A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Peter. When Jesus had finished his discourse, in the hearing of the people, he entered the city of Capernaum. That was a large city up in the Northwest corner of the lake. A centurion had a servant whom he held in very high regard, who at that moment was sick even to the point of dying. When the centurion, of course he's a Roman officer, when the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to Jesus, asking him to come and save the life of his servant.
Upon approaching Jesus, they asked him earnestly, this man deserves this favor from you because he loves our people and even built our synagogue for us. Jesus set out at once with him. When he was only a short distance from the centurion's house, the centurion sent friends of his to tell Jesus, sir, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you enter my house. That is why I did not presume to come to you myself. Just give the order, and my servant will be cured.
I too am a man who knows the meaning of an order, having soldiers under my command. I say to one soldier, on your way, and off he goes. To another, come here, and the man comes. And to my slave, I say, do this, and he does it. Jesus showed amazement on hearing this and turned to the crowd which was following him.
I tell you, I have never found so much faith among the Israelites. When the deputation returned to the house, they found the servant in perfect health. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
How do you account for this faith, which would be better called trust or confidence, in this Roman officer. He was a man of some importance. Where did he get it? And if he had it, why did so many Israelites not have it? This is a good question.
How do you account for faith? Now the this word faith is very ambiguous. It has two extremely different meanings. One is has to do with our ascent, where we accept something as true or false on authority. It's the it's what goes on in law courts.
Here you have the weighing of evidence and testimony and witnesses, and all of that paraphernalia which goes into building up a case for certitude, human certitude. On the other hand, the word faith can have another meaning very different from it, where it is an equivalent of trust or confidence. Now sometimes the two go together. That's the way it should be. But in our own minds, and especially if we're going to do any clear thinking, we should keep these two meanings apart.
How do you account for it? Our faith is tested. That is I'm using this word now in the sense of trust and confidence. It is tested when we're put to the test. Now every time we say the Lord's Prayer, we ask God not to put us to the test.
And that's a very sensible thing to do. We do not want to be tempted, as one translation very poorly puts it. We ask God not to put us to the test because we're not too sure how we can react. And here, you see, is the heart of the matter, as Jane as Green would put it probably. You see, we think in terms of myself, ourselves.
What can I do? How will I face up to it? How will I endure it? How will I react? When of course, if you're a Christian, you see, and if you have faith in the sense in which you have given a commitment to Jesus Christ, an intellectual certitude, which of course ought to be more than that, plus the other meaning of faith, of trust and confidence.
If you have all of this, if you have it, then it ought to be operational. Then it ought to come through in daily living just as the centurions did. I don't know how he got it, but he had it. He recognized in Jesus' authority. And so many others who were close to Jesus did not recognize that.
But he did, and so he was confident in it. He wasn't worried. He had respect for Jesus and the Jewish tradition because he knew if Jesus crossed the threshold of his house, as a Jew, he would be unclean. And so here's this Roman who has this trust, but it's operational. It's not merely something coming off his lips.
And this is the heart of the matter. Is our faith operational? Is it affective? Does it come into our daily living? And let's be concrete, just within the last twenty four hours, within a certain geographical area of this parish, we had one family and all friends bereaved by a suicide.
There was another person emotionally disturbed, and two very abrupt attacks, probably strokes. How do you react to these things? There's the test of faith. Can you say to Jesus, Lord, I believe you have the authority. I don't ask you to come into my house.
Just say the word and it's going to be taken care of. You're not going to bring the dead back to life. You're not going to make life endless. You see, we say he recovered from his illness. What do we mean?
All we mean is we postpone dying. That's all. And for how long? You know there's no cure for dying yet. We're working on it, but we haven't gotten there yet.
