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Letters Twenty-First
Sunday in Ordinary Time |
The Catholic Telegraph
August 24, 2001Last Sunday’s reading spoke about the need for perseverance in our faith, for continued attention to our relationship with God, for constant regard for our conviction that God is faithful and that the realities that we might not see with our earthly eyes really do exist.
This Sunday’s reading deals with another aspect of our life of faith: being willing to be trained by God even though the training demands struggle, effort, and even pain.
The author starts off by telling his readers that, if they are finding the demands of faith too heavy to bear, it’s because they have forgotten a fundamental lesson. Then he cites The Book of Proverbs (3.11 f.) which calls those who would be wise to welcome the fatherly, though sometimes stern, intervention of God. Though painful, such interventions are important elements in the education of God’s sons and daughters. These interventions are also a sign that their recipients are legitimate children of the household, officially recognized by the father. If they weren’t legitimate offspring, the father wouldn’t bother to try to educate them.
The author goes on to acknowledge that, while the training God offers us may be hard to take, it results in a sense of well-being in those who accept it and increases their maturity and virtue.
Finally, the author offers two more Scriptural citations to make his point. The first is from a passage in Isaiah (35.3) in which the prophet is encouraging his hearers to strengthen themselves for the return trip from exile. The second is again from Proverbs (4.26) where the author is talking about walking the road to wisdom. If you walk carefully on that road, Hebrews says, your aches and pains will go away.
The word that the author of Hebrews uses to express God’s educational intervention on our behalf is discipline (paideia in Greek). It occurs no less than five times in the six verses of our reading, plus another three times in verses 8-10. There’s no doubt what this passage is about. Discipline (and its Greek equivalent) signifies learning and knowledge, education and training and instruction, but also correction and punishment. It suggests that growing up, acquiring knowledge and skill, is not an easy undertaking. It requires effort, struggle, even suffering, sometimes inherent in the matters we are concerned with, sometimes administered from outside as part of the methodology of a teacher. We may not go in much any more for the kind of corporal punishment mentioned in verse 6, but every good teacher knows that he or she has to make serious demands on students if they are going to learn what is being taught. (Which of us does not remember with gratitude somebody in our lives who helped us learn by making us exert more effort than we thought appropriate at the time?)
The author doesn’t describe in detail the sufferings and annoyances his readers had to endure as part of their faith. Last week’s reading told us that they hadn’t yet had to face martyrdom. Maybe they were being inconvenienced by little discourtesies from their pagan neighbors, by feeling like outsiders to the culture in which they lived. Maybe internal tensions in the community of faith wer5e causing them annoyance. It could also be that their longing for their former religious practices was a source of suffering. Perhaps they didn’t see in themselves the immediate results that they expected from belonging to the Church, or feel the consolations they had experienced before. In any case, the author’s lesson is clear: Christian faith is not a matter of going with the flow, of simply pursuing whatever turns you on, of engaging in a comforting spiritual hobby. Christian faith is something that has to be rooted in the innermost parts of our being. It’s something that changes just about everything in our lives. Granted, it’s something that we get all at once, at baptism, but it’s also something whose assimilation requires attention and effort from us for the rest of our lives. Christian faith is a relationship that we have to work at. Being a believer is a skill that we have to learn, and all learning that is worth the name requires attention and effort. God never promised anybody that loving Him and being in touch with Him would be easy.
It’s not that God sets out to make faith hard for us, by making us endure discipline for its own sake. It’s rather that the lessons that God wants us to learn in the context of faith tend to be harder than we might have expected at first.
There’s one more aspect to all this. All of us are always children in relationship with God. We might like to think that we have been practicing faith for a long time now, that we have reached a plateau of maturity, that there isn’t much more we need to experience or learn. But no matter where we are in our faith life, God still has more to offer us, still more to teach us. We are always in need of His discipline.
In today’s live letter we hear these early Christians being told: "Pay attention to the teacher! You need to learn how to shape up and walk straight." That’s a message that we all need to hear once in a while.
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Conversation Questions
What aspects of my faith life require the most effort from me?
How have past suffering and effort strengthened my faith?
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