Economy of Joy/9 - Christianity loses its transformative power if the Gospel is turned into a manual for “binding” instead of “unbinding”
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/07/2024
At the heart of the Jubilee and its humanism is the shabbat, the Sabbath, which we have been repeating, with many nuances, since the first instalment of this series of articles. A shabbat that is the deep soul of the entire Bible, Old and New Testaments, its leaven, the meaning of its vision of God, of relationships and of the world.
Jesus of Nazareth could not help but love Shabbat, a biblical institution deeply consistent with the law of his Kingdom, with its gratuitousness and universal fraternity that includes the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky. The Sabbath was the pledge of the new world he announced, a continuous and eternal Sabbath, where there is no difference between free and slave, between man and woman, between humans and animals, between us and the earth, where the seventh day is the fulfilment of the prophecy of every day. Why, then, do the Gospels tell us of a Jesus who often violated the rules of the Sabbath? ‘It happened that on the Sabbath Jesus was passing through the grain fields, and his disciples, as they walked along, began to pick the heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look! Why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?”’ (Mk 2:23-24). And in the Gospel according to John: ‘Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your stretcher and walk.” ... But that day was the Sabbath’ (Jn 5:8-9b). And we could continue with many other episodes that show Jesus as a serial transgressor of the Sabbath and other norms of the Law of Moses (fasting, for example).
What then was the Sabbath for Jesus and his community? The Kingdom of Heaven is a liberation from all religion. The Sabbath would have been, in the profound biblical logic, the spiritual device to protect the Covenant from becoming a religion like that of other peoples. The whole Bible is a tenacious attempt to liberate its God, YHWH, from the logic of the surrounding religions. Through Moses, God had also given the Law-Torah, as we know, but that law was different from all others, above all because of the presence in it of the Sabbath, and therefore of the sabbatical year and the Jubilee, a paradoxical and prophetic passage of law that was supposed to make the Law something very different from the norms of all religions. Between the six days and the seventh there is the same dynamic tension that we find between the Law and the prophets, which the New Testament summarises in the comparison between Moses and Christ. For biblical prophecy, Shabbat is not the exception to the rule of the Law, but rather its prophecy, that which makes the Torah something more than a founding text of a religion. If, then, Shabbat also becomes a prescription of the Law, if it is lived not as a sublimation of the Law but as one religious norm among many, Shabbat is no longer salt or leaven, it loses its active principle and does nothing but reinforce the legal nature of religion. The Judaism known to Jesus, or at least what the Gospels tell us (streaked with anti-Jewish polemics), seems to have lost precisely this subversive and prophetic meaning of the Sabbath. Jesus saw that men had turned a gift from YHWH into a bond for men for the benefit of God. This is a very common practice in all religions, which almost always end up becoming real limitations on human freedom for imagined offerings pleasing to God. And Jesus, with a saying that is probably original to him (‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’: Mk 2:27), tells us something decisive about his vision of God, the world and life. The “Son of Man” presents himself as “lord of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:28) to free us from the many wrong Sabbaths of our religions and ideologies. To help us rediscover the true prophetic meaning of the Sabbath, Jesus asked his disciples to free themselves from the “law” of the Sabbath in order to find the “spirit” of the Sabbath. This is very similar to the relationship with the temple: the Sabbath is the true “worship” that Jesus announces to the Samaritan woman (Jn 4). The Sabbath is the temple of time, and the biblical God can only be encountered by freeing oneself from the temple and the Sabbath, in order to rediscover both “in spirit and truth”.
Jesus' message of liberation from the Sabbath of religion is also addressed to his church, to Christians of yesterday and today, and is a constant invitation to free oneself and others from the new laws that the church itself has created since its earliest days.
