Icon, Modern
Translation of the Epistle for the 18th Sunday After Pentecost
Brethren: I give thanks to my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, because in everything you have been enriched in Him, in all utterance and in all knowledge; even as the witness to the Christ has been made so firm in you that you lack no grace, while awaiting the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who will also keep you secure unto the end, unimpeachable in the day of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Translation of the Holy Gospel According to Saint Matthew
At that time, Jesus, getting into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town. And behold, they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a pallet. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the paralytic, Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven you. And behold, some of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemes. And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Why do you harbour evil thoughts in your hearts? For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Arise, and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, – then He said to the paralytic – Arise, take up your pallet and go to your house. And he arose, and went away to his house. But when the crowds saw it, they were struck with fear, and glorified God Who had given such power to men.
The Saving Words of the Gospel.
And Jesus seeing their faith said, “Take courage, your sins are forgiven.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Transcription of Sermon
The word faith has a number of meanings, but it’s also often misused. I remember a movie about dog sledding that was billed as It’s a story about faith... No, it was a story about dog sledding. And then I was sitting in a doctor’s office and there was an elderly woman sitting across from me with a sweater. It had a tree with a little bird in it and these two cats at the foot of the tree and it said, Faith is sharing. Well, no. No. No, it’s not. Faith is not cats, birds, trees, or dog sledding. Faith is none of those things.
And I remember a friend asked me, about over 20 years ago, to help prepare his students in southern Germany with the Confirmation class. So, I was interviewing one of the boys and I asked him about his sacramental practice. And he said, Well, I don’t really go to mass. I just want to get the confirmation so later when I get married, I can get married in the Church.
I said, So, this confirmation thing is kind of like the solemn closure to your Catholicism. Is that what I’m understanding? And I said, You know, this isn’t any way to treat our Lord.
And he said, Well, I believe in God.
I said, Well, I’m sure he appreciates your acknowledgment of his existence, but it’s not going to help you, because if you read James 2:19, it says there that the demons believe and tremble. So, their faith, which is a natural faith, doesn’t help them either.
Well, ever since the Enlightenment, which tried to make Our Lord disappear, the level of discussion hasn’t gotten any better.
On the other hand, we see this drama of a soul that there’s much unseen at work in which we only see the externals. Our Lord sees it all. He saw how He had planted the seed of faith in this man’s soul. He saw the receptivity. He saw the cooperation with grace – which was also something that required grace – his ability to cooperate with the grace of faith. He saw the flourishing of the grace in his soul and how this established a relationship, not intellectual ascent – I believe. Simply that, I believe God exists. – but established a relationship, a personal relationship which brings about forgiveness. It establishes one in God. And Our Lord watched the interior evolution of this love story take place in this man’s soul, and it must have been beautiful for him to see and very gratifying. And we only see the surface of it in this Gospel.
When Augustine speaks about faith, he discusses levels of faith. He says… he distinguishes between credere, which means “to believe”, credere Deum“, credere Deo, credere in Deum. And we say it every Sunday, right? Credo in unum Deum. So, credere Deum, which is natural belief – natural, as opposed to supernatural – to believe that there is a God, to believe that God exists. This is not salvific. This is something that can be arrived at through the processes of natural reasoning.
Then there’s credere Deo, which is actually supernatural. Credere Deo, to “believe in God”, which requires trust. And, more particularly, this credere Deo, to “believe in God”, is to trust what He has revealed, to trust what He says is true. And so, this is relational. And this is also the beginning, then, of eternal life.
But wait, there’s more. For credere in Deum is really the pinnacle of faith. This credere in Deum is, and there’s no real non-awkward English translation of this credere in Deum, but we say it every Sunday when we say it in Latin, to “believe in God” is not “in God”, it’s “believe into God”. There’s a movement to “believe into God”. So, there’s a metaphysical movement, and it’s mutual. There’s an insertion of the self into God and God into us. It’s relational, and it requires abandonment. It requires surrender of one’s entire self. And this is credere in Deum. The abandonment of oneself to One that I cannot see or hear.