And so is our faith Keebler Ross, you know, on death and dying, which was a very sensible and very thoughtful and challenging study of how people react to dying. It's an old book now and she's she's collapsed. But the one thing that came through to me, I read that book occasionally because it's still a good good piece of research, is that the Christians reacted in no better way than the non Christians, As far as I can make out, this is not one of her big points, but as far as I can read it this, they all go through the same depression, almost despair and hopelessness. How do you reconcile that with being a Christian? How do you reconcile a Christian facing up to life as if it wasn't to die as if it wasn't going to end in this life with dying?
How can you reconcile a thought of living without the cross of Jesus Christ when he put that down as the only criterion of being his follower? How do you reconcile a Christian who thinks it's very unusual and abnormal for him to be rejected? When our blessed Lord said that's what the world's gonna do with you all the time. You're you're gonna say this is a harsh doctrine. Well, let me tell you that that Christianity is a doctrine of Christ dying on the cross.
The son of God, incidentally. Incidentally. And if we pretend or if we accept or if we say we're your follower, what have we to expect? What happened to the first disciples? Jews Judas, he fell into the into the chasm of despair and hanged himself.
All the rest of them were martyrs. That's how the first crowd started out. Our Christianity is know, it's awfully We can get so wrapped up in things, and by that I mean religiosity, that we forget the transcendence of God Almighty. By forgetting, I mean operationally. Oh, we could spout it off with our mouths and we say, believe in God and I believe God's running the universe.
I believe that yes. Of course, I believe that Jesus Christ said that not a hair from my head falls without my heavenly father. I know that Christ said that about the sparrows and the flowers of the field, and I know that's so true. Where is that reflected in my daily living in my reaction to the tragedies, the crises, and the things that happen? Once you're into your late thirties, things begin to happen.
Where is our Christianity? Where do we reflect the centurion? Lord, I know you've got the power. I don't understand all the How can I understand? When I throw that switch over there to turn the light on, I don't understand what makes that light burn in any in any actual sense of the word.
And if if it if at last you say, well, everybody knows what makes the light burn, it's electricity. Well, then my question is, what in the world is electricity? We're pretty ignorant people, you know, but we know how to use things. And our blessed Lord never he never told us we were going to understand everything. Life has plenty of mysteries.
It has plenty of unanswered questions. Any little child can can stump the the wisest person on God's earth. Doesn't take a genius to ask questions. So what do we come back to? We come back to this Roman, this centurion who recognized Jesus Christ as having authority.
And that's what let us pray for that kind of thing. Newman called it, you know, the real ascent. Well, if there's anything that turns you off is that kind of language. Today we talk about gut assent, a gut reaction. It sounds a little vulgar, but what we're trying to say is what Newman said with his real assent, or what some other people talk about as total assent.
Not just merely an affirmation of my intellect, like saying two and two or four, or I believe in God. It means that I give my whole being to certain commitments. A father and a mother taking care of the of a sick child, for example. They're concerned about it. They're thinking.
They're acting. They're worrying. They're emotionally involved. The whole complexity. That's what we're talking about.
We're talking about the totality of myself, the whole being. And I'm not a Cartesian. I'm not a disembodied spirit, you know, running around loose. I'm a human being with emotions, with sentiment, with feeling, with thoughts, with fears, with concerns, with anxieties. And then I have an intelligence where I have supposedly, where I have certain conceptions of God and of Jesus Christ.
How do you put all of this together and make it come out one integrated? How do you do it? It's a gift. Faith is a gift. Let us never forget it.
You can't earn it. You can lose it, You can destroy it. But it's a gift of Jesus Christ, and here again is a tremendous mystery. And so I let us pray in this mass that our faith, which we accept and which is certainly so frightfully important. Just read yesterday that the great crisis in the Catholic church is the one of truth.
Truth, that's the brain, that's the intelligence. But you can't divorce that kind of faith, faith of man's intellect from our daily living, from our effective ways of life, from the what happens to us of one thing or another, death and dying and tragedies and accidents, and the good things of life, are they all integrated into the oneness of being truly a Christian and a follower of Jesus Christ? In the name of the father, of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.