The Necessity of Faith

Third Sunday after Easter
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  I think we often presume that it would have been better to be alive when our Lord was walking the earth.  We hear this stories from the Gospels and presume that if we would have been there, we certainly would have followed Christ and been one of His most faithful disciples.  We would have recognized that He is who He says He is, not only from His teachings, but especially from His miracles.  And that’s a pleasant thought.  But the Gospels also paint a very different picture of everyone else, including the Apostles.  No one seems to understand who Christ is, not even the Apostles, until after He has been raised from the dead.  Our Lord does draw big crowds at times (the Sermon on the Mount and the feeding of the five thousand come to mind), but a lot of people didn’t take well to either of those situations after a little while, and we know that most of the disciples stopped following Christ after the bread of life discourse.
    Interacting with the Lord always requires faith.  When He walked on the earth it required faith to know that this itinerant rabbi from Nazareth was the co-eternal Son of the Father.  It required faith to know that, when the Savior said our sins are forgiven and that we should pick up our mat and walk, that they really were and we really should. 

   The Gospel we hear today is from the Last Supper discourses, and the Lord says that we will not see Him, but that we will see Him again.  We might have some sense of what He meant, but the apostles did not.  And the explanation that the Lord gives, that we will be sad and mourn, but that we will later rejoice, didn’t really seem to answer the question.  It was confusing, especially in the light of the Master washing His servants’ feet, and then changing the Passover ritual to say that the bread was really His Body, and the wine was really His Blood. 
    But we are in the time of labor right now, the time when the Lord is away, knowing that He will return in a short time.  The labor is not joyful, but the fruit of this labor will be exceedingly joyful.  And when the fruit of the labor comes, we won’t even think about the pain we went through to get to it. 
    The labor is faith.  The labor is striving after God, doing our best to love and serve Him with our whole mind, heart, and strength, when may things around us and many things inside of us tell us to love and serve only ourselves.  It is painful to die to oneself, as Christ instructed us to do, to take up our cross daily and follow Him.  It is an act of faith to say that it will all be worth it, because we don’t see many results, and certainly not the eternally lasting ones, until after we are dead.  It’s Indiana Jones walking out onto a ledge he cannot see in “The Last Crusade.” 
    It takes faith to not live according to the desires of our flesh, as St. Peter instructs us.  It takes faith to be subject to governmental leaders, especially when they’re working against you.  That’s the context in which St. Peter wrote this passage.  He wasn’t talking about a good emperor or governor.  He was talking about an emperor and governors who were seeking the extinction of Christianity.  He was talking about those who were finding new and cruel ways to torture those who followed Christ. 
    He’s not saying that we should obey our civil leaders when they tell us to do something against divine or natural law, the laws of God or the laws that God set up for nature, that any person can know by the gift of reason.  But He does tell us to be good citizens and be subject to them in promoting the good of the city, State, and country.  But that takes faith.  It seems to especially take faith these days, that being good citizens when so many are confused about so much is somehow part of God’s plan, and that God will make everything right and will correct the errors of our day and that justice and truth will win out.  But they will.
    And we see a clearer distinction between good and evil these days.  The choice between following Christ is becoming a starker choice.  Catholics who wish to be faithful to the Gospel and the Church can no longer simply “go along” with society, as society now posits as good that which is evil, and, as much as science is touted as the ultimate truth, science is ignored if it doesn’t support particular viewpoints (like gender dysphoria and the unique personhood of an infant in the womb).  It takes faith to trust that God will right all these, but He will.  And we don’t want to be on the losing side when He does right these wrongs.
    Today the Lord invites us to have faith; to trust that He is who He says He is; that He can do mighty things, not only while He was on earth, but even now when His glorified Body is at the right hand of God in heaven.  The Lord invites us to be good citizens, and to be subject to our government leaders as long as they don’t work against our practice of the faith.  Christ invites us to trust Him, to trust the Father, and the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.  Amen.