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19TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (C)

  1. Our second reading today is from the 11th Chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews. Many of us might say – This is not our most familiar New Testament document. The Letter seems to have been designed as a word of exhortation addressed to Jewish converts to the faith, to strengthen them in their new found faith and to ward off apostasy from the faith which the author saw as a real danger for those to whom he was writing. In Chapter 11 – it has no reference to bankruptcy proceedings – the author invites his readers to think of the men and women of great faith who fill the pages of the Old Testament. Our excerpt at Mass today cites just two – Abraham, who is called our father in faith, and Sarah, his wife. And so we read – “By faith Abraham obeyed God when he was called and went forth to the place he was to receive as a heritage: he went by faith, moreover, not knowing where he is going, by faith he sojourned in the Promise Land as in a foreign country. By faith, Sarah received the power to conceive for she was past the age but was firm in her conviction that the One – namely, God – who had made the promise was worthy of trust.”

  2. We should note the opening sentence of our second reading – “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is the realization, the reality, the substance of what we hope for – and what are our hopes in Christ? The Act of Hope tells us: “pardon for our sins, the help of God’s grace and the gift of everlasting life”. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that faith also is the evidence of things not seen. No one has ever seen God, no one sees the risen Christ, no one sees the workings of the Holy Spirit. Only God really knows God; only God can truly tell us about God. Faith – whether human or divine – means sharing in the knowledge of someone who truly knows. This is what the grace of faith is all about. Faith means our sharing in the knowledge proper to our Three-Personed God. Faith means conviction – because of God’s word – about things we do not see.

  3. Over the past few hundred years, cultural trends have launched massive attacks against Catholic teaching about the nature of faith. These attacks are pervasively present in the communications media today. In the 18th Century, philosopher David Hume spoke of faith as “emotional conviction”, not intellectual conviction, that is, practical certitude that cannot be justified theoretically. Philosopher Immanuel Kant could write – faith is the subjectively adequate, objectively inadequate, acceptance of something as true. In other words, these observations, so very inaccurate, are telling us that your faith and my faith, the faith of the Church, are views subjectively peculiar to ourselves or to our community of faith but have nothing to say about the truth of things, that is, what is really real.

  4. We should think of faith as both a gift of God and our human actions under grace by which we adhere personally to God and accept as the truths of things God’s teachings as preached in the Church when those teachings are taught as revealed by God. Four words helpfully expressed our many- centuried Catholic tradition on the nature of faith: knowledge, trust, obedience, and love. In other words, faith means knowledge of what God has taught and continues to teach us through Christ and the Spirit; faith means obedience to God in Christ and in the Spirit, for how can we say we believe God and we believe in God if our lives do not conform with the faith of the Church. Faith means, faith involves, our love of God, even in our human experiences. It’s difficult for us to trust someone we do not love. Love involves obviously a communion with God which we trust will be brought to perfection when we join God and his saints in heaven.

  5. One question is crucial – Why do we believe? What motivates our belief? Think of a trial by jury. Jury members must evaluate the various witnesses for one can only believe a creditable witness. And so the jurors must ask themselves two questions: 1) Does this witness possess the requisite knowledge? And 2) Does this witness appear to be trustworthy? We ask the same sort of questions with regard to God – God’s knowledgeableness, God’s trustworthiness. These qualities do not motivate our faith. Their role is to make the act of faith both reasonable and upright. Only God can move us to faith. Only God can tell us about God. And God cannot deceive or be deceived.

  6. The saints seem to grow in faith by practicing what the Catechism calls the presence of God, the many presences of the risen Christ. We do not practice God’s being present; we practice our being present to God who is very real for us and whose grace makes us live in his acknowledged presence whether in the order of nature or in the realm of grace. We also must practice each day living in the many presences of the living Christ. Does he not dwell in our hearts by faith? Do we not have his word in the Scriptures to guide us to what is true? Do we not seek to recognize the presence of the risen Christ in our neighbor, especially our neighbor who is needy and poor? And then we have the presence of presences in the great gift of the Eucharist, what we call the Real Presence, the presence of the risen Christ really, truly and sacramentally in the greatest of the sacraments, the one we call the Blessed Sacrament. Notice the word we have used – “practice”. The saints were the great practitioners of faith. We must imitate their example. I read in a magazine recently the following story: It seems that a tourist in New York City wanted to visit Carnegie Hall, one of the great centers of music in our country and in the world. The tourist stopped a pedestrian who happened to be a musician and who in her dreams saw herself one day playing the cello in Carnegie Hall. The tourist said to the pedestrian – How does one get to Carnegie Hall? The musician answered – practice, practice, practice. Is faith any different? How do we get to know the Lord Jesus? How do we live in His presence? How does one become like the saints in this regard? The answer is practice, practice, practice.