The readings for Mass today are in stark contrast to one another. Moses is a towering pillar of rock solid faith in God, in today’s first reading for Mass from the book of Deuteronomy. His words are sure, firm, and resolute. There is no room for doubt in Moses’s words. He wants to make sure that the people cling firmly to their faith in God well into the future, and never doubt, or forget God’s loving care for them. It sounds like Moses was trying to ensure their faith in God would endure permanently. He wanted to make sure God’s people and their descendants never forgot the mighty deeds and awesome gifts God had given them. How great was His love for His people!
The first reading goes on to talk about the enduring faith of their fathers: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The blessings they were going to receive from God they did not earn. They were the fulfillment of a promise that God had made to their fathers, because of their deep and abiding faith in Him. Moses was afraid they would forget where their blessings came from one day, and take God’s gifts for granted. His fears were real and justified.
In our secular lives today, there are many parents and grandparents that worked hard and built something substantial in their lives that they pass on to their children and grandchildren. It might be a family business, farm, home, trade or other things of value. Children often follow in their parents footsteps and sometimes inherit things they did not earn for themselves. The fear is always there that the children will become spoiled and take for granted the inheritance they have received, if they did not work for it themselves.
The same thing is true in our lives of faith. For many “cradle Catholics” their faith is as familiar to them as bread and butter. No pun intended. Seriously, many Catholics enjoy a way of life that is full and rich, with large families and extended families. They have almost picture perfect family traditions and holidays and embody the best of Christianity in their love and support for one another. They can easily fall into the trap of taking each other for granted until a tragedy or death in the family occurs though.
But, that is not what happened to the father in today’s Gospel. He never took his son’s life for granted or just accepted his fate either. He didn’t just “learn to live with it”. And, he didn’t accept defeat either. The tenacity of this father’s love for his son is most evident when he sought Jesus out – even after his disciples failed to cure his son. You can’t help but admire this man’s great faith. He never gave up. He held on to his faith even in the face of apparent failure, against all odds. This is the stuff heroes and saints are made of. This is the faith of our fathers.
Compare this man’s belief in Jesus’s power to heal his son, with the faith of Christ’s own disciples. The boy’s epileptic fits must have seemed too powerful for them to handle. Epilepsy in today’s modern world is a powerful force too, as anyone that has witnessed a grand mal seizure can attest. It must have been pretty intimidating for the disciples to be faced with something like this. They tried, but it must have been a weak attempt because it failed.
Jesus is utterly frustrated by their lack of faith. His own disciples! After all he had taught them, and the powers he had given them, they still had doubts that their powers were strong enough to command the forces of nature because they were from God himself. Jesus human side is very evident in his words to them:
“O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?”
To be blunt, Jesus was pretty fed up with them all.
What about you? Do you still doubt the Lord’s ability to heal your life? Your problems? Your heartaches? Or do you just struggle along with half-hearted attempts at prayer now and then? A hurried word or two in the morning on the way to work? Or a sentence or two as you fall asleep at night?
Today isn’t the day to be lukewarm or practice your spiritual life half heartedly, with one foot in the secular world and one foot in your spiritual life. Today is the day to resolve to strengthen your belief in the One who parted the Red Sea to save His people, and sent His only son into the world to heal us, and save us – from ourselves.
Our problems and concerns are no match for God. But, have we forgotten the awesome power of prayer? The miraculous ways that God has often answered our prayers and deepest needs in the past, in ways that we could not even begin to imagine?
There is nothing that we are facing in our lives today that God can not handle, and that we can not handle, with Jesus walking by our side.
