9th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Dt 11: 18, 26-28, 32; Rom 3: 21-25, 28: Mt 7: 21-27
Dc. Larry Brockman
It isn’t good enough. It isn’t good enough to just say you believe- assenting to some vague sense of belief in the trinity, and that Jesus died on the cross, rose from the dead, and promised those who believed all of that they, then they would inherit eternal life. Because this may be paying lip service to the consequences of what our faith teaches. And appearances don’t cut it either- looking like a Christian by just appearing to live as a Christian, coming to Mass each week; and associating with a Christian community like this one. These are good things- but they aren’t sufficient, because they don’t in and of themselves make us Christians.
You see, as Moses says in the first reading on behalf of God the Father, we have to “Take these words of mine into your hearts and souls”. Into your hearts and souls! That means that we need to not just say we believe, or appear to believe, but me must understand what our faith teaches so that it becomes part of our innermost being. If we do that, then we will live our Faith, and that is the key, living our Faith- believing and understanding what we believe to such a depth that our hearts and minds respond to it by the way we lead our daily lives. That is what it means to be a Christian. And so, today’s scriptures, taken as a whole, require a whole lot more of us than just saying we believe or going through the appearances of a believer.
Now St. Paul says very clearly this morning that: “A person is justified by Faith apart from the law”. So, Faith is what saves us, not observance of the law, but it has to be real faith. Faith is believing in what God has revealed to us, even if we can’t understand it all or reason it all out. Today’s society has embraced an intellectual attitude that says to believe in something, it has to be proven; there has to be scientific evidence of it. But again, Faith is accepting things we cannot prove- things like the incarnation and the trinity and even the existence of God, just don’t conform to our culture’s standard that requires scientific proof. And yet, through the whole body of scripture, and the tradition of the Church, we have been given our basic Nicene Creed on what we believe about God. This Creed is professed every Sunday right after the Homily. It is what all of us as Christians- even our Protestant brothers, jointly profess as the basics of our religious belief. To be a Christian, we need to believe all of it, taking it on Faith. Why? Because over thousands of years of our Judeo Christian tradition, the Nicene Creed emerges as the essence of God’s revelation of His nature to us, and so we need to accept it.
And we have been given the ten commandments on what God expects of us in terms of moral behavior. These have been augmented by Jesus’ teachings, particularly the Beatitudes. We need to accept these because they are direct revelations from our God. Now our culture teaches us, especially when we are college educated, to challenge everything. We are taught to be discerning, skeptical, and critical of what information is presented to us. We are taught to test everything, reason it out, and weigh all of the implications in arriving at truth. And our society preaches that things are relative; that it all depends on the circumstances and your perspective.
And so, when we are confronted with something like our Catechism- which summarizes the teachings of the Church including the implications of what our faith teaches on the Creed and the 10 commandments and the beatitudes at the next level of detail- people tend to bristle at this level of detail and challenge it. Rather, our culture encourages a cafeteria type of “faith”, one in which we pick and choose what we reason to be acceptable from the Catechism, as if any of us individuals have the intellectual capacity to compete with the aggregate teaching authority of our Church. And this is done under the guise of going by our own consciences. I’ll have more to say about the conscience part in a minute. And so, there are folks who claim to be people of “Faith” who believe, for example, that Abortion is OK because they see other dimensions, other perspectives of the truth- like the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy. But this is not a matter of personal opinion, it is a moral truth. And yes, there are moral absolutes, things are not relative. Abortion is not OK even in cases of rape and incest because of the circumstances; it is always inherently wrong because it takes an innocent life.
That’s what the emphasis in today’s Gospel is trying to tell us. Moral relativism is like building your house on sand- because as an individual your house cannot handle relativism. You and I need bedrock to build our foundations on- absolute rights and wrongs- or else we will fall apart when we are confronted with all of the challenges. None of us has the wisdom and discernment of God. And so He has revealed his truth to us through scriptures and our aggregate tradition.so that we will know- will know what the truth is, and the Catechism is the truth, the bedrock foundation we all need.
Let me talk about conscience for a minute. We all must act according to our consciences, right. And in fact, the Catechism says that. But, the Catechism also says that our consciences need to be informed, fully informed. The formation of our consciences is not a secular responsibility. It is a responsibility that is associated with our belief system. You know, last December, our parish and the Diocese as a whole, launched a program called “Why Catholic”. “Why Catholic” is a walk over several years, through the Catechism. It is a way for you and I to become better informed as to what the Church teaches and why. It is a Catholic way to form your conscience. It is not too late to join one of these groups. We will be signing folks up for these groups again as we enter Lent.
Now when your Faith is strong, and you know what our church teaches, it will be written on your hearts and minds. And like all people of good will, you will live that faith with conviction, even when the going gets tough, because the overwhelming majority of us want to do the right thing.
Tags: Christian Faith