Faith and Reason
by Fr. David M. Knight
Tuesday, October 1, 2024
Twenty-Sixth Week of the Year
Memorial of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
Lectionary 456
Job 3:1-3, 11-17, 20-23/Lk 9:51-56
Job 3:1-23 faces—and eloquently—the fact that sometimes life can be so painful we wish were dead. But he perceives death as rest:
Had I slept, I should then have been at rest with kings and counselors... There the wicked cease from troubling, there the weary are at rest.
It is never really death that anyone wants, but escape from what is painful in life. That escape is imagined either as a happier state of life or just as the absence of suffering. We can’t really imagine non-existence, and if we could, there would be nothing positive in it to choose. The only people who can choose death for itself are those who perceive it as entrance into a better life. Only Christians have any definite revelation about that, although the almost universal belief in life after death shows that, in addition to reason, every culture has received enlightenment from God under some form.
Those who do not believe in life after death are putting their faith in assumptions based on the writings of once-popular intellectuals whose various philosophies almost nobody embraces today as coherent explanations of reality. Although their answers satisfy no one, they did manage to stay in the limelight long enough to cast doubt on basic principles they did not understand and to create doubt about many conclusions based on them. These doubts are taken for granted today, uncritically, in large segments of our culture by people who do not examine their roots or put their validity to the test.
Job doesn’t argue with these “men whose path is hidden from them,” and who are “hemmed in” by their own denial of God. But he alerts us to the longings of our hearts. Truth lies there.
Luke 9:51-56 shows us that believers are just as subject to cultural prejudices as anyone, unless we let God’s word emancipate us.
Because Jews and Samaritans differed about religion, they were hostile to each other. The Samaritans would not welcome Jesus, so James and John wanted to “call down fire from heaven to destroy them.” We see why Jesus nicknamed them the “Sons of Thunder.” Jesus just “turned and rebuked them.”
And he rebukes us whenever we let our nationalistic or cultural prejudices blind us to the human dignity of people unlike ourselves, or to the mystery of divine sacredness in all reborn through grace. (Mark 3:17.)
Initiative: Think on two levels: human and divine. Use both reason and faith.
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
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