Missione Salute n. 4/2016

‘Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed’ (2 Timothy 3:14). Paul’s exhortations to Timothy concern us all.  One is dealing here with the Word and resisting attempts that seek to make us replace it with other words.

The Word should be proclaimed, independently of whether the circumstances are opportune or not. Often those circumstances that appear to be less favourable are the most fertile when it comes to sowing seeds. Apart from this, it would be a fine thing if men of the Church showed that they were able to ‘annoy’ important figures as well. However, the exhortation of Paul to continue in what we have believed does not concern only the domain of faith and faithfulness to the Word – it also concerns the entire life of a believer.

The true disciple

A Christian is one who enrols in the ‘resistance’. A Christian ‘resists’ an order not founded upon justice and opposes it. Believing ‘resists’ with an open face everything that removes space from freedom, that offends the dignity of man, and every form of enslavement, dehumanisation, degradation, and prevarication by the powers that be.

The true disciple of Christ ‘engages in resistance’ against all phantoms, fundamentalisms, wherever they appear, in his or her own home as well. A Christian who ‘chooses freedom’ engages in meaningful actions – even if they are risky – that disturb the persuasive tyrannies of fashion, the liturgies of conformism, the overbearing attitudes of the master of the moment, and the aberrations of power. He or she remains steady despite the brazen provocations of advertising and propaganda; despite the influences of the environment, the impetuous shoves of the ‘prevailing wind’.

A Christian who enrols in resistance forgoes the attractions of peaceful and privileged positions, careers that have been helped, and guaranteed titles. He or she accepts with a sense of pride that he or she belongs to a minority that is vigilant and awakens people from a dream provoked by artificial methods to infect the masses.

He or she does not go down well-worn roads, even if privileged tracks are offered, but, instead, follows an uncomfortable geography and those lonely pathways that are suggested by his or her conscience.

 A ‘Venturesome’ Faith

When Paul reached the sunset of his life he engaged in a rapid assessment of his life and at the end of it, summing things up, he could affirm that he had achieved a great result: ‘I kept the faith’.

Certainly his faith was not an easy faith – it was a faith repeatedly put to the test: difficulties of all kinds, obstacles, disappointments, not being understood, opposition, persecution…

However, one should make clear that the secret of his success did not lie in being immobile. He himself defined himself as a runner – he completed the race. Paul ran until the last moment…Only in this way did he manage to keep the faith. His most prudent defence, indeed, lay in stopping. The ‘deposit’! It was safe when it was taken far away, handed over to many hands in a more or less aware way, offered to everyone, made available to anybody, despite the evident disapproval of prudent ‘conservatives’ of a gift that they held to be exclusive to them.

The place of safekeeping for the deposit of the faith was not a text or a palace but the heart of an impassioned individual on a journey. The faith was safe when it travelled openly on the roads of men. Paul kept the faith because he did not confine himself to defending it, to engaging in polemic against his enemies. Instead, he spread it; he irradiated it; he took it far away.

He resolutely opposed those regressive impulses that sought to conserve the message of Christ within the boundaries of Palestine; he adopted courageous approaches; he made unpredictable sorties into enemy territory; he allowed himself to be provoked by people far away, by different cultures; he spoke in a frank way and said what he thought; he offered the essential and abandoned legalistic dross.

‘I kept the faith’.

Yes, Paul kept the faith because he faced up to very stormy trips by sea, without ever getting entrenched in defensive positions.

He kept the faith…because he ventured it.

Paul could declare, without the sin of pride or presumption, that he had won his race because he had had a fundamental insight: one cannot reach one’s destination by remaining blocked (like certain purported champions of the faith) on the starting line, perhaps shouting against those who in their eyes have the unforgiveable failing of moving and perhaps running ahead. In conclusion, Paul kept the faith because he did not consider Damascus a point of arrival but a point of departure. He did not ‘arrive’ in Damascus. He set off from Damascus.

Alessandro Pronzato