When Abraham obeyed God’s summons to leave his homeland and go to a
new place to found a new people – the Jewish people as they would become
known – that was an act of faith, an act of faith which, through time,
transformed the lives of billions upon billions of people. Abraham can have had no real idea what God had in store for him, and had even less idea that his act of faith in God was the start of a story that has so far lasted 4,000 years.
When God told him he would have as many descendants as the stars in the sky, in a purely worldly sense that would have seemed ridiculous in view of the fact that he and his wife, Sarah, were childless.
He cannot have known that in addition to physical descendants – the Jews – he would also have countless numbers of spiritual descendants, namely Christians and Muslims who between them number something like two billion people at this time alone.
The new papal encyclical Lumen Fidei is all about faith. Again and again and again in the Bible we encounter great acts of faith. Abraham himself displayed his utter faith in God when he prepared to sacrifice his son by Sarah – Isaac – only for God to stay his hand at the last moment.
In the Bible we see one prophet after another called out of obscurity to tell an often reluctant people what God wanted of them.
We often see the faith hanging by a thread as the descendants of Abraham turned to other gods because they thought God had abandoned them or because it was simply hard and demanding to follow Him and easier to follow less demanding gods.
It is then that a prophet would rise to call them back to the right path, although it often took a full generation or more for that to happen.
One reason why faith is sometimes hard is that we find it hard to take the long view. If we think in years and the Church thinks in centuries, God thinks in millennia.
Two thousand years separate Abraham from Jesus and another two thousand years separate us from the time Jesus walked on earth.
By the end of his life Abraham only had the merest glimpse of what God meant when He told him his descendants would be as numberless as the stars in the sky.
Only a few generations on, when they had to move to Egypt to flee a famine in their own land, the family of Abraham became slaves and they had to keep the faith through the generations of slavery. They must have sometimes wondered whether God had abandoned them.
Then, when they escaped from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, their hardships in the desert made some of them think twice about what they had done, and their faith in God waned again. Was there a Promised Land at all?
Better to go back to Egypt or else abandon the God of Abraham and Isaac and find a new God. But they did find the Promised Land in the end because the promises of God are true.
The story of God and the Israelites ought to have strong resonance for Irish Christians today.
This is a very trying time to be a Christian, and especially a Catholic Christian in Ireland.
We are still in the middle of a backlash against a Church that in the past was often more authoritarian than loving. The scandals have done massive damage.
Huge numbers of Irish people have turned their back on Christianity and decided to put their faith and trust in other things. During the Celtic Tiger, for many people that was money.
This is, of course, a form of idolatry and idolatry is the invariable substitute for true faith.
As the new encyclical says: “The history of Israel also shows us the temptation of unbelief to which the people yielded more than once. Here the opposite of faith is shown to be idolatry.”
It explains that idolatry is the demand for a god we can see, feel and touch.
It says: “In place of faith in God, it seems better to worship an idol, into whose face we can look directly and whose origin we know, because it is the work of our own hands.” What is money, for example, but the work of our own hands?
The encyclical goes on: “Before an idol, there is no risk that we will be called to abandon our security, for idols ‘have mouths, but they cannot speak’”.
Making security our final goal and purpose is the very definition of idolatry because it makes us turn away from the true God who often wants us, like Abraham to leave behind our comfort zones, and to accept the invitation of Jesus to step out of the boat on to the waters.
When we don’t trust God enough to leave our comfort zones behind, that is a form of infidelity. We want only what suits our own desires and will worship whatever seems to suit our desires at any given moment. Thus our idols keep changing.
On this point Lumen Fidei is excellent: “Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life-story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another.”
True faith on the other hand, “consists in the willingness to let ourselves be constantly transformed and renewed by God’s call”.
Another temptation at the present time is, of course, to alter Christianity in order to make it more comfortable, to make it less challenging, to make it reflect what suits us, to make it look like us. And that is simply another form of idolatry.
The challenge before us then is no more and no less than to keep the faith. The story of the Israelites and the multiple examples of infidelity and idolatry followed by periods of fidelity exactly mirrors the story of Christianity and the stories of individual Christian peoples such as the Irish.
What are we going to do now, in our time? How many of us are going to abandon the faith entirely? Which of us is going to demand a faith that is much less challenging instead? And which of us are going to trust that God knows what He is doing and has His view on a far horizon that is many lifetimes ahead of us.
Our task, in other words, is to be faithful at a time when it is hard to be faithful and easier to be unfaithful. We never know how strong our faith is until it is tested. It is being tested now.
Our job is to show it is equal to the test and not give up but to keep going trusting that God knows where all this is going and where it will end.