Sacred Heart Parish

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14th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (B)

  1. A popular adage has it that, while absence make the heart grow fonder, familiarity may easily breed contempt. This seems to have been the experience of Jesus in his hometown of Nazareth at the start of his public ministry. Many of the townsfolk had heard of his wisdom; they willingly admitted the mighty deeds wrought be his hands. Nevertheless, they asked one another – Where did this man get all this? Is he not the carpenter, son of Mary? As St. Mark the Evangelist testifies – “And so they took offense at him”. Jesus in turn responded to them – “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.” As a result Jesus was not able to perform any mighty deeds in Nazareth. He was amazed at their unbelief.

  2. Several centuries before the Lord Jesus, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob complained to his prophet Ezekiel about the unbelief of his people Israel. In our first reading, God commanded Ezekiel to continue his prophetic ministry, and then he added – whether they heed you or resist you, they shall know that a prophet has been among them.

  3. The Second Vatican Council, fifty years ago, was the 1st Ecumenical Council to address officially the question of widespread unbelief. The Council told us at that time that the root reason for human dignity lies in our call to communion with God. We would not exist were we not created by God’s love, and we cannot live fully according to the truth unless we freely acknowledge God’s love and devote ourselves to God. Yet the fact remains that many of our contemporaries have never recognized any such relationship with God, or they have explicitly rejected it. The word “unbelief” in the Council’s teaching is applied to various phenomena which are quite distinct from one another. For while God is expressly denied by some, others believe that they can assert absolutely nothing about God; some unduly transgressing the limits of the positive sciences contend that everything can be explained by scientific reasoning alone.

  4. In the light of this question of unbelief, how are we to understand the meaning of the word “faith” – whether we talk about divine faith, faith in God’s word, or human faith, that is, accepting as true the word of another. Faith is basically a form of knowledge. True and certain knowledge comes to us in two ways: through scientific knowledge which we can call self-appropriated knowledge or faith-knowledge whereby we know something based on someone else’s word. As a matter of fact, we live our everyday lives more in terms of human faith than in terms of scientific knowledge. I can offer myself as an example. My early education was highly classical – Latin, Greek, history and the like. My knowledge of science is not self-appropriated knowledge, but faith-knowledge. In other words, what I know about science I know by faith in the words of those who are scientifically competent. Faith means sharing in the knowledge of another. If there is no one who knows, then there can be no one who believes. Many wrongly think that faith means emotional or practical conviction about matters that cannot be verified by science, some sort of vague religious experience devoid of intellectual or historical content. Faith means knowledge of what God has done for us in history through Christ and through the Spirit; faith means trust in what God has said to us down through history through Christ and through the Holy Spirit, as taught to us now by that body of the risen Christ which we call the Church; faith means obedience to God – because disobedience is the same as unbelief; and faith means community of life with God, the first stage this side of the grave, but then the final stage beyond the grave. Here and now we live by the grace of faith. In heaven we will live by the light of glory. The gift of grace means glory in exile; the ultimate and wonderful gift of glory means grace gone home.

  5. Recently our Holy Father expressed his view about unbelief in our day.
    ”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’ (cf. Jn 13:1) – 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.” In light of what the Pope has said about unbelief, we can perhaps understand the challenge he gives us. He challenges us to lives of faith and hope and love. He challenges us to live the Gospel in our everyday lives, at home or abroad, in the workplace, and where we encounter those who know nothing about God. The Second Vatican Council, we should remember, said something quite shocking to our ears – “That taken as a whole, unbelief is not a spontaneous development, but stems from a variety of causes including a critical reaction to the Catholic faith. Hence, believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of unbelief. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith or are deficient in their religious, moral, social lives, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God.”