I love the readings we had last Sunday, the Gospel of the Transfiguration and that strange, rather frightening accountfrom Genesis 15 in which Abram is asked to bisect a number of animal carcasses and lay them down either side of a line. He falls asleep, and while he sleeps a flaming firebrand passes between the carcasses.
This strange ritual was an ancient way of sealing a covenant, a gesture which ratified a solemn bond. Something of its symbolic quality survives in the childish oath “cross my heart and hope to die”. If the party offering this agreement should break it, he invites the same fate to befall him as the butchered animals. It means: “May I be destroyed if I go back on my promise.”
We should note that this all happens while Abram sleeps: a biblical reminder that Abram is not concluding a bargain with God. He is rather the passive recipient of one. God, of his own initiative, makes a one-sided covenant with Abram of which he, God, is the guarantor. All this happens in response to Abram’s rather heartfelt question, “How can I know?” that God will keep his promise.
“How can I know?” is a question about faith. Faith is the quality of my response to God’s revelation and promise, the stand I have willed myself to take in relation to it. It is not how I feel about God. When people say “My faith is weak”, I think they imagine that for others faith is a kind of religious accomplishment – like riding a bicycle – that once mastered never goes away. It is easy to imagine that the exemplars of faith we see around us breathe in clouds of incense whenever they pray.
Faith is not strong or weak according to one’s own sense of how I feel about God on a given day. Abram’s “How can I know?” is not: “How much can I understand, or compute how close I am getting, to the mind of God?” Rather, it is: “How can I accept that this promise is the meaning of my life? How can I know that despite my reactions at a natural level, I am, in fact, to pursue this promise of God’s favour through all that obscures it, to pursue it long after the initial excitement or emotional response to it has worn off, and when the certainty of vision I had becomes clouded or the voice seems fainter?”
Faith is a bit like being in love with someone far away: I have to keep faith with them against the present reality of the experience of their absence. On the one hand it is true that I have had some experience of them that has changed me, but this experience makes the subsequent absence all the harder, since the present reality is a painful reminder that things are not as they were when I was first seized by this call from without and it was new and exiting and we were together. In such circumstances, faith has to be more than just nostalgia for what it used to feel like.
It has to be a deeply willed commitment to tolerating the present experience of wanting more, for the sake of a “more” that hope and love deep in my heart identify as precious, as the only thing that would justify the privations of the present. It is the willingness to believe that God is more on the basis of an intimation.
Faith is like a light that only casts up the shadow of your present experience and yet from that shadow you intuit the presence of the light. It is belief in the God of revelation, in what God has promised, not the God of my own doubts or fantasy. There is a purifying aspect to such faith because I can only approach closer by shedding my own illusions of who God is, what he is like, what he should be doing. My experience teaches me a little of where God is and a great deal of where he is not. It reveals with the obscurity of silhouette.
Pope Emeritus Benedict says: “The life of faith is nothing less than the continued pursuit of God through all that disguises, disfigures, destroys and, so to say, annihilates him.” In Jesus, God has incarnated not only the promise, but also the guarantee of that promise, his heart cleft before us on the cross. This is both the scandal and the glory for which it prepares us.
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