Second Sunday Lent 1997

Is faith a test?

There is kind of an embarrassment of riches in the readings today. Even though each one taken separately is, as I said, very rich and can be used in a variety of ways, I would like to try and connect them, and there are a variety of connections possible, but I have chosen one in particular that I will now try to make clear to you. The first reading is very famous, there are all kinds of paintings, and even music and plays from the Middle Ages about the sacrifice of Isaac..., but it is also one of the most puzzling, especially in the context of the rest of the Book of Genesis. You remember that Abraham was given the promise by God that out of his progeny would come the salvation of everybody, and that Abraham and his wife were old and the very birth of Isaac, their only kid, was miraculous, as the text has it. Why go to all this trouble to get this post-menopausal lady pregnant and then have God say, "now do him in?" What is going on?--Well, the text itself says that this is some kind of test of Abraham’s faith, and in the Letter to the Romans Paul will refer to Abraham’s faith, but its original context is very likely that of a protest, a polemic, against something that was very common in the Ancient Near East: namely, child sacrifice. Every time a city was built, of course all cities were walled, they would routinely take a baby and throw it into the foundation to protect it in some kind of magical way. Beyond that, child sacrifice was usual, archaeologists keep digging up these baby skeletons, and the Jews, who were influenced by their neighbors, were making some kind of protesting statement in this text, however strange it might seem in other ways. But, attached to this passage in Romans, it takes on a different meaning. In Romans too, it is important to know something of the context: this is Paul’s last letter and shortly after this he was executed for preaching the Gospel. You may remember in the Second Letter to the Corinthians he gives this litany of horrors that he has had to undergo, so when he talks about distress, hardship, nakedness, persecution, famine, the sword... these are not abstract possibilities for Paul, all of these things refer to things in which Paul was really involved. He was certainly jailed and persecuted by all kinds of people, and finally he was killed, tradition says that he was beheaded. And then the last text, this famous Transfiguration Text which is always on the Second Sunday of Lent in either Mark, Matthew, or Luke’s version, is a kind of prolepsis, that is an anticipation, of Easter (I think the majority of scholars will say that the Transfiguration is some sort of Easter vision thrown back into Jesus’ pre-crucifixion career).

So, given all that, what do we do? Is faith a test?--I don’t think it is, myself. I don’t think God keeps throwing curve-balls at us to say, "I wonder if he’ll hold up in the face of this one." I think that is a shallow understanding of what the life of faith is and I have been suggesting that Lent is a time in which to deepen ourselves and, in this context, to deepen our faith. I read this text wondering about the faith of Abraham, and I read about Paul writing to the Church of Rome, and then I look at myself and I find that the great difference between me and these texts is that God is simply not that kind of context in my lived experience. It is very simple; I live in terms of all kinds of other coordinates, even in the face of such hardships as I have. What hardship?--Well, I almost ran into somebody coming in today, the dough-nut line at Tim Hortons was too long, and the dogs were too stubborn when I was walking them... So I’ve got all these hardships... Is it possible to say that that is God testing you?--I don’t think so, and yet that is clearly how the Cross and suffering is misrepresented in the Christian life. What we have in the case of Paul is somebody who was suffering, as in the case of Abraham, out of the belief that God really is there, and that God really is the ultimate context of one’s existence, and that anything that goes on in one’s life is not only incomprehensible, but not dealable with, apart from God.

What I’m getting at is that Lent is a chance for me to examine all the strategies whereby I get from one day to the next without any reference to God, and it is a very simple suggestion that I make. Lent is for the deepening of what?--The deepening of who I am. The Prayer of Augustine, which I think is the paradigm of all prayer, says: "Lord, let me know myself; let me know you." So the knowledge of God is inseparable from the knowledge of myself, and the knowledge of myself is inseparable from my knowledge of God... Well, if I’m honest with myself, that’s not the way I operate. In fact, there is the additional problem of being part of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. The problem there is that I have all these public coordinates for my life: "oh yeah, Trojcak should be this and this." Even Ted Schmidt complained about the shirt I wore when I introduced him the other night because it was not clerical enough... So what I’m getting at is, even though I don’t wear the Roman Collar, I still hear: "Father’s here, Father Trojcak is here." All that stuff can and does function as a filter of my self-knowledge and it doesn’t have anything to do with faith at all, but rather some bureaucratic protocol.

So what I’m saying is that the readings today are moving us to simply ask some really searching questions about how we constitute our existence. If we don’t, then the Gospel, this business of the Transfiguration, is meaningless. What does a transfigured life look like? We can’t even begin to address that until we become aware of our own untransfigured condition. How are we going to talk about an untransfigured condition? There is a whole range of possibilities and yet none of that has to do with what Paul is talking about: the garage door opener got stuck, the coffee was scorched, one of my kids is in jail... So I hope for me and for you that the readings can serve as a great question mark.

Lent is a time to first of all come to be aware that there really is a question... when normally I’m not even aware that there is a question as to where God is and how God is in my life.

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