Sacred Heart Parish

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27th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (C)

  1. The prophet Habakkuk says to us in the first reading – “The one who is rash has no integrity; but the just person because of his faith shall live.” In our second reading, Paul admonishes Timothy – “Take as your norm the sound words you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in the Lord Jesus”. In our Gospel, the Apostles say to Jesus in prayer – “Lord, increase our faith”. That’s a wonderful idea for all of us. Elsewhere in the synoptic Gospels we read – “Lord, I do believe; increase my faith; help my unbelief”. Let’s talk about faith.

  2. Faith is knowledge of what God has done for us in Christ and in the Spirit; faith is trust in what God has said to us in faith and in the Spirit; faith is obedience to God who calls us to himself in Christ and in the Holy Spirit; faith is union with God in the little vision we have through faith, hope and love until we arrive at the big vision which we call heaven. Faith is born when one who does not know begins to share in the knowledge of one who does know. If there is no one who knows, there can be no one who believes. If the one who knows is human, then we have human faith; if the one who knows is divine, then we have divine faith. The words faith and belief are so often used and most often misused. Some might say, for example, that the Red Sox did not make it this year, but I believe they will do better next year. This means that belief is equated with opinion which is so misleading. Perhaps I could offer you an inviolable witness test so that you could always tell when you are misusing the words faith or belief. If you say “I believe” and if you can equate with that expression “I think, I assume, I suppose, I consider probable”, then it follows that you are misusing and thus abusing the beautiful words “faith” and “belief”. To believe then is to regard something as true on the testimony of someone else. Two elements are involved: 1) the content (what is believed) cannot be verified, yet 2) the content is unreservedly accepted as real and true. Just think of what we say when we say our Act of Faith: we mention the Trinity, the Incarnation, we mention all the elements of our Creed, and then we add – “I believe all these truths, not because I can prove them, not because I can fully understand them; but because you have revealed them, my God, and you cannot deceive or be deceived”.

  3. So far we have been talking about faith. Now we should turn our attention to something else, something always allied with faith in the best of the Catholic tradition, that is, right reason. God is the God of grace, so he gives us the gift of faith. God is also the God of nature, of creation, so he gives us the gift of reason. Faith always needs the light that comes to us from right reason. Right reason always stands in need of those many lights that only can come to us from faith. Listen carefully, I would suggest, to what Pope John Paul II had to say in his remarkable letter on faith and reason: “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.” The apostles in the Gospel prayed – “Lord, increase our faith” They could well have continued their prayer by saying – Increase within us the good gift of right reason.

  4. The faith-reason question at the heart of our centuries-long Catholic tradition is so important for our world today. In historic Westminster Hall our Holy Father asked the political leaders of Great Britain – Where do we find the ethical foundations for our political choices? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to right reason – prescinding from the content of Revelation. As our Holy Father has expressed it: The role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers, still less to propose concrete political solutions, something altogether outside the competence of religion; the role of religion rather is to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. Thus, religion has a corrective role to play vis-à-vis right reason. Right reason has a corrective role to play vis-à-vis faith, because distorted forms of religion can create such problems as we see in countries all over the world. Religion is not a problem for legislators to solve but a vital contributor to national and international conversations. This is why our Holy Father has been suggesting that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into profound and ongoing dialogue for the good of civilization. The work of the Gospel is two-fold – it must be at work both evangelizing and civilizing. Humanizing is a most important moment within evangelizing. Only when faith and right reason work together can the people of the 21st Century seek to create a civilization of love, and the civilization of love this side of the grave is a sort of sign and sacrament of what awaits us in the world to come.