JESUS EDUCATES TO THE FAITH

This Gospel manifestation of Christ on the threatening and agitated sea is an extraordinary icon of faith, a light in the night; victory over the fear of death. In our own time– and I think there is no need to dwell on this – we are much troubled and worried. However, faith seems to no longer interest the men and women. God is increasingly a “problem” that leaves us indifferent. In those, then, who profess themselves Christians, faith, in fact, appears weak, and incapable of shaping life. If it is true that Christians “become” and are not born, as Tertullian stated, it is equally true that until not long ago, people were born Christians and grew up as such, because the family and ecclesial fabric helped them to so define themselves. But today the picture is profoundly changed. Various cultural waves, the most diversified anthropologies, the numbing of a certain well-being—all these risk overwhelming a fragile and short-lived faith. Well then, at that very place, where it seems that the sea overwhelms us—on those same menacing waves—Christ comes to us. And he comes to us as a teacher of faith. It is to him therefore that we must turn our gaze, as the Letter to the Hebrews also exhorts (cf. Heb 12:2). But here a clarification is needed: what is faith? In the Old Testament there is a verb that defines the act of believing: ‘âman («to lean on»). Believing therefore means finding a foundation on which to rest. This foundation cannot be ideological but personal, that is, one does not rely on something but on someone. For the New Testament, this someone is Christ, author and perfecter of faith. By looking at him, each of us first learns what it means to believe; not only that, he also learns what it means to live his own faith. But faith, we must never forget it, it is also a human necessity. In fact, living without trusting is impossible. Yet we are all full of suspicions and prejudices towards others, so we can affirm that, if faith is in crisis today, it is also because the human act of believing is in crisis. Why, for example, do people nowadays prefer cohabitation to marriage? Isn’t it because we are incapable of bringing faith into the concrete circumstances of life and, when we do actually try to do that, scepticism within us says to us, “How long is this going to last?” We no longer believe in love, thus contradicting John’s lapidary affirmation: «We have put our faith in love” (1 Jn 4:16). This is the real drama that hangs over us, much more so than the pandemics we try to fight. This is why Jesus educated his own interlocutors. He knew well that without faith there can be no human life, and therefore no ability to establish relationships. But faith presupposes love as a free giving over of self; it allows the impossible, that is, to stay with the evangelical image, «to walk on waters», on the forces that threaten our personal stability, family or community.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Santa Maria – Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves,
Prinknash Abbey