Readings for the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time:
2 Kings 5:14-17 | 2 Timothy 2:8-13 | Luke 17:11-19

What is real faith?

Do you ever worry? Do you get anxious over money or relationships? Do you fret about how your children are growing up and whether they will always be safe? Do you stress out about the details? Do you feel like your whole world and all its relationships and tasks depends entirely on you? Jesus understands and holds out faith as the response.

On a deeper level, do you ever struggle to believe in God? Perhaps you have had a robust spiritual life, but now feel like it’s evaporated? Do you feel as though faith is on the decline in society? Does it seem like consciousness of God, not consciousness of religion but of God, has died in today’s world? Jesus understands and holds out faith as the response.

When we have real faith, as Jesus demonstrates with the cleansing of the lepers, God heals us. To have faith today, though, does not mean to believe in fantasy. To have faith is to trust God is reality, and that reality is good.  It is to trust this reality is greater than my mind. We tend to think of faith in at least three other ways. We have to dispel these understandings before we can make an act of faith.

First, faith is not belief. Beliefs are wonderful. They are a crucial part of every religion. Faith, though, is not about checking off a list of beliefs or about intellectually assenting to doctrines. The faith Jesus praises has nothing to do with ritual, law, or moral behavior. Rather, Jesus’ faith has everything to do with surrender and unknowing. Faith is not, essentially, belief. The doctrines and dogmas of the Catholic Church are the primary objects of belief, but not of faith. Faith’s proper focus is God alone. Still, beliefs support faith and articulate it. Faith, we can say, is the inner core while belief is the outer layer. Belief is not wrong, but it is not faith as Jesus recognizes it. The challenge faith presents to us is to let God be who God is and not to project our own ideas onto God, that is, not to confuse our ideas and beliefs about God for the actual reality of God.

Second, faith is not an opinion about reality. Everyone has an opinion, but they do not always correspond to the truth. Our society seems gluttonous for people’s opinions but unwilling to proclaim universal truth. These days a lot of people use the colloquial expression “for me…”, which indicates something is true for me but not necessarily for you. Faith has nothing to do with this. One with faith does not say, “well this works for me” but tries to bend over backwards to respect another person’s opinion about faith, especially if it “doesn’t work for them.” Faith is a whole-hearted commitment to the truth that God is Reality, but not a private opinion about “what works for me.”

Third, faith does not oppose science. The faith Jesus praises has no inherent problems with reason or science. Reason and science often use doubt and skepticism to probe the world. Jesus never mentions doubt as the opposite of faith. Jesus does point to worry, though, as faith’s opposite. Instead of reason or doubt, the contrary of faith is our brain’s insatiable need for certainty. The feeling of uncertainty can generate anxiety and even trigger the flight or fight reaction. The brain seems to need certainty much like it craves food or sex. Neuroscience says the brain treats uncertainty as a threat. The excessive desire for certainty is one of the mind’s mechanisms that Jesus calls us to transcend.

For Jesus, faith is not primarily belief, has nothing to do with opinion, and does not oppose science and reason. For Jesus, faith accepts God as God really is, that is to say, as incomprehensible, unimaginable, and uncontrollable mystery. God is darkness to our minds, and the nothingness beyond being. Thus, the faith Jesus praises is what the mystics call “dark faith.”  Dark faith is the divine nothingness insofar as it affects the mind and our usual ways of knowing. Faith is to know God beyond the mind by knowing nothing, according to the sixth century mystic Dionysius the Areopagite. Because God is infinite and incomprehensible mystery, faith in God means accepting just this reality. To have faith, then, does not mean we can feel God or prove God. It does not mean we see God like we see someone else. Thomas Keating writes, “Pure faith consents and surrenders to the Ultimate Mystery just as He is, not as you think He is or as someone has told you He is, but as He is in Himself.” Through faith, we open to God as God really is and surrender ourselves, healing always follows.