STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND?

 

 

Paolo Cugini

 

And he said to them, Do you still not understand? (Mk 8:21).

It must not have been easy for the first disciples, both men and women, to follow that man from Nazareth. We often imagine their "yes" as a linear path, but the reality was one of enormous psychological and spiritual toil. They followed Jesus, they had abandoned their safety nets, yet the gap between the Master's proposal and their own experience was abysmal. It wasn't just a matter of intellectual understanding; it was a matter of dismantling an entire symbolic universe constructed over centuries of history.

The legacy of a rigid cultic paradigm weighed heavily on the minds of Jesus' contemporaries. Faith was understood as a system of sacrifices, prescriptions, and duties. At its center sat the image of a demanding God, a sovereign who did not forgive transgressors and threatened eternal punishment. In this context, religion had become an instrument of social control. Religious leaders had built a wall between the sacred (relegated to the temple) and the profane (the daily life of the people). This deformed God was, in effect, an antagonist to man, an entity who served to justify the power logic of the temple lords. The risk of reducing God to a harsh judge is a constant temptation in the history of religions.

Jesus bursts into this landscape with subversive force. He defines the Pharisees' understanding of religion as bad leaven, a negative ferment capable of contaminating the entire mass. His response is not a new law, but a revelation: God is Father and infinite mercy. While the temple imposed precepts, Jesus opened paths of liberation. With Him, the separation between sacred and profane collapses definitively. In Christ, the sacred enters time and the flesh: everything is sanctified and nothing must be sacrificed. It is the victory of life over death and of love over hate.

Why did the disciples struggle to understand? The answer lies in what we might call a colonization of the imagination. For too long, they had assimilated the poison of religious leaders, mistaking human traditions for the Word of God. Exposing this mystification was Jesus's most courageous act, but it also sparked the hatred of the established powers. A God who forgives everything and everyone is not suitable for those who seek to subjugate the people through fear.

Mercy is not cheap do-goodism, but the strength that destroys the logic of power.

Entering the Gospel journey today means accepting the same suffering as the disciples: the effort to shed the old religion of fear and bargaining with the divine. The transition is radical: from the God-Tyrant to the God-Love. Only by accepting this stripping can we be clothed in the light of the Mystery of Mercy, transforming faith from a list of obligations to an experience of authentic freedom.