Today’s readings: Exodus 34, 4-6.8-9; 2 Corinthians 13, 11-13; Jn 3, 16-18.
The difficulty on the part of Nicodemus highlighted today in John’s gospel is that Nicodemus could not see how Jesus’ teaching meshes with everyday life. Nicodemus was a Pharisee who acknowledged Jesus’ spiritual authority yet found it very difficult to reconcile that with his old and rigid frame of mind.
We encounter the same experience in the reading from Exodus with Moses standing with the two stone tablets in his hands, imploring God about a headstrong people, and the response is of a “God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”.
We all in some way or other continue to carry within us the same set of difficulties as we struggle to reconcile what we believe with what we experience daily. In his book Mercy, Cardinal Walter Kasper speaks of pain and suffering as universal human experiences and how religions seek to explain and ask where we can find the strength to endure.
Living in the 21st century confronted with ruthless terrorism, outrageous injustice, abused and starving children, millions of displaced people seeking stability, the increasing persecution of Christians and devastating natural catastrophes, it is difficult for many to speak of an all-powerful God who is just and merciful, affirms Kasper.
The religious crisis that characterises our times can either look like a blind alley that simply marks the end of the road where belief in God is concerned, or it can offer new opportunities for renewal and transformation. Those among us who really care to believe in a God out there, have the option of either giving in to unproductive responses or else focusing on productive strategies for confronting the cultural challenges of our time.
The classical Christian tradition is a rich one but in these times it needs to be re-appropriated and re-enacted. While we empathise with the pain and suffering around us, we need to recover our sources of strength to endure. This may ask of us and of our churches an overhaul in the way faith has always been formulated and transmitted.
From our standpoint as believers, we need to be honest intellectually and face the most important and vital questions that ask for a meaningful answer. Peter Hodgson, in his book Winds of the Spirit, writes: “From the point of view of history, we have lost confidence that a divine providence governs the course of events, directing them to some beneficial end”.
When we revisit the political, socio-economic and ecological crises that have been re-enforcing this lack of confidence throughout the last short century, it becomes natural to ask whether the experience of God’s absence, even of His very death, was primarily a cultural event in the sense that humanity no longer felt the need of the particular God preached to solve its problems or to satisfy its deepest longings?
If, as the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida once said, the religions are rafts that sail on an endless sea, then we must keep watch that we do not allow our preoccupation with the business on the raft to displace God’s business, which is love. In its medieval sense, religion stood for virtue, and true religion meant the virtue of being genuinely or truly religious, of genuinely or truly loving God. God is more important than religion, as the ocean is more important than the raft, to return to Nishida’s metaphor.
Even though his work on The Trinity purports to be a discussion of the Trinity, Augustine’s preoccupation throughout is with the Christian life. His argument is complex, but his conclusion is based upon defining God as love and on the innate possibility within us human beings to search for Him and know Him rather than just to know about Him.
Love is more important than faith, writes John Caputo in his book On Religion. God can still be the object of desire and of the deepest longings inside us, more than the object of our knowledge. Indeed it is more the restless heart that can meet and experience God rather than the inquisitive mind.