Today’s readings: Deut. 11, 18.26-28; Rom. 3, 21-25.28; Matt. 7, 21-27.
Many times we may ask ourselves whether the dizzying progress we have seen in our time will continue indefinitely. Hollywood filmslike Deep Impact, about a comet hitting the earth, or The Day AfterTomorrow, showing sudden weather changes plunging the world into a deep freeze, reflect such a fear.
We may consider the possibility of the world plunging into sudden chaos as remote. But one just needs to look around to grasp how shaky the foundations we’ve built on can be. This applies to issues varying from the environment to politics as well as to culture and religion.
The Gospel image of a house built on rock or sand speaks clearly about what passes and what remains in life. It also indicates what makes faith authentic and what instead renders it a caricature of true belief. The feeling of a Church in ruins and of religion as weak has been commonplace in the past 200 years.
The floods and gales Jesus speaks of in the Gospel can be applied to the power of secularisation which was capable of demolishing a seemingly powerful building that was taken to be Christ’s Church. Maybe what came down was not the real thing. Much of it was a human construct, very similar to the house built on sand to which Jesus is referring.
In Nostalgia for the Absolute, George Steiner writes, “this decay, coupled with the failure of alternative versions of truth, has created a pervasive nostalgia for the absolute that is growing and deepening and leading us, for the first time in Western tradition, to a massive clash between truth and human survival”.
We’ve been experiencing breakdowns of order in the Western world throughout the past century, and more recently since the TwinTowers tragedy, the economic crisis that hit Europe and the US, and now with the Arab unrest. It makes a lot of sense that today the Gospel speaks of the shaky foundations we live on. What is it that makes us wise or stupid in the way we handle all this?
In our times, religion and the Church seem to be relativised. This worries us. Besides, there are signs of social collapse in our societies which we all recognise but have great difficulties to come to terms with, explain or interpret.
Diagnosis of what’s going on is not easy so we attribute all this to a variety of causes present and past. Are these signs of social collapse proof that the house we’ve inherited was built on the sand? Diagnosis apart, our challenge ahead is to grasp whether faith in the true God can truly be a remedy to all this.
In today’s reading from Deuteronomy, Moses speaks to the people: “I set before you today a blessing and a curse; a blessing if you obey the commandments of the Lord, a curse if you disobey”. Maybe these are words that to our modern ears and sensibility sound outdated or perhaps even superstitious.
St Paul’s words to the Romans do not contradict Moses. We read from Paul today one of the most fundamental statements of Christianity, that “a man is justified by faith and not by doing something the Law tells him to do”. Paul puts obedience to the law in the right Christian perspective which, honestly enough, is not always in line with the way we’ve been brought up to think.
Our challenge ahead is to deepen our understanding of the faith, to be wise where faith is concerned, to distinguish wisely between being people of faith and being people who just use faith as an alibi.
As the Gospel says, we can prophesy in the Lord’s name, even cast out demons and work miracles. But it can be a caricature if there is no coherence. We can be faced with the words, “I have never known you”.
Ways of conceiving our faith relationship with God merely in terms of observance of the law are only houses and lives built on sand. The solid ground of our faith is not the way religion has come to form an integral part of our culture. That is today in ruins. What endures is the interior foundation which makes us true to ourselves and honest to God.