The encounter with Jesus frees us from every religion of the Law, including Christianity itself, including the very idea-ideology of Jesus Christ that every Christian constructs for himself. We can hope to encounter Jesus if we are able to free ourselves from his “religion” as well, in order to find his Kingdom. This is his “metanoia”, the U-turn of life, which, when accomplished, brings us into another world, into a new city. The Kingdom is not a religion, but liberation from all cults in order to enter the age of the spirit. One cannot enter the Gospel, let alone Paul, without this understanding of metanoia. The Kingdom that Jesus proclaims is therefore first and foremost a liberation from the burden that religions place on the shoulders of their faithful. When we encounter the person and message of Jesus, if we are already within a religion, the first thing we must do is free ourselves from it, become free from its snares, undergo metanoia, be reborn in the spirit in order to begin believing again as children. This essential operation is then repeated many times in life. Because every new idea of God soon secretes its idol (of a community, a movement, a person, of ourselves...), which must be destroyed every day by beginning a new following of the naked, subtle voice. Christianity has lost all its transforming and liberating power every time we have turned it into one of the many religions of the earth, into imago imperi, empires large and small, where the law has subjugated the spirit, the Gospel has been transformed into a treatise on ethics, into manuals for confessors and syllabi to “bind” instead of “loosen”, to define who was inside and who was outside the boundaries of the empire, to excommunicate, to defend at all costs the boundaries of the sacred citadel. When we read the Gospels, then, we should be very clear that the scribes, Pharisees, and doctors of the law with whom Jesus comes into conflict are not only those of his historical time but are representatives of the Law, religion, and theology that every religion generates, including the religion born of the Gospel of Jesus, even though he only wanted to announce a new Kingdom, the eternal Sabbath.
We must remember that at the origin of biblical faith there is an experience of liberation, and whenever we do not read it as an experience of liberation, we are in a relationship with an idol, even if we call it YHWH or Jesus. That original liberation gradually begins to generate cults, liturgies, dogmas, ethical laws, and a priestly class. God begins to be imagined by his representatives as a superior being who feeds on human sacrifices, and they begin to teach that we must diminish so that God may grow. A religion that becomes a “zero-sum game” between God and men, where the pain of men and women becomes joy for God, and vice versa. Every conversion begins with “shabbat shalom”, entering a new day freed from the burdens of the first six, in an empty temple without time and without sacrifices.
But there is more. Every important encounter with another person should be introduced by “shabbat shalom”; it should be an entry into a different day, a preparation to welcome a mystery, the mystery enclosed in each person, the mystery of the other. This attitude is good in every interpersonal encounter, but it is essential in every spiritual and charismatic community. Communities live well and are places of authentic liberation from the many traps hidden in relationships when we are able to say “shabbat shalom” to every “brother” and “sister”, when we are aware that we are facing a mystery, and therefore know how to respect and cherish it. This respect is not always present, and perhaps not essential, in families and friendships, but it is indispensable in spiritual communities. We live together, we share our table, our work, our choir, we stand shoulder to shoulder in liturgy and prayer. We are often immersed in a great closeness, fraternity and sisterhood, which are that “relational good” that we create every moment and that nourishes us like bread and milk every morning. But communities wither if and when we lose the awareness that in the person who has lived next to me for years, for decades, there is an intimate mystery that remains largely unknown to me (to others, and to the other). L'inmiarsi e l'intuarsi, which gave us Dante's immense poetry - “if I could understand you as you understand me” (Paradiso, IX,81) - is the life of paradise, but on earth it is always a partial and imperfect experience, which must coexist with a necessary spiritual chastity that knows how to stop in front of the mystery of the other, without giving in to the temptation of gluttony for its sublime beauty. And to learn throughout life to rejoice in knowing how to be content with those few glimpses that, on particularly bright mornings, we can glimpse from the right distance; and then to discover the happiness of “quia”, that is, to rejoice in what is given to us: ‘Be content, human people, in “quia”’ (Purgatorio, III, 37).
It is chastity towards that irreducible spiritual core that marks, and must mark, a limit in the necessary pericrisis of interiority. When this limit is violated, communities become groups of cohabitants who, at best, generate some social work and provide some meritorious services, and at worst produce pain, neurosis and violence. A sabbatical community, on the other hand, is one that asks a lot of everyone, where each and every one lives authentic relationships of communion and closeness, where mutual responsibility for all reigns, where everyone sees others change, evolve, suffer and rejoice. For six days, he accompanies them, listens to them, admonishes them, encourages them, but on the seventh day he knows how to stop, how to recognise and accept ignorance about the mystery of that different day of the soul, because he learns that it is in that inviolable garden where the most beautiful flowers live, which do not die if we are able not to pick them.
