Amazing God

“He was amazed at their lack of faith.” Amazed. This line has stuck in my head all week long. Jesus was amazed at their lack of faith. Jesus doesn’t get amazed too often. I looked it up, and Jesus is only amazed twice in the Gospels. The single other time the Greek verb we translate as “amazed” is used to describe Jesus is when he saw the incredible faith of the centurion in Capernaum who had asked Jesus to heal the servant in his household. Jesus is amazed at faith: either a lack or a depth of it.

The Nazarenes thought they knew who Jesus was. He was the son of Mary and Joseph. He was a carpenter. They knew his cousins. So what if he had exorcised demons, healed paralytics, calmed the seas, and even raised people from the dead? He was still just that Jesus kid from down the street. Because they “knew” him, they were not willing to take the tiniest step of faith towards Jesus.

Compare that to the centurion in Capernaum. The centurion may not have known exactly who Jesus was, but he knew that Jesus could help; so, he came to Jesus for help. Turning to Jesus, the centurion recognized something greater than him standing in front of him, someone worthy of his faith. The centurion, a commander of many men and well-respected in the army, humiliated himself to ask Jesus, a poor man who had no social standing at all, to help him. Jesus offered to come over and heal the centurion’s servant; however, the centurion debased himself further and told Jesus that he is not worthy for him to enter under his roof, and said that Jesus can heal the servant with his words. “[Jesus] was amazed and said to those following him, “Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.”

When it comes to the question of faith, there are only two options. You either have faith or you don’t. Some might claim that they don’t have an opinion on the subject, but that is simply lack of faith in different clothing. So… do I have faith or not? How do I amaze God? Do I amaze God with my lack of faith, or do I amaze God with my faith? Maybe, for most of us here, the question is a bit different: I have faith, but it is weak; how can I turn my faith into something that amazes God?

The first step toward answering that question is to recognize that any faith is better than none, and that the seeds of faith are a gift from God. The work is not all on God though. Yes, God and the people around us work to nurture those seeds of faith within us, but it ultimately comes down to our own decisions. God has given us each free will, and because of that free will we are able to make decisions that impact our future, not just here on earth, but also in the afterlife. If we did not have a free will, then we would be predestined to heaven or hell at the outset of our lives, as John Calvin—the founder of the Calvinist sect of Protestantism—taught. But that can’t be true. God loves us, and God’s love for us would not be true love if he forced us to have faith or if he forced us to love him. God will not force us to love him, but he will give us all we need to make that decision on our own.

Having faith is, ultimately, a decision we must make. I know that I often make the error of thinking that virtues or graces from God have something to do with my feelings. I don’t always feel 100% close to God: there are days when I feel that he is quite distant from me, but there are also days that he feels very close, where it feels that he is directly working through me. Faith, though, is not the same thing as feelings. Faith is deeper than that: faith is above our feelings. Even on the worst of days, even when I feel like God is 1000 miles away, even when I feel like I’m wasting my time saying my prayers, even when I am halfway through a homily and forget the second half, I always know that God is with me. Every day I make the choice to believe in God, to believe that he loves me, and to live my life in accordance with his will. I try to, at least. I do what I can, and I leave the rest up to God. If I do my best, he’ll fill in the cracks.

Those cracks God fills in are, really, his way of helping us increase our faith. Paul recognizes this, writing that “when I am weak, then I am strong.” Paul says that through his weaknesses, the power of Christ dwells in him. Paul’s weaknesses are where Christ shows forth the most. It is the same for us. Our weaknesses are where we are most exposed to others. They are the areas where we are most vulnerable. They are the areas where we recognize that we need help from God the most, the areas where we cry out to God in our prayer, saying, “I believe; help my unbelief!”

We can all pray that God helps us in our unbelief. We can all work to increase our faith by consciously making the decision to believe in God, in his love, and in his plan for us. These decisions can be made rationally, as shown by the 2000 years of academic scholarship the Catholic Church has produced, (we did invent universities, after all…) nearly all of it relying on the fact that not only is our faith based in God himself, but it is also fundamentally reasonable. Let us all choose to believe, and to devote ourselves to God in heart and in mind. Let’s choose to put our faith in God, so that when we die and stand before Him on the day of our judgment, he will look at us with love, be amazed at our faith, and say to us, “well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Note: This homily was posted on July 10, 2018. It was delivered on July 8, 2018, so I have modified the posting date to match the delivery date.

Today’s Readings
July 8, 2018
14th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
Ezekiel 2:2-5; Psalm 123:1-2, 2, 3-4; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6

Reflection for the Third Sunday of Lent

About halfway through today’s Gospel, the woman at the well says to Jesus, “you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus responds to this in an interesting way,

“Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth.”

A lot is going on in these few sentences. Jesus affirms worship in Jerusalem, but then says that neither Jerusalem nor anywhere is where the worship will take place. But we know that true worship, even now, continues in a multitude of places on the earth. While this could be a prophecy of the destruction of the Temple, it can also be seen to contain more truths about true worship. The center of Jewish worship was the Temple. Non-Jewish worship was often centered around a particular place. Ancient peoples often believe mountains to be the places of the gods. The Psalms, which are both Jewish and Catholic prayers, often reference this idea of going up a mountain to worship. What Jesus is telling us is not that there will be no places of worship in this world, but that the true center of worship will no longer be here on earth. The true center of Christian worship is in the Heavenly Kingdom of God. The Mass in the West, the Divine Liturgy in the East, these are both participations in the Heavenly Liturgy. They are but images of the true glory of Heavenly Worship.

This worship requires us to know who we are worshipping. If God is not physically present on this earth, we must have some understanding of who he is in order to give him worship. This does not mean that we understand God: God is beyond our understanding. It means that our God is understandable. There is order, some sort of reason, to God at which we can grasp. The false gods of the pagans did not have this. They were given earthly forms so that people could form images in their minds, but their actions and behaviors were unreasonable. The stories of the gods were as often about their cruelty and strangeness as they were about their positive qualities. Furthermore, there was not a rationality to the religious system which allowed for rich, deep and complex thought. It allowed for many wonderful stories, and for much thought about human nature, but it was ultimately shallow. Often, the pagan gods take on aspects of human nature and the stories are formed more by human condition than by the nature of God.

The Jews, after hundreds of years of various journeys through the desert and exiles, had banished such thought from their minds. They had finally realized that God is one, that he is immaterial, and that there is an order to Him. Perhaps we do not understand, but there is a perceivable order. The Jews were chosen by God to spread this wonderful discovery to all the people of the world, but they failed their mission. Salvation still comes from the Jews through Jesus Christ and the Apostles, all of whom were Jewish. Jesus and his Apostles brought salvation to all mankind, by teaching us how to worship God in Spirit and Truth through the Eucharistic Sacrifice. It is a sacrifice in Spirit because it joins in the Liturgy of Heaven, and it is a true sacrifice because it is an anamnesis—a true memorial in which we make present what occurs in the past—of the Passion of our Lord.

This worship in which we participate then forms the basis of our entire lives. It is the water which Jesus promised the woman at the well. When we pray and offer ourselves to God totally, most perfectly through participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, we receive this water that lasts through all eternity.

(Sorry this is late! – MS)

Today’s Readings: Ex 17:3-7; Ps 95:1-2, 6-7, 8-9; Rom 5:1-2, 5-8; Jn 4:5-42