Sacred Heart Parish

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22ND SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)

  1. We should note what Moses says to the Israelites in our first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy – “If you keep God’s laws and decrees, if you live each day by the Torah, you will give evidence of your wisdom and intelligence to all the pagans who will hear of these statutes and say – ‘This great nation, God’s people Israel, is truly a wise and intelligent people.’ For what great nation is there that has gods so close to it as the Lord, our God, is to us whenever we call upon him?”

  2. A few weeks ago I saw an interesting news note about the BBC. It seems that Channel 4 of the BBC ended its series entitled “Revelations” by inviting some religious leaders to respond to the question – How do you know God exists? It’s not fair to go by a news account only but the Archbishop of Canterbury expressed his view that he prefers to speak of having confidence or trusting that God exists and of feeling that he is in the presence of something greater that you cannot conceive. The Archbishop of Westminster spoke of a father-figure who has our fate in his hands. Britain’s chief rabbi spoke of seeing God in terms of his presence in other people. A distinguished Moslem scholar expressed his faith in terms of a relationship between what his heart is feeling, his eyes are seeing and his mind is understanding. The Hindu Swami said – “It’s faith. It’s really as simple and as powerful as that,”

  3. Strange things are happening these days. Polemical atheists are waging vigorous campaigns for the revising of civil laws which are favorable to religious groups. They are even placing ads in busses and streetcars denouncing religion as useless and delusionary. What if someone were to ask you – How do you know that God exists? What would you say? What would I say?

  4. Much depends, of course, on what one thinks of the human person. We have programmed within us the basic desire to know what is true. We have a second desire to possess what is good. In our everyday pursuits we rely on two channels for human knowledge. There is faith knowledge and there is scientific knowledge. Faith knowledge, which accounts for most of what we come to know in the course of our lifetime, rests on the authority of those who know and who share their knowledge with us. Scientific knowledge rests on what we ourselves personally appropriate by proper scientific methods. (Some folks have studied and grasped and argued with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. For myself, whatever I know about such a theory is faith knowledge.) Pope John Paul II begins his Encyclical Letter by writing – “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth – in a word to know himself – so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

  5. The Catechism teaches us that the Church holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason. Without this capacity man would not be able to welcome God’s revelation. Reason has several ways of approaching God. One way starts from the world around us where we find everything we touch is finite, limited, constantly changing, quite unnecessary and yet set in both order and beauty. We can also start from the human person within whom we find openness to truth and beauty, a sense of moral goodness, the voice of conscience, longing for happiness that is not finite, cannot end, which makes us say with St. Augustine – “You inspire us, O Lord, to delight in praising you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

  6. It is good for us to think about these things. As our Holy Father has recently expressed it: “In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God whose face we recognize in a love which presses ‘to the end’ – in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. The real problem at this moment of our history is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings, with increasingly evident destructive effects.”

  7. One final remark and this comes from the Letter we call 1 John, which reminds us of the relationship between truth and love. Love must proceed from truth, and knowledge must bear fruit in love. With this mind, 1 John says to us – “Let us love one another, because love is of God and everyone who loves is begotten of God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.”