Today’s readings: Acts 3, 13-15.17-19; 1 John 2, 1-5; Luke 24, 35-48.
The burden of proof that Christ is truly risen and alive rests always on those who in some way or other claim to be believers in him.
The atheist grand story throughout Modernity has been that of the former enslavement of humanity to primitive superstitions. What actually we need to be witnessing to firmly and strongly in our age is precisely that Christianity is no fairy tale. The Christian faith helps us make sense of things.
One of the major issues we continuously encounter and find difficult to resolve in the faith is how to explain why the God we believe in seems to be one who lets things go their course even if that implies suffering and death.
Why is this God a helpless and impotent God in the face of what distorts and crushes life?
This we find sort of re-proposed in today’s readings, first by Peter, then by Jesus himself. In the first reading from Acts, it is surprising how Peter, addressing the crowds who brought Jesus to death, seems to be so forgiving: “Neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing”. He even goes so far as to affirm that “this was the way God carried out what he had foretold”.
In the gospel, Jesus himself told his disciples: “This is what I meant when I said, while I was still with you, that everything written about me has to be fulfilled”.
What God is this that lets things happen as they were written and foretold as if He were powerless? Is this not a God who is helpless, unable to halt and change what we ourselves propose and mean to carry out? God’s irruption in history and in the midst of our daily experiences diametrically opposes the intellectualistic notion of faith that sometimes dominates our struggle to make ends meet.
Faith is, strictly speaking, a journey in doubt. Grappling in the dark is one of the best metaphors that explains what faith is about.
Believing is not knowing. It is rather finding one’s way amidst progress and reversals. It reminds of Shadowlands, a television film subsequently adapted to cinema which deals with how C.S. Lewis struggled with personal pain and grief.
Lewis preaches that one should endure suffering with patience, but finds that the simple answers he had preached no longer apply when Joy becomes afflicted with cancer and eventually dies.
The conclusion of the film goes: “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”
In his first letter John writes: “When anyone does obey what he has said, God’s love comes to perfection in him”. Obedience is the stature of waiting, of listening.
It is only in the context of this active waiting that God’s story unfolds in our stories, making us see His word come true.
Faith is rich with its own interior and consistent evidence which, though, is never translatable in normal evidence to the naked eye. It is always a growth, a continuous chiaroscuro.
What stands firm in this chiaroscuro, in this land of shadows, is the written Word of God which opens our minds and hearts constantly to the unwritten word which we are called to listen to. But if there is no listening, if there is no opening up to God’s loving and embracing presence, the written word becomes only a dead letter.
Faith in this land of shadows is meant to help us make sense of things that otherwise would remain obscure and chaotic.