One Faith and One God

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

G.K. Chesterton

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote in his great work, Orthodoxy: 
 

I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before….I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it….I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

Here Chesterton was, trying to be on the cutting edge of criticizing his own time, and found out that the new thing he was advocating was quite old, as old as the Church, because it was the Church.
    St. Paul talks about one faith, one God, one baptism.  And they are all connected.  We live in a cosmopolitan world.  Not only can you find those who practice monotheism almost everywhere, you can also find polytheists, those who believe in many gods, and even atheists, those who believe in no God.  And yet, all of them claim that their system is true, as they should, or else they should leave whatever system they have for believing.  However, there is one true faith because there is one true God.
    The key for us is discovering what this one faith is.  And no, I don’t mean to question Catholicism.  If I didn’t think Catholicism was true I could do a lot of other things than give up a family, good money, and my independence.  But do we believe that Catholicism is the truth?  Not exhaustive of it, because we are finite and our Lord, who calls Himself the Truth (along with the Way and the Life), is infinite, but at least as much truth as God has revealed exists in Christ and the one Church that He founded, which subsists in the Catholic Church.
    It would seem easier just to pretend like every form of Christianity is as true as the other, or that every religion is as true as the other.  It would seem to lead to less fighting.  But if there is truth, than it’s important to know it.  To put this outside the realm of theology, we really want to know if gravity exists, and if the natural world operates by cause and effect.  We don’t let off so easily those who deny gravity, or who deny that the natural world seems to operate by cause and effect.  Imagine the physical harm that could come from thinking that the Illuminati invented gravity to scare us from using our innate ability to fly.  And yet, we can write off someone who does not know the truth, a truth that does not only allow us to interact in this world, but a truth that could affect how we spend eternity!
    Now, a few important considerations.  First, just because someone gets part of the truth wrong does not mean they have the entire truth wrong.  I can know that cause and effect govern the natural order, but decide that the cause of an illness is bad humors that I have to release from the body through bloodletting.  I’m right about cause and effect; not so much about the bloodletting.  When it comes to our fellow man, just because they lack some of the truth does not mean they lack all of the truth.  Yes, God only founded 2 religions, Judaism and Catholicism (though we could rightly speak of Catholicism as the divinely-ordered fulfillment of Judaism).  But it doesn’t mean that other religions don’t have any truth.  Islam teaches that there is only one God; they’re right.  Buddhists talk about the importance of not letting our physical desires control us; that’s wise.  Still, our goal is to fill in the blanks for them, and help them see what they don’t have quite right.
    The same is true for our fellow Christians: they have a fair amount of things right; especially the Orthodox.  But if they’re not subject to the one leader Christ appointed for His Church; or they cut out books of the Bible; or they don’t recognize the sacramental system that Christ established, they are missing out.  And we should help them come to see the fullness of the truth.  If you think gravity exists, but only if you jump off a tall building, you have a strong start, but need to understand gravity better to know it exists everywhere, not just at tall buildings.
    Second, while it is imperative that we share the truth, it is equally imperative that we share it with love.  Yelling at Muslims in Dearborn that Mohammed is a false prophet probably won’t win them over.  But engaging in loving, respectful dialogue about how God could not contradict Himself might be a step in the right direction.  Or showing a Buddhist that God created the world good and does not want us to totally disassociate ourselves from it.  Or helping a non-Catholic Christian to see that the teachings of the Catholic Church are most faithful to what God has revealed in the Scriptures by talking about how you read the Scripture over a cup of coffee or bourbon can go a long way.
    There is only one true faith, because God is one.  Other religions and other Christian denominations have parts of the truth, and we should recognize those as finding their source in God, as all truth finds its source in God who is Truth Himself.  But if we commit ourselves to the truth, and commit to sharing with others in love, then we, like G.K. Chesterton, will find that the truth is not a political party or a vogue critique of the modern age, but a Person, who desires to love us and be loved by us, and help us to grow into the people He made us to be.  And that Person is Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.  

Jesus, Mary, and Judaism

Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God

    In the past year, there have been more and more attacks on Jewish people, both around the country and around the world.  Just this past Saturday night, a suspect stabbed five people during a Hanukkah celebration in their rabbi’s home.  Any attack on an innocent person is horribly evil, but that evil is compounded when the motivating factor is a person’s religion and/or race. 
    Why bring this up?  Why talk about anti-Semitic violence on the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God?  All three readings for today’s celebration point us towards the religion of Mary and the religion of Jesus: Judaism.  The first reading is the Aaronic priestly blessing, by which the Chosen people were to be blessed.  The Church includes this reading as a way to begin the new year, as a people blessed by the Lord with a blessing the Lord Himself gave to His People, Israel.
    The second reading reminds us that Jesus was born of Mary, “born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”  Perhaps this doesn’t sound so friendly to Judaism.  And many will twist St. Paul and select only certain passages to make it sound like St. Paul himself was against the Jewish people, though, St. Paul, or Saul as he was called among the Jews, was himself Jewish, and a most ardent practitioner of Judaism before He began to follow Jesus.  But St. Paul saw Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, who fulfilled the promises God made to Abraham and David.  And God, through Jesus, fulfilled the law and raised us merely from followers of the Law to the freedom of God’s children. 
    And at the end of our Gospel, we heard about the circumcision of Jesus, the sign that He was part of the Chosen People, and a recipient of the covenant between God and Abraham.  Jesus, yes, is the founder and Head of the Catholic Church.  But the Church herself is a sister, as it were, to Judaism, and truly the fulfillment of all that God revealed of Himself to the Chosen People throughout the Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.
    To understand Jesus fully, and to understand Mary fully, we have to understand Judaism.  So often we gloss over things that would have been so important to the first Christians, most of whom were Jews.  In our first reading, we heard this phrase over and over again: “The Lord…”  In Hebrew, the language in which the Book of Numbers was written, this would have been said Adonai, though the letters spelled out the sacred Name of God, which we are not allowed to say in the Mass.  In Greek, it was translated into 𝛰 𝛫𝜐𝜌𝜄𝜊𝜍 which we translate into English as “The Lord…” in all caps.  If you’re ever reading your Old Testament, and wondered why that was in caps, that signifies that the word is the Sacred Name of God.  And when St. Paul proclaims that “Jesus is Lord,” he is saying, “𝛪𝜀𝜎𝜊𝜐𝜍 𝛰 𝛫𝜐𝜌𝜄𝜊𝜍” which means that Jesus is the same God as the God of Israel, the Lord.
    Which brings us back to Mary, whom we celebrate and honor today.  Because if Jesus is the Lord, God who revealed Himself to Abraham and entered into a covenant with the Chosen People, and Mary is the mother of Jesus, then she is also rightfully called the Mother of God, the 𝛳𝜀𝜊𝜏𝜊𝜅𝜊𝜍, as was solemnly defined at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431.  She is not simply a woman who gave birth to a male child, but she gave birth to the creator of the entire universe, who saves us from sin and death by His own Death and Resurrection.  And because of that unique role in salvation history, we honor her (not worship her) above all the saints.  We love her as our mother, given to us by her Divine Son, Jesus at the foot of the cross, and we take every opportunity we can to shower our affection on her, as spiritual children and joint heirs with her Son Jesus.  So, as the deacon in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom chants, “Commemorating our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary with all the saints, let us commit ourselves and one another and our whole life to Christ our God.”