Where Faith Lives It Grows
WEDNESDAY, Easter
week six: May 4, 2016
The Responsorial Psalm declares we should
praise God both for what we experience by grace and see around us in the world:
“Heaven and earth are filled with your
glory” (Psalm 148).
In Acts 17:15 to 18:l Paul begins in
Athens by arguing that “The God who made the world and everything in it… does
not live in shrines made by human hands.” He argues that if we are his
“offspring,” as Aratus, a poet from Cilicia (part of modern-day Turkey, where
Tarsus, Paul’s birthplace was) wrote, then “we ought not to think of divinity
as something like a statue of gold, or silver, or stone, a product of human
genius and art.” Then he spoke of God calling all people to “reform their
lives.” As long as he was on this human plane, the Athenians listened. But when
he said God had “endorsed Jesus by raising him from the dead,” that was too
much for them. “Some sneered, while others said, ‘We must hear you on this
topic some other time,.” At this point Paul got the message and left. “A few
did join him, however, and became believers.” These were the ones who were able
to go beyond rational speculation on the human level and commit to God in
faith. Faith is a free human choice, but it is a divinely-powered choice to go
beyond the human and accept the divine gift of sharing in God’s act of knowing.
Not everyone is willing to make that choice.
In John 16: 12-15 Jesus recognizes that
even those who do accept to know truth by faith cannot accept immediately all
that God wants to reveal to them. He said to his disciples, “I have much more
to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. When the Spirit of truth comes, however,
he will guide you to all truth.”
Our
cultural conditioning and the limitations of our human intellects make some
things so hard for us to grasp that we cry out like the man in the Gospel, “I
believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
Peter himself, initially, could not believe it was God’s will to let Jesus be
crucified (Matthew 16: 21-23), and
this was after Jesus had praised him
for his faith and decided to make him pope! We have to be willing to grow and
let others grow.
Jesus
says that what the Spirit will announce is truth “he will have received from
me.” And Jesus receives it from the Father, because “all that the Father has
belongs to me.” That simply means it is Truth that belongs inseparably to God:
Father, Son and Spirit, and anyone who receives it from the Church receives it
from the Three Persons of God. In other words, it is divine, it is mystery, it
comes as a gift from above: “Heaven and
earth are filled with your glory.”
Initiative: Be a prophet. Don’t
expect people of weak faith to accept
what you say or do. Be willing yourself to grow
into what you do not understand..
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