18th Sunday Reflection: The First Demand Of Faith…Believe
THE FIRST DEMAND OF FAITH… BELIEVE… (John 6:24-35)
Listen to Him, believe in the one God has sent, and do whatever he tells you… act following the will of the one who sent us Jesus, the Christ. Listen! Believe! Act!
But instead, we demand, ‘Show us the God who has sent you Jesus, and then we will believe’.
But seeing is not believing and facts cannot convince us. When our worldview is challenged we find ourselves acting aggressively against any information or affirmations that oppose our position. There are only winners and losers in this contest of living. Millennia of slavery, serfdom, indentured labour; this is the debris of our history, millions of bodies deemed insignificant, cognitively deficient, without intrinsic value, without voice, without rights, without ancestry or persona, faceless as individuals, and faceless as a group. This is the focal point where we are called to seek the Body of Christ. History fails to convince us and so we look away. We either ALL have intrinsic dignity, or no one has such value. When creation no longer has any value beyond beneficiation, we also share in their degradation.
The crowds that have gathered around Jesus demand a sign ‘such as their ancestors received’. The irony is that they have just participated in this ‘sign’. They have witnessed Jesus performing a miracle, they have been fed with bread from heaven, but they fail to see, fail to believe, and so refuse that most blessed exchange that restores life beyond death.
The crowds fail to gift themselves to the present moment, to the NOW, to the reality of what is, clinging to the past with its grudges, un-forgiveness, resentments, and ritual demands, clinging to concerns of the future with its all fears and monsters. Here is the opportunity lost, the call to Incarnation, to participate in weaving a fabric of compassion and justice on which everyone and all creation can depend.
Then as now, the first to suffer are always the most vulnerable, children, the old, those with mental illness, the poor, refugees and the homeless, the voiceless, and the outcasts. When we dare to listen we will hear also the groan of our mother earth, the seas, the animal kingdom. As they suffer, so does our own integrity. This loss of personal integrity is tied to the loss of the soul of our nations, a loss of what it means to be human now entrenched in our structures.
Faith, religion, and church are in a state of disunity and upheaval because some of their alleged adherents engage in hateful and violent behaviour that distorts and defies the values they claim to represent.
Each day is however a new beginning, another step to be taken and the choice to be made anew, always in the compassionate remembrance of God’s great Mercy and those moments of incredible grace; moments of soaring beauty as well as the moments of scorching darkness.
Those moments with God are terrible, awesome, and wild. Moments of the tender promptings of the Holy Spirit, gently leading us from blind judgements and that hardness of heart that comes from years of needing to win, needing to be on top.
Lord that we may see! Philosophy is a great teacher in knowing that we cannot always trust our judgements according to what we think we see. How easily we fall away from Truth into our own illusions. The optical illusions trick us into false judgements and perilous predictions.
The moment we have made this judgement, in or out, in front or behind, on top of or below, good or bad, useful or useless, we have formed an attachment to our own particular ‘enlightened judgement’. This is easy enough to prove and to understand yet it can be a great stumbling block.
When we fall in love with an abstract, an idea of some sort, we tend to impose our own image on that ideal.
Love of the church founded by Jesus can only grow out of our encounter and love for Jesus himself otherwise we have created our own “golden calf”.
The church is a community founded through Jesus and in Jesus the Christ. Through and in Jesus we belong to each other in the church. This is where we find our identity as the Christian community. This is our core identity which must take the primacy of any other ideological, social, purity codes or pious practices with which we identify.
Only the compassion and vulnerability of the Incarnation can lead us out of the darkness into new life and new hope.
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