The Gift of Faith

SERMON BY FATHER JONATHAN E MOORE - LINK HERE 

The Gift of Faith

Hello again dear friends. Today I'm going to consider our gospel for next Sunday, the 21st Sunday of the year, and I've entitled this reflection The Gift of Faith. You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Saint Peter's great act of faith at Caesarea Philippi stands as one of the defining moments of our faith journey, and with good reason. This was the first time that the true nature of Jesus of Nazareth was recognised by a human person. The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same, truly God and truly man.

Saint Peter is the first Pope, Vicar of Christ on earth, and a clear line of succession from him right down to our own Pope Leo. The apostolic succession is what guarantees Catholic belief and doctrine as the authentic teaching of our blessed Lord himself. Please come with me as I meander through two important aspects of today's gospel.

First the questions Jesus asks his apostles, and second his response to Peter's act of faith. First the questions, because they're full of spiritual significance. Who do people say the Son of Man is? And then, but you, who do you say I am? Jesus is not engaged in market research.

He does not ask questions like, do people like me? And add up the number of likes, as a modern social media addict might. He does not ask, "Do people approve of what I teach?" Or again, "Do people like what I'm doing?" No, His questions cut to the heart of true spirituality. They are not about doing, but about being.

As I've said so often before, human beings struggle with spiritual growth, because it is hard to break away from the doing, having, going and making mindset. As a result, we tend to define ourselves and everybody else, God included, in terms of activity, rather than being. Ask a person, who are you? And nine times out of ten, they will tell you what they do.

"I'm a teacher. I'm a bricklayer. I'm a stockbroker."

This causes many problems, not just in our relationship with God either. How many young women, or young men for that matter, have fallen in love with a uniform, a pretty face, social standing, good dress sense, success or wealth, and then struggled to come to terms with the person they found they had married. Many, thank God, are able to overcome that initial disappointment and learn to love the other simply for who they are.

And such is true love. Being is so much more important than doing, but we spend so much of our lives learning and achieving, that we can so easily forget. There's a lovely old Slovak hymn, translated into English as, "Jesus, Thou art coming".

The fourth verse says, "Dearest Lord, I love thee with my whole heart, not for what Thou givest, but for who Thou art". Those words could well be used as a model of prayer. Loving must go beyond doing, or it simply doesn't go deep enough to be true.

Any relationship which rests on having, doing, getting, is a house built on sand. Jesus, wanting to build his church on rock, asked the right question. A thousand years later, St Francis of Assisi spent his whole life asking two questions when he prayed, "O God, who are you and who am I?" He lived a very full life and left an enduring legacy to successive ages, because he knew the right question too.

Let us now turn to the words Jesus spoke in response to Peter's act of faith. "Blessed are you, Simon Barjona. It was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven.

Jesus does not praise Simon Peter for working it all out for himself and reaching a logical conclusion, because that is not what happened. When St Peter confessed that Jesus is Christ, the Son of the living God, Jesus declared to him that this revelation did not come from flesh and blood, but from "my Father who is in Heaven". Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by Him.

Before this faith can be exercised, we must have the grace of God to move and assist us, and we must have the interior assistance of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth. Faith is a gift of God. It is freely given to us.

We cannot deserve, earn, merit or buy this most precious of all gifts. This is a very basic and necessary truth of the spiritual life. Faith is not something any human person can achieve, attain or discover for himself or herself.

Neither is it a gift we can give to any other person, much as we would often like to. It would be quite possible for someone to gain an honours degree in theology and not believe in God at all. We might be well versed in Catholic belief and practise and not believe a word of it.

The most we can ever do in catechesis is to provide fuel for the fire God chooses to light, and God doesn't light that fire to order. In prayer we need to thank God every day for the gift He has given us and pray that others may be likewise blessed. None of the New Testament writers speaks more beautifully of faith than Saint Paul.

He had not known Jesus during his earthly life like the other apostles. His relationship with our Lord was based on faith alone, just like our own, and it is to him that today's last word belongs. You'll find this in the second chapter of the letter to the Galatians beginning at verse 19.

"I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in this body I live in faith, faith in the Son of God who loved me and who sacrificed himself for my sake." Amen.