We usually talk about the “infosphere”: our globe, in fact, is wrapped in a network of invisible threads along which an endless mass of communications flows. Yet never before have we been alone and the conversation is – especially in the younger generations (but not only) – an interface with the cold screen of a computer or mobile phone. The taste of it is being lost look each other in the eyesto dialogue and communicate in the original sense of this word of Latin origin which is based on the word munus“gift”, exchanging ideas, emotions, thoughts in a warm, sincere, direct way.
For many years – more than all the collaborators of our weekly – I have been looking at this page, each time changing a theme. Now, at the suggestion of the management, I start with the readers an ideal journey through the streets and villages of the Holy Landon stones now more streaked with blood than ever before, to “record” some live jokes. In fact, we want to collect various dialogues that Jesus had with men and women in a personal way.
We will therefore discard the speeches addressed to the crowd, just as we will reduce to a minimum the close comparisons that Christ often established with the political-religious groups of the time, Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, doctors of the law. The scene will therefore be the many meetings that the Rabbi of Nazareth had with many single people in those few years of his mission as a traveling preacher along dusty streets, in modest villages or in the city of Jerusalem. We used the term “meeting” to designate conversations that are most often short.
It is a suggestive word because it intertwines the preposition “in” of embracing and listening to each other with the negative adverb against indicating a distance. Yes, because sometimes talking to each other is not just sharing, but also revealing a different life identity and thought. Of course, if you only adopt this aspect, then you have a “clash”. A nineteenth-century English statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, was lapidary in this sense: “My concept of a pleasant person is only that of a person who agrees with me.”
Jesus, as we will see from the reports offered by the Gospels, above all awakens the listening, harmony, sympathy also because his interlocutors are often individuals open to him, marked by pain, by trials, by evil. However, Christ does not ignore diversity either sometimes it shakes the othergoing “against” his closure or his hypocrisy or misunderstanding. Often his will be questions that claw at the conscience.
An exegete, Ludwig Monti, in a beautiful book, Jesus’ questions (San Paolo 2019), has counted many 217 addressed to those he met and he scored 141 of them addressed to him by his interlocutors. For this reason our journey will often be marked by surprises, both for the people we meet and for the incisive and decisive words of Christ.
