ONLY FAITH

Our joy and our hope and our confidence today do not arise from anything that can be seen.  Our faith does not stay firm because we can observe a far distant light up ahead, or hear the echo of a consoling melody on the other side of suffering.  Our steady walk into chaos, step by step, is not the result of our determination or our bravery, nor is our standing in the enveloping darkness the sign of our strength. 

Rather, it is all based on our willingness to trust in a promise, willingly to become weak, embracing of that which we cannot yet understand.  It is to fall into the embrace of the only power on earth that can lead us out of the impossible human condition into which we have become trapped.  It is like finding ourselves in quicksand, having realized that our every move will only threaten to pull us farther downward, sealing our doom even more inevitably.  And for a long time that’s just exactly what it seems to be doing.  

We struggle onward not because it seems to be the only rational thing to do, but because it does not.  Faith, and only faith, strips away every confidence, every false hope, for the sake of a promise – and nothing more. 

Jesus and his followers turned their faces toward Jerusalem on that passion day without any understanding as to how it could possibly end well.  Death was the only likely outcome as they moved forward, and despair must have seemed to them to be the only proper emotion – except for sadness and perhaps even a little foolishness. 

They followed in the same way all their ancestors before them had: they followed a promise, in faith.  There wasn’t anything else upon which to cling.

And so do we follow in the same way now, as we behold the inhumanity in Ukraine, abuse in our homes and on our borders, violence and racism in our towns, poison in the air, addictions and angers in our hearts, shatterings in our relationships, exclusion.  Such darkness, such hopelessness, such loneliness.  And still we cling to the promise.  Our Holy Week is just beginning, perhaps in desperation and disappointment, but it has only begun.  We live it yet again as they did and as all of us ever will – possessed of our faith to accompany our tears and our bewilderment.  Have we any other choice?