Today’s readings: Habakkuk 1,2-3; 2,2-4; 2 Timothy 1, 6-8.13-14; Luke 17, 5-10.
One of the major issues we face today in a culture which claims that it can do without religion, is the conflict between a private faith and a public religion.
Peter Berger, a sociologist of religion, recently claimed that what effectively today is in real crisis is secularisation, not faith. Religion is neither merely private nor purely irrational. These are myths that need to be dispelled because they bear little relation to either our political life or our everyday experience.
There is a social dimension of belief, a public role of religion which finds articulation in the collective consciousness and responsibility of any community of faith that deserves to be taken seriously in this day and age. It is actually on this public level that many a time we are hopelessly lacking. What we are ready to think out in our hearts or in the intimacy of our inner circles of friends, we are often fearful, or even feel intimidated, to articulate publicly.
The power of faith as illustrated by Jesus in the imagery of the mustard seed is not an energy we are called to experience only interiorly. There is a world out there waiting to be healed, to hear the good news that can be liberating, free from all ideology and capable of balancing private commitment and public testimony.
Thomas Merton insisted that a religion is most authentic when its primary function is to mentor a person’s spiritual liberty. It is in that authenticity that faith needs to be rooted in order then to be publicly articulated as credible and consistent. The prophet, wrote Josef Ratzinger, is someone who tells the truth on the strength of his contact with God. It is a question of rendering the truth of God present at this moment in time.
This is what the prophet Habakkuk is doing in the first reading, screaming boldly at God and taking Him to task for ignoring the cries of His people and not listening to their prayers. This is not the only case in point we read about in the Scriptures. Other prophets did the same.
God was and is still very often put in the dock, as we read, for example, in Jewish authors like Elie Wiesel in his The trial of God or David Blumenthal in his The Abusive God. God has often been accused of simply looking on while violence thrives. This is experienced daily even by many of us, provoked by God’s silence and patience in the face of the world’s griefs.
St Paul in today’s second reading encourages Timothy not only to be a guardian of the faith but also a minister of boldness. Together with the Apostles in today’s gospel, it makes sense for us to ask Jesus to “increase our faith”. Increasing faith means consolidating, it means facing boldly our situations today and seeking to mediate more meaning to what is under way around us.
One very basic question that has haunted Israel in its prophets and that continues to haunt us believers throughout time is whether the God we believe in can really change the course of history. Karl Barth, Swiss Reformed theologian often regarded as the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, faces precisely this issue of what is ‘real’ and what is ‘possible’. It is ordinary, according to any common rationality, to begin with what is possible and then to judge what is real on the basis of the possible. Thus, if it is not possible it cannot be real. Barth inverts this and insists that the real comes first in the mystery of God.
The prophet Habakkuk touches on this problematic in today’s reading. Israel is in grief about the losses suffered. What Habakkuk is boldly recalling is the creator’s capacity for newness in the midst of the most dire of circumstances. “Write the vision down,” he says, “inscribe it on tablets to be easily read. If it comes slowly, wait, for come it will, without fail.” Boldness matures us to face the cross, but enables us to see through suffering.