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The Catholic Telegraph
June 7, 2002Last Sunday, our reading from Romans taught us that justification (a relationship with God constituted by our sharing in God’s holiness) comes by faith. It is a gift and is not and cannot be earned by our human efforts.
This Sunday’s reading teaches us what faith entails, and Paul uses as the prime example of faith the experience of Abraham, whom the Jews reverenced not only as the father of God’s people, but also as the just man par excellence. Throughout chapter four Paul is making the point that the relationship between God and Abraham was a gift from God that Abraham was able to receive because of his faith. The relationship began before God commanded Abraham to circumcise himself and his family, and so it began before God gave His law to Abraham. Consequently, it was faith and not observance of the law that made possible Abraham’s acceptance of God’s gift.
Today’s reading is the conclusion of chapter four. Here Paul describes Abraham’s faith in greater detail and goes on to apply Abraham’s experience to our own access to justification.
Abraham’s faith consisted in confident hope beyond any reasonable expectation that God’s promise to make him the father of many nations would come true. Abraham’s faith was unwavering it its conviction that God would give him a legitimate son, in spite of the fact that he and his wife were far beyond child-bearing age. As far as having children was concerned, they were as good as dead. Abraham did not doubt God’s promise. He was fully convinced that God was able to do what God had promised to do. This conviction made him strong and resulted in his being able to receive God’s gifts.
But, our text continues, Abraham wasn’t the only one who became able to receive God’s gifts through faith. We, too, become qualified for God’s gift of life through our faith. Just as Abraham believed that God could bring life out of his and Sarah’s "dead" bodies, so we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and made him the source of new life for us.
Most of us tend to look on faith as firmly believing "what the Church believes and teaches," as the traditional act of faith has it. Faith is indeed that, but it is something more than that, too. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 176) put it this way: faith "involves an assent of the intellect and the will to the self-revelation God has made through his deed and words." Faith involves both intellect and will, head and heart, knowledge and love, understanding and determination, belief and self-gift. Both elements have to be there if our faith is to be wholesome and real.
Faith as intellectual assent alone becomes an exercise in reasoning, a matter of comprehending things. This can be pretty chilly. It can reduce our relationship with God to enunciating the right words in the right order, to knowing all the answers.
Faith as a response of the will alone can degenerate into a kind of spiritual emotionalism, "feeling good about God." Religion becomes a way of giving ourselves away to vagueness and affectivity, so that it doesn’t matter much what we believe, as long as believing warms our heart.
Abraham’s faith was a matter both of knowing and of loving. He knew what God had promised him: to make him the father of many nations, to give him a legitimate son to carry on his line. There was no uncertainty about what God was saying. But he wasn’t content just to know. He was confident that God would fulfill what He had promised. He committed himself to faithfulness to God. He accepted God’s word with his head and responded to it with the full conviction of his heart.
Our faith has to be like Abraham’s. We are called to know the Lord Jesus, called to grasp the truth of His being and His salvation. It matters whether or not Jesus was and is true God and true man. It matters that God is one nature in three Persons. It matters that there are seven sacraments and not seventeen. We have to know what our Christian faith is all about. We have to accept with our minds what the Lord teaches us and deepen our understanding of what that teaching means.
But we are also called to love of the Lord Jesus and to confidence in Him. We are called to hang on to our love for Him and dedication to Him in good times and in bad, when we understand what is going on in our lives and when we haven’t got a clue. Even if the whole world seems to be crumbling around us, even if God’s promise of care and love for us seems absolutely ridiculous, we have to hang on to our dedication, we have to remain firm in our commitment just as Abraham did.
Knowledge of God and response to Him, understanding and commitment to His openness to us: this is what constitutes faith. Faith enables us to accept God’s gifts, and is itself Christian - says to God: "I believe what You tell me and I trust in what you promise me."
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Conversation Questions.
Have I ever known a person of deep faith? How did/does he/she relate to God?
How has my faith been tested?
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