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In the homily last week, we were told that faith is a state of being, or perhaps even better, an action, wherein the faithful one accepts that the world is as we often experience it: without hope, shallow, empty, and perhaps without some inherent meaning. In the face of this, ‘faith is the affirmation of life against despair’. It ‘admits of little more than shadows and dust, but dances still’, and perhaps most clearly: it ‘accepts that those things which naturally lead to despair are true, but rejects their logical conclusion.’ Faith is then the opposite of despair, but it attempts to oppose despair while simultaneously accepting the reasons for despair. It is related to Christianity, because the Christian story presents the reality of despair, even God-forsakeness, on the cross, but affirms life in the resurrection: ‘The world has done its worst, yet still life remains’. And for this story to be meaningful, we are told, it does not even need to be true! It illustrates the general point.
Of course, the problem is, if the resurrection is not true, the general point is a lie. Life does not remain. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul writes that ‘if Christ is not raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, then we are of all people most to be pitied.’ You see, I don’t think that we were offered a formulation of faith which opposes despair, instead we were offered a ‘hysteria of the spirit’, as Kierkegaard calls it, something which melancholy produces when it finds that it is living in despair, but sees no way out. This is not an alternative to despair; it is an intensification of it brought about by a futile attempt to avoid reality. It has nothing to offer those faced with the reality of death – what is the message for the recent widower, that he should accept his wife’s passing as a manifestation of the meaninglessness and pain of life, but keep smiling anyway? At least outright despair allows one to respond appropriately to what has been accepted as ‘reality’. I should add that this is not some throwaway comment. A friend of mine whose wife died recently after a long battle with cancer read last week’s homily on the Oriel chapel blog, and got in touch, clearly upset. Christianity is serious business: either we have something real to offer, something which faces up to reality, or we don’t. Either ‘love is strong as death’ (Song of Solomon 8:6), or it isn’t. There is no middle ground, and it is not helpful to suggest otherwise.
As should now be obvious, I would find it difficult to disagree with last week’s homily more. That’s not to say that there weren’t some things that I thought were interesting, or that sounded right. For instance, I agree that faith is the affirmation of life against despair – but I also think that the meaninglessness of the world is something like an illusion, brought about by sin.
So what is the alternative to this vision of ‘faith’? I believe that the hope offered in Christian faith is described in John 6. When Jesus says, “whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life…I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever,” we should take him at his word, and hold onto that promise.
Although the reading for tonight begins with verse 44, I believe that the previous three verses give important context. The passage begins: ‘So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, “I have come down from heaven?”’
Jesus’s listeners wonder, how can Jesus claim to have come down from heaven? How can he claim to be a messenger from God, or the King promised by God in the Old Testament? After all, they know his parents! What he is telling him flies in the face of everything which they have known, everything they believed up to this point. The point which I am trying to emphasize is that what Jesus is telling them is simply not rational, and by rational I mean, it does not fit in with those things they know, which they have believed. When Martin Luther commented on this passage, he took the opportunity to indulge in a 20 or 30 page diatribe against human reason. It seems excessive, and makes him seem like a bit of an irrationalist – but this isn’t what’s going on at all. He somewhat sarcastically says that if you want to know that 10 is larger than 1, or that you should build a roof over the house instead of under it, use your reason there, show off your expertise, but if we try to evaluate Jesus’ claim to be the ‘bread of life come down from heaven’ by the standards of what we already think we know, we will run into problems.
In essence, this is the problem with faith as defined last week – we were told to simply accept that the world, or life, is ‘little more than shadows and dust’. If this is your starting point, then it is impossible to make sense of Jesus’ claim that ‘whoever believes has eternal life’. We were told that to have faith means to accept the ‘rational’ view that life is empty, but to make the illogical move to rejoice without reason.
There is another alternative, you can be ‘irrational’ and say that at times life may seem shallow, meaningless, empty: that injustice seems to go unpunished, that suffering goes uncomforted, that love is disappointed, and death will ultimately rule, but nevertheless God has promised that in the end Death will not rule, that God’s love will achieve its object, that mourners will be comforted, and injustice will be set right. Of course, I don’t believe that this belief is actually irrational, unless you have made a prior decision to take our experience of the world on its own terms, without reference to God.
Kierkegaard wrote in his journal “When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd — faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd — if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge.” It is not always easy to trust the promises of God over what seems to be overwhelming experience to the contrary, but this difficulty does not make it irrational to do so.
But how does one come to have this faith? Jesus does not give us a direct answer; he simply says that ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.’ Jesus’ position here is clearly that faith is not the effort of the believer. Luther explains what Jesus says here: he says that “When God draws us, He is not like a hangman, who drags a thief up the ladder to the gallows; but He allures and coaxes us in a friendly fashion, as a kind man attracts people by his amiability and cordiality, and everyone willingly goes to him … you hear that God is not hostile to you, but is your gracious and merciful Father, who gave his son for you, let Him die for you, and raised Him again from the dead. He directs you to the Son and has Him proclaimed to you. And if this is correctly taught, then we come to Him. That is meant by the expression 'to be drawn’.”
Luther’s point is that the Father draws us to his Son Jesus by offering us his grace – he shows us that life is meaningful, or rather, that God gives it meaning. That, as Psalm 30 says ‘Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning’ and later on ‘you have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not by silent. O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever!”
This is a pure gift of God. We cannot make God become incarnate in Christ, and we were not involved in raising Christ from the dead. Ed was right last week when he said that the resurrection is an affirmation of life – but this affirmation of life is outside of our abilities. God raised Jesus from the dead, as Jesus will raise those whom the Father calls. Faith is not our own ability to simulate a fictional resurrection in our own lives, but the result of God living, dying, and rising again for us. If Christ is not raised, our faith is futile and we are still in our sins. Those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, then we are of all people most to be pitied, but because of Christ we can say “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
Amen.
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