Leo (2). 'If You Can'. The Meaning of Faith
Mark 9:14-29
As
they were coming down the mountain Jesus sternly charged them not to tell
anyone what they had seen until the son of man should rise from the dead. They
kept his words to themselves, but they discussed among themselves what this
‘rising from the dead’ could mean. They began to question him. ‘Why do the
legal experts say that Elijah must come first?’ they asked. Jesus said to them,
‘Elijah does come first and is putting everything straight. But why do the
scriptures say that the son of man must suffer many things and be treated with
contempt? I’m telling you, Elijah has indeed come, and they’ve done to him all
that they wanted, just as it has been written of him.’
When they reached the other
disciples they noticed that they were arguing with some legal experts,
surrounded by a huge crowd. As soon as the crowd caught sight of Jesus they
were amazed and they ran towards him and began to greet him. He said to them,
‘What are you arguing with them about?’ One of the crowd answered, ‘Teacher, I
brought my son to you because he has a spirit of dumbness,
and whenever it seizes him it throws him down and he foams at the mouth and
grinds his teeth, and he’s wasting away. I asked your disciples to cast it out,
but they weren’t powerful enough.’ He answered them, ‘O faithless generation!
How long must I put up with you? Bring him here!’ They brought him, and when
the spirit saw him it immediately threw the lad into convulsions. He fell to
the ground and was rolling about, foaming at the mouth. Jesus asked his father,
‘How long has this been going on?’ He replied, ‘Since he was a little child.
Many times it has thrown him into the fire and into the water in order to
destroy him. If you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.’ Jesus said
to him, ‘If you can! Everything is possible to someone who has faith!’
Straightaway, the boy’s father cried out, “I do have faith! Help my lack of
faith!’
When
Jesus noticed that a crowd was bearing upon them, he rebuked the unclean
spirit, saying, ‘Deaf and dumb spirit, I order you to come out of him, and
never enter him again!’ With a shriek, the spirit sent the lad into terrible
convulsions, and came out. The young man looked as if he was dead, but Jesus,
taking him by the hand, raised him, and he stood up. When they went into a
house, the disciples asked him privately, ‘Why weren’t we able to cast it out?’
He said to them, ‘Nobody can cast out this kind except by prayer.’
Children's Story: The
Doctor’s Diagnosis
A
man was in bed, very sick. He had not eaten or spoken for two days, and his
wife thought the end was near, so she called in the doctor.
The
doctor gave the old man a very thorough physical examination. He looked at his
tongue, lifted his eyelids to examine his eyes, listened to his chest through
his stethoscope, tested his reflexes by hitting his knee with a little hammer,
felt his pulse, looked in his ears, and took his temperature. Finally, he
pulled the bed sheet over the man’s head, and pronounced, in sombre tones, ‘I’m
afraid your husband has been dead for two days.’
At
that moment, the old man pulled back the sheet, lifted his head slightly, and
whispered anxiously, ‘No, my dear, I’m still alive!’
The
man’s wife pushed his head back down again, covered him once more with the bed
sheet, and snapped, ‘Be quiet! Who asked you? The doctor is an expert, he ought
to know!’
*********************
This sermon was
delivered on 19th August 2007
If the sun and moon
should doubt,
They’d immediately go
out.
(William Blake)
Say what you like about the
Internet, but when you want information quickly it’s often there at your
fingertips. In preparing this sermon I wanted a copy of The Penny Catechism – the little booklet that most Catholics over
the age of fifty would have had to learn by heart – but it’s not readily available
these days, so I put my request into Google, and within seconds – 2.4 seconds
to be exact – there was The Penny Catechism up on my screen. I couldn’t have
accessed it more quickly if I’d gone to my bookcase to fetch it!
I
was after the Catholic definition of ‘faith’, which I still vaguely remember
from my own hours spent with the Catechism, but which I wanted to get right. It
comes early on, at question nine:
Question: ‘What is faith?’
Answer: ‘Faith is a supernatural
gift of God, which enables us to believe without doubting whatever God has
revealed.’
A couple of questions on it asks:
‘How are you to know what God has revealed?’ And the answer is: ‘I am to know
what God has revealed by the testimony, teaching and authority of the Catholic
Church.’
And then: ‘What are the chief
things which God has revealed?’
Answer: ‘The chief things which
God has revealed are contained in the Apostles' Creed.’
I
wanted this definition of faith because faith is a central concept of the
zodiacal sign Leo which, I believe, has inspired the section of Mark’s Gospel
that we are currently considering. The astrological writer Charles Carter says
that, ‘If the keynote of the sign Cancer is “I fear”, the keynote of Leo is “I
have faith”’. In fact, Faith is a central concept in all three of the so-called
‘Fire’ signs of the zodiac, Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, and with good reason:
‘Fire’ is the Element which represents enthusiasm, energy, vigour, zest, power,
individuality, all of which are bound up with what the Gospel of Mark means by
faith.
But
there is no trace of any of these things in the Catholic Church’s definition. In
the Catechism, faith is about believing certain propositions – propositions
which have been ‘revealed’ to us by God and delivered to us by the authority of
the Catholic Church. This is how most of us have been schooled to understand
faith, and why the definition given years ago by Mark Twain that ‘faith is
believing what you know isn’t true’ is not too far wide of the mark. ‘Losing’
our faith is simply ceasing to accept that these propositions have any
correspondence with the truth, or any relevance to life.
For
many Protestants, who talk about being ‘saved by faith’, ‘faith’ means
accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour and trusting that he has paid the
price of sin. If one firmly believes this, they say, one is ‘saved’, that is,
destined for heaven.
