How deep is your faith in the Lord?
Though Moses knew he would never enter in the Promised Land,
in the Book of Deuteronomy, he takes pains to prepare the people of Israel for
their first harvest there, instructing them elaborately on the offering of
thanksgiving they will make to the Lord: You
shall declare before the Lord, your God… I have now brought you the firstfruits
of the products of the soil which you, O Lord, have given me. And having set them before the Lord, your
God, you shall bow down in his presence.
Gratitude is our first connection to God; through thanksgiving, we
recognize that we need God; we acknowledge that God has a place in our lives,
that God is necessary to our existence. Say to the Lord, My refuge and fortress, my
God in whom I trust, Psalm 91 proclaims.
The psalmist encourages the people to realize that God is with them, and
that they are protected wherever they are.
Again, trust and deep faith are necessary, and it is gratitude that leads
us to trust.
Faith is at the center of Paul's letter to the Romans as well: if you
believe, you will be saved, he says.
He has preached the Gospel to the Romans; they simply have to put their
faith in the Word of God. Jesus' death
has been effective in their lives, and they need to make that known. But to confess
with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised
him from the dead is to step into a space of difficulty, to step into the
Cross. Yet, without witness, is your
faith really something you live? Paul
thus calls the Romans -- and us -- to living faith in the promise that is
ours: you will be saved.
Jesus' faith, of course, is a given: he has trust in the love of his Father even
when tempted by the devil in the
desert, as Luke describes it. Driven to this life-threatening
place of dangerous, wild things by the Holy Spirit, Jesus spends forty days
reversing the sin of Adam, in order to give humankind the opportunity to
embrace faith once again, and to let go of the thirst for power man once
sought. Human power functions by
taking; Jesus understands that he needs to stand with the power of love itself,
which works by giving. Confident, having
trust in God alone, he rejects Satan's temptations and embraces love instead.
Lent is a time to discover anew how deeply in love with God
we are, how profoundly we trust, how completely we have faith in the Lord's
presence. After all, it is not human
power that saves us, but God's power, the power that is love, at work in our
lives, always. Hence: have faith!
This post is based on Fr. Pat's 2013 homily on these readings.
Image source: Wordle
No comments:
Post a Comment