Monday March 22, 2004 Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Fourth Week of Lent
Reading (Isaiah 65:17-21) Gospel (St. John 4:43-54)
In the Gospel reading today, we see this man, the
royal official, who is willing to walk for approximately two days to be able to
come and ask Jesus for the favor of healing his son. Having made that effort,
the man gets chastised by Our Lord, Who tells him, Unless you people see signs
and wonders, you will not believe. The man continues to press to ask Our Lord
for what it is that he is seeking. And when Our Lord tells him that he may go
and his son will live, it is when the man believed and he turned around and
began walking home. Now he came hoping that Our Lord would come with him; he
came hoping that Our Lord would come back with him to lay His hands upon this
child, or to pray over him, or to do something that would actually bring the
child back to health. When the man saw nothing, he had to make a pure act of
faith. He had already made an act of faith that Jesus was able to heal his son.
He had made a strong enough act of faith that he was willing to leave his home
and walk to the place where Jesus was, and then he had to walk away having seen
nothing, but having merely to believe in the word that Our Lord had spoken.
When we see the kind of faith this man had, we begin
to realize what it is that Our Lord is seeking in each one of us. He wants us
to believe. And the question is: How much do we believe? For many of us, we
believe as long as it is convenient, as long as we do not have to go out of our
way, as long as there is not any hardship involved in the believing, and of
course as long as we can live according to the adage: Seeing is believing.
Well, that is not the way it works with God. The question that God is going to
ask is: Do you believe even when it is hard? Do you believe enough to be
inconvenienced by your faith? Do you believe even when you cannot see? That is
very difficult.
Saint John of the Cross tells us, however, that it
is in the darkness of faith that is, when you can see nothing; in fact, it
feels like and seems like you are going backwards at times he says it is then
that you have the most sure path to God. If you are seeking union with God, it
is not going to be found in all kinds of external signs and wonders; but rather
it is going to be found most perfectly in the darkness of faith when we believe
without seeing, when we have no proof that what God has told us is going to in
fact be done, other than His promise. He Who has made the promise is
trustworthy. He Who made the promise cannot deceive and He cannot be deceived.
Now we know, of course, in our heads about Who God
is and that He is trustworthy and we know the promises He has made, but the
problem is not what is in our head the problem here is what is in the heart,
or the lack thereof for most of us. And so that is what we have to work on,
which is why Our Lord in His mercy allows us to have to deal with the darkness,
to have to deal with the idea that we do not see, that we have to suffer at
times and we do not understand. We have to struggle against our own self
because everything in us at that time says, Hes not doing what He promised.
Where is your faith? How can you believe?
This man, from quite far away, had to believe
without seeing. Without any evidence, he had to simply believe in the word that
Jesus spoke to him. So too, do we. When we look at the words of Our Lord and
all of the things He has said and promised, we know them all. We have heard
them hundreds and hundreds of times. They sound real good to us, but most of us
really do not believe them because we do not see them. We do not see the
reality of it in our own lives. Consequently, it is not that we do not accept
that this could be the truth; we just simply do not put it into practice
because our faith is not strong enough to do so. That is why the Lord allows
some of those interior struggles: to strengthen our faith so that even in the
darkness we will be able to believe with the same kind of belief, that is, with
the same strength and in fact, with an even greater
strength of faith than if we were actually to see something right before our
eyes. That is the kind of faith God is looking for from us: to believe what it
is that He has said and to put it into practice by the way we live.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.