Faith is not for the Weak

                                               Faith is Not For The Weak

 

 

I know that Avery Dulles was quoted in my last post but it bears repeating the same man of faith for that which I would like to speak about now. So I quote- “ Christ, as He appeared in the scriptures, was not primarily a moralist. For conduct as such he cared very little; love and faith he cherished beyond measure.”

This is liberating news to some, scandal at best for others and sure to cause a storm should the truth ever be known to the moralists among us. But what does this mean?

 

Well, it does not mean that Christ never preached on the moral life, that we are free to decide for ourselves the rights and wrongs of the life we live. Obviously not, for there are those things called the Ten Commandments to balance each and every one us against and every one of them holds a message to be adhered too. Yet consider this. When asked which of the commandments was the greatest, Christ answered that we should love the Lord our God with all our strength and our neighbor as himself.

Not, it should be noted, the other nine. Why? Because if you follow the first, the others just sort of fall into line. If you love God and your neighbor, you will not sleep with his wife. If you love your neighbor, you won’t steal from him or slander his name in public, or bare false witness against him. If you stop the moralist tendency to avoid sin and just love God through your neighbor, you won’t break the other nine commandments- simple fare for a simple man.

Give me the best of those commands then, let me run with them and prove I love God through my neighbor and his best interest, but do not let me count every sin and foible I have to prove to God how much I love Him. It would never be proven. God alone knows how much we love Him and we only know that he does through the way that we keep that one command.

So what then for the moralist? To dot every I and cross every T is to lose the true meaning of the cross for all that it is worth. To reduce the cross to a sentimental belief alone is to denude the very essence of Christianity. It is to reduce our Lord to the realm of sanctimonious belief. Here then is reality versus pretense; you must die.

 It is essential a fact as the air you breathe; you, and I, must die. But the really perverse thing that most of us will never grasp, is the fact that we start dying the day we are born. And to continue the conundrum is the fact that we never start living until we begin to die. To ourselves, to our very self, to those around us in the face of apology, in the admittance of wrongdoing. My God is writ large against the backdrop of pride and I for one should like to be mistaken for one who cares. I should very much like to be mistaken for one of those that can recognize their fault and come home anyway. I, would like to be, a saint.

Far be it from me to attempt such a thing but consider this if you will. It is not I that calls out to be a saint; it is the living God that calls forth upon all his saints to become that which we should ascribe to be. You got it; saints. So the call becomes divine, the call becomes the question and the question is, will we become the saints God intended us to be? Or will you continue to cross the t and dot the I? The cross itself should suffice for each and every one of us. It is up to us to progress in sanctity, vilify the world and hope to eternal life.

It is up to us to live the command.