After decline comes renewal

The history of the People of God as told in the Old Testament is a sequence of stumbles. As the Children of Israel slowly fused into the Jewish nation, they repeatedly fell short of the fidelity to the one God that Moses had committed them to. They suffered various calamities, and were repeatedly warned by the prophets that they had brought this divine chastisement down on their own heads. And the cycle of decline and renewal was repeated each time as the words of the prophets were heeded and the people returned to the practices of the faith. Each time was different, but each time essentially the same.

There are important lessons here for the Church, particularly as Easter approaches. It is customary to read the Old Testament as anticipating the New, with Christ – the man of sorrows and suffering servant foretold by Isaiah – as the fulfilment of these prophecies. Indeed, in a reading now rejected by the Church, the tragedy that soon befell the Jews under Roman rule was once interpreted as punishment for their refusal to recognise Christ as their Messiah.

But the Church can make better use of this analogy, to explain itself to itself now. In calling itself the new People of God, without denouncing the original covenant with the Jews as invalid, it can also attribute to itself that Old Testament history of decline and renewal.

God sends prophets to make straight the way of the Lord, recall the faithful to obedience, and place the People of God again on the narrow path from which they had wandered. The betrayal for which the prophets castigated them had two characteristics, clearly linked: the worship of false gods, and neglect of the poor. It is not insignificant that those are two of the main evils being attacked under the present papacy. And the prophet denouncing them, in language biblical prophets would have been proud of, is Pope Francis. As with the Old Testament prophets, furthermore, the rebuke and call for repentance is again as much directed at wider society as at the religious establishment.

False gods are being worshipped again, the gods of power and wealth: in the Church, clericalism and all its abuses; the idolatrous presumption that a societas perfecta has already been achieved and is headquartered in the Vatican; the burying of financial and sexual scandal instead of addressing it; the appalling abuse of children by priests; reliance on the letter of the law rather than the spirit.

And in society at large: the pursuit of profit at all costs. Francis, in his exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, declared: “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.” And so the poor are being neglected again.

Just as the Old Testament records how the Hebrew People of God were returned to the light, so the Church, Christ’s mystical body, is also not immune to the cycle of death and rebirth, crucifixion and resurrection, as its own process of purification from sin. Easter has many meanings, and this is one of them. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow” (Isaiah 1:18).