Today’s readings: Exodus 17, 8-13; 2 Timothy 3, 14 - 4,2; Luke 18, 1-8.

The key question in the gospel today is whether the Lord is going to find faith on earth when he comes. It is a provoking question which may have a myriad of answers depending on perceptions, beliefs, and reading of the times we live in.

For many, these are times of extraordinary possibilities, despite the difficulties we sense in so many aspects of our daily living collectively and individually. For others, they are times of cultural sunset and moral confusion. Many live as if the show must go on, while so many others have to battle on to survive.

Our standpoint in life today does not make it easy to perceive the future serenely. We may have very differing versions of how faith in the future is going to take shape. Yet the major issue remains whether we can still believe in the future.

In the first reading from Exodus we read about Amalek, enemy number one for Israel, and how through the leadership of Moses and Joshua, Israel made it to move on and experience God’s power in the face of peril. St Luke speaks of a widow, representing all those on the periphery of our societies, begging for justice.

The two prayers, that of Moses and that of the widow, are set within a political framework. Our prayers can no longer be innocent or naive. We cannot pray ‘Thy kingdom come’ with eyes, ears and mouth shut. That would make our faith very ambiguous and our religion alienating.

We need courage and vision to address the question that is being posed to us today about the faith of the future. As a first reaction we may be induced to answer negatively, standing by stereotype judgments based normally on reading numbers of low church attendance. But maybe God’s vision of reality differs from ours.

Faith is not a set of opinions or an ideology. Religious people very often measure faith quantitatively. But is faith measurable in that sense? As someone said, you can’t be an optimist in religion and a pessimist about the world. Though we need to be with our feet to the ground, it doesn’t pay to be gloomy.

Times change, and different eras succeed one another. We should never fall in the trap of identifying our faith with one particular era. Faith always transcends all that comes and goes. Faith cannot become nostalgia of a past that has gone; neither can it be reduced to a projection of wishful thinking or beliefs.

The challenge facing us all today is to bring faith alive from the ruins of whatever is collapsing right in front of our eyes. The new Jerusalem we all aspire to from the faith standpoint, is never a refurbished city or structure. Biblically speaking, the new Jerusalem was always meant to be built on the ruins of the old one.

Faith, rather than linked to doctrine, has to be seen more in conjunction with God’s gratuitous grace that is still being showered on the world as it is now. The “encircling gloom”, like John Henry Newman, should make us turn more to the living God with the gentle prayer “Lead kindly light”.

Probably, faith in the future will be less tangible in cultural terms. It will be more like that of the widow in the gospel, contrasting the arrogant judge and all that he represents. There are many people in the world today who by normal standards are on the losing side, yet who bravely persist in their song of resistance.

This happened in Latin America in the golden age of the theology of liberation. It still occurs in the daily battles of all those who stand up for the rights of others, whoever they may be. It transpires wherever simple people find the courage to say the truth that is never spoken in circles meant to defend it.

Thank God, there are many of these around. Faith continues to live on in them and through them. Cultural analysts have always claimed that with modernity all that was grand-scale was doomed to failure.

At times we forget that Jesus in the gospel speaks of faith in terms of a seed sown in the ground and letting it be till the time is ripe. That’s a different wavelength than ours. In that sense, he will find faith on earth when he comes. Surely not as we perceive it to be many a time.