But
neither the Catholic nor the Protestant definition of faith comes even close to
what Jesus meant by the word. In the story of the Cure of the Deaf Boy, which
we heard earlier, Jesus rebukes his apostles for their lack of faith, and the
boy’s father exclaims, ‘Lord I believe, help my unbelief!’ Is Jesus telling the
apostles off because they don’t believe the propositions of the Apostles’
Creed? Is the boy’s father asking for help in accepting Jesus Christ as his
Lord and Saviour? Hardly. A moment’s consideration will show that this cannot
be the case. For Jesus, faith is not about metaphysical propositions which one
has to sacrifice one’s reasoning powers in order to accept. Faith is an attitude
to life, a positive attitude, grounded in a strong sense of our immense powers
as human beings, which we can have – or not have – regardless of the contents
of our supposed metaphysical belief system. Faith is what gets you out of bed
in the morning; it’s what keeps you struggling on in the face of life’s
vicissitudes and disappointments. The opposite of this kind of faith is not doubt
or disbelief, both of which are perfectly reasonable intellectual responses to
speculative theological statements: it is apathy, cynicism, an overwhelming
sense of futility and pointlessness, a feeling of being a helpless pawn in the
mindless drift of an indifferent universe.
Nowhere
in literature is this attitude to life more succinctly or more chillingly
expressed than in Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth may well have claimed
that he ‘believed’ the contents of the Apostles’ Creed, but his nihilistic
observation shows that he has no faith at all.
Although
Macbeth’s brand of ‘faithlessness’ has been around since the dawn of time, it
seems to be on the increase in our own day, fed by influential schools of
contemporary thought – philosophy, biology, psychology, genetics - which casually
strip us of our personal autonomy, telling us we are simply objects in a world
of objects, accidents of cosmology and history, our actions and our attitudes
determined by circumstances beyond our control. I remember, many years ago,
when I was a student in York, attending a lecture by a professor of psychology,
at which we were told, quite blithely and with no sense of regret in her voice,
that we were completely at the mercy of our genes and our environment, with the
environment having the bigger influence. ‘There is no freedom of the will at
all,’ she said. ‘Freedom of the will is pure fiction.’
I
wondered then, and I wonder still, what such teaching does to our sense of
moral responsibility, to our sense of right and wrong, virtue and vice, good
and bad, honourable and despicable. Is there any room in such a system of
thought for praise or blame, approval or censure? Strangely, although I have
met many people who would say that they go along with such opinions, none of
them has shown the slightest inclination to curb his or her tendency to
criticise volubly those who have wronged them, or to heap praise on those who
do them favours. Certain Marxist thinkers, who talk of human beings as pawns of
history or economics, never seem tired of using the language of moral censure
on people who are simply responding, so some Marxists would have us believe, as
psychological, sociological and economic laws dictate. Nor is such an attitude
restricted to secular philosophies. Religions often preach a type of fatalism
which renders us powerless in the face of some deity’s whims and diktats. So,
to some Muslims, Allah has written the script and we are simply acting the
parts allotted; to Christians of the Calvinist persuasion, the end of history
is known in advance, and God has already separated the saved from the damned,
so there’s not much point in any kind of moral striving. All of which cuts
clean across that deep sense we have of ourselves as moral beings with the
power of choice – however limited such a power might be. We may laugh at the
woman in the story I told the children, who believed the expert rather than her
experience, but how different are we? My experiences of life may teach me that
I am being with some degree of moral autonomy, but the university professor
tells me I don’t have any, so I must believe her. I may base my daily life on
the assumption that people around me are making decisions for which they can be
applauded or censured, but the intellectually respectable Mr Grim Faced
Determinist tells me that they are just acting as they must, As a consequence,
faith in my own limited but real autonomy is eroded, and gradually replaced
with a feeling of impotence in the face of cosmic inevitability.
purpose in their lives died quickly. Those who could perceive no meaning in their existence, no point to their experiences, gave in most readily. Such ‘purpose’ need not involve what we might call ultimate, transcendent purpose. He isn’t talking about abstract or overarching meaning, such as might be given by certain kinds of religious conviction; he is talking about the specific meaning that life might have at any given moment. Quoting Nietzsche, he says that ‘He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how’. Faith, for Frankl, is the why of life. The why will differ with the individual, but without it we will find ourselves in despair, regardless of our level of prosperity. Many people, says Frankl, ‘have enough to live by, but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning’. Or, as the Book of Proverbs has it, ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’
Frankl’s
experiences in Auschwitz taught him that human beings, far from being the
playthings of circumstances, have the potential to attain and express what he
calls a ‘spiritual freedom’ which cannot be taken away, and which alone can
make life purposeful and meaningful. He writes:
The
Face to Faith column in yesterday’s Guardian (18th August 2007) dealt with
this very theme. Its author Canon Andrew Clitherow, says that such a faith is
actually a prerequisite of a genuinely mature faith in God.
However, while religion often tells you to have faith in God first and then to know your place in his scheme of things, developing a faith in human nature today actually precedes having an authentic faith in God. Then as we unearth the divine potential in cosmic existence, we can take increasing responsibility for ourselves and the universe in a creative and loving way.
One final point: ‘the divine potential in cosmic existence’, the transforming power of the Christ within, has to be discovered. The kind of demon that was afflicting the young boy – that is, the demon which convinces the individual that he or she is a plaything of circumstances – cannot be driven out, merely by wishing it away, or by begging someone else to take it from us. ‘Only prayer will do it,’ says Jesus. By which he means that we must pay assiduous attention to our spiritual practice, if we are to develop the kind of faith which will transform the individual and help to transform the world.
My book The Gospel and the Zodiac: The Secret Truth about Jesus is available for a mere £6.89 from
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