness.

What should concern us most is not a certain liturgical style or an ecclesial administration or a thrust of church geo-politics. It is whether the church is, or is not, what it is mandated to be. As Jesus said, ‘If the salt loses its saltiness, with what can be it be salted again?’ The strategies resorted to deflect attention from this regrettable state will aggravate the condemnation it generates and perpetuates.