“At that time Jesus exclaimed: ‘I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike’” (Mt 11:25).
Why did the wise and the learned, referring to some of the Sadducees, Pharisees and scribes, reject Jesus? One possibility is that Jesus challenged their idol of tradition. Even though Jesus did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it (cf. Mt 5:17), the invitation to go deeper was and continues to be challenging. This is certainly highlighted in the six antitheses that Jesus shared during his Sermon on the Mount that we explored not that long ago. Here is one such example: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil” (Mt 5: 28). Offer no resistance to one who is evil? Not only hard to swallow for people of Jesus’ time, but for us today as well.
Jesus offered then and continues to offer us today a share in the intimacy of the Trinitarian Love of God shared between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. To share in his Love, we need to resist being governed by holding blindly on to tradition for its own sake. Instead, we need to be open to growth, change, and renewal. Gerhard Lohfink, in his book, No Irrelevant Jesus, quotes the Polish philosopher Leszak Kolakowski: “A society in which tradition becomes a cult is condemned to stagnation; a society that tries to live entirely through revolt against tradition condemns itself to destruction” (Lohfink 2014, 2).
Many have left the Church or are barely hanging in there because they feel we are too steeped in tradition, rules, and laws Yet in doing so, they have left behind the secure ground or foundation, with no anchor in their life. On the other extreme are those who remain hunkered down, entrenched in a bunker of tradition fearing the secular tide, grasping, white knuckled, to tradition, but this stifles their growth.
Both tendencies are insufficient because at the root there is not a trust in or relationship with Jesus. Knowing Jesus helps balance the tension between each. Jesus invites us to remain anchored in the Truth of the deposit of faith that he has given while encouraging us to go deeper in our understanding, practice of our faith, and relationship with his Father. If we are not moving forward in our spiritual lives, we are moving backward. “Tradition then exists concretely as presence in faith, which again, as the in-dwelling of Christ, is antecedent to all its explicit formulations and is fertile and living, thus developing and unfolding throughout the ages” (Ratzinger, 123).
We are better when we resist the extremes of rejecting tradition altogether or idolizing tradition alone, and instead build on the foundation of Jesus Christ: “The Way, the Truth and the Life” (cf. Jn 14:6). Within the life of the Church, “we must not do away with its traditions, but at the same time, it must continually clarify, renew, and deepen them” (Lohfink 2014, 2).
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Photo: Close up of Our Lady of Manresa, St. Charles Church founded in 1819.
Lohfink, Gerhard. No Irrelevant Jesus: On Jesus and the Church Today. Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2014.
Ratzinger, Joseph in Introducing Communio Theology. Elk Grove Village, IL: Word on Fire, 2025.
Spiritual Stepping Stones 