John Henry Newman says, We believe because we love. There’s a lot in that simple phrase, We believe because we love, on many different levels, which I won’t go into now. Thomas, when he speaks about faith – I recommend you read if you have your Summa, your portable Summa Theologica with you right now – you’ll find it in the second part Secunda Secundae. It’s the second question. When you go home you can read it. But he also has a very beautiful commentary on the Creed right at the very opening. He talks about faith and the four effects of the Act of Faith.
The first of which is, he says, akin to marriage of the soul with God. This notion of mystical nuptials has been somewhat lost in modern theology. All of the early Fathers, Eastern and Western, speak of it. Thomas Aquinas speaks of it. Bernard of Clairvaux. All of the mystics speak of it. All of the traditional theologians speak of it. We don’t hear much about it today, and that’s a shame because that’s our vocation: To be married to God. He refers to Hosea Chapter 2. – I recommend you read Hosea Chapter 2 today. It’s beautiful. – He says I will espouse you in faith. He is talking to His unfaithful bride, Israel. I will espouse you in faith. So, the first effect of faith is then marriage between God and the soul.
The second effect is the immediate presence of eternal life in the soul already. Thomas uses the term inchoatio vitae aeternae, and so, there’s the presence of heaven in our souls already. So, we often think of heaven as something to come. Well, it’s something imminent. It’s something present, in as much as we are in grace. And so, when we are tempted, when we are tempted, we’re faced with a choice, no matter the nature of the temptation. This is why you see throughout all of the Old Testament, right?, sin is always… all sin is always tantamount to adultery, right?, because of this matrimonial element of the relationship with God. But sin, it’s a denial of eternity. It’s the denial of my vocation. It’s the denial of this call that is not to some place but to a relationship and it’s something within me. It’s a denial of my own identity of something I bear within me, just as the Tabernacle has the Blessed Sacrament within. It’s the denial of self. It’s a form of self-harm and self-imposed schizophrenia.
The third effect of Faith, he says, since the just man lives by faith from on high, we are given strength for our choices, And so there’s a certain moral compass that we’re given: the light of faith to know what is right, to know what is wrong, to know what is true and orthodox, and to know what is heretical, to lead us to safe harbor. And so, again, when we’re tempted, we’re tempted by something shiny in this dark valley as opposed to that which lasts.
The fourth effect of the Act of Faith: It affords us the strength, the fortitude we need to overcome temptations. In other words, Our Lord does not set us up for failure. Rather, He gives us the tools we need to reach home. Faith requires darkness. Faith requires the inability to see. A great, rather unsung hero of the Carmelite family, Elizabeth of the Holy Trinity, canonized not long ago, she says, “Faith is a face-to-face encounter with SOMEONE, written in capitals, with SOMEONE in the dark.” In other words, He’s no less present, we just can’t see Him. And this also ought to define, then, precisely the nature of our situation. When we are faced with trials, we’re faced with grief, difficulties, or even blessings, all sorts of material blessings which might distract us from what really matters, when we see the small banalities that make up our day as offerings to God, when we make conscious, intentional offerings of the little things that we do, hard and enjoyable, we offer them to Our Lord in faith, these small acts of faith and charity then prepare us for future trials, because when trials come, you know, virtue is not something that can be improvised. And so, the little things, then, are building a foundation.
This abandonment that credere in Deum demands, then, is something we see most exemplified in the ultimate trial of Our Lord on the Cross when He says, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And what is His response to this? It’s not despair. Imagine, He had the beatific vision, as Mystici Corporis tells us — Pius XII’s Encyclical Letter — tells us that from the moment of the Word Made Flesh’s conception in the womb, He had the beatific vision. And then, He’s in Gethsemane, He’s on the Cross, and He’s almost blinded from heaven. He can’t see the face of the Father. There’s something mysterious going on in which He participates somehow in the darkness of our sin without having committed sin, the effects of our sin. And He says, Why have You abandoned me? And what is His response? Into your hands I abandon my spirit. So, He has the experience of being abandoned and His response is to abandon Himself to the very one that seems to have abandoned Him, but He knows with His intellect that He has not.
And this is what is kept for us in Scripture, for us to call from, for us to draw from, for our own spiritual lives, to see that it’s real, that this is the pattern we are to follow and may it also be so for each one of us.
In the Name of the Father, and of Son, the Holy Ghost.
— Fr. Ermatinger