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Faith bears within itself an obstacle which, inherent in its very enigmatic nature, is in exact proportion to its grandeur: “God is in heaven and you are on earth.”2.1 This distance, unbearable in the long run, formerly made Isaiah utter the profoundly human cry: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.”2.2 The often forced optimism of our hymns does not resolve the secret feeling of an absence that one fears to avow.
How can we pass from an abstract, distant and catechetical knowledge to a personal encounter, to a living communion? How can the presence of God enter the lives of man? “Why does God make faith so difficult?” asks the man who is the prey of doubts. The resurrection had inaugurated “the eighth day”, yet in appearance nothing has changed. The new world has been inserted in the old, and the eighth day exists only in the seven others. St. Peter knew the skeptical and mocking spirit that asked: “Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”2.3 Likewise the Jews wished to draw out a clear-cut answer, without any possible equivocation: “Tell us whether thou art the Christ.”2.4 They asked for an even surer guarantee: “Show us the Father, and it is enough for US.”2.5Certainly such a proof would be more than sufficient; but proofs wound truth, and the Lord's refusal was immediate and categorical: “Why does this generation demand a sign? Amen I say to you, a sign shall not be given to this generation.”2.6
God has come, but it seems he does not want men to perceive his divinity. In the rare cases of his miracles, Jesus commanded: “Go and tell this to no man.” Meditating, Pascal noted: “Revelation means that the veil has been removed; now the incarnation veils the face of God more.”2.7 God hides himself in his very manifestation, and this is the great mystery of the hidden God.
Reason, even at the moment when “all is consummated”, lays down its conditions. “If he is the king of Israel, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe him.”2.8 God answers by his silence, but for the one who knows how to listen, it is in this silence that “he declares his love to man”.2.9 This is the divine folly of which St. Paul speaks, the incomprehensible respect that God has for our freedom.
Every compelling proof violates the human conscience and changes faith into simple knowledge. That is why God limits his almighty power, encloses himself in the silence of his suffering love, withdraws all signs, suspends every miracle, casts a shadow over the brightness of his face. It is to this kenotic attitude of God that faith essentially responds. It keeps and will always keep an element of darkness, a crucifying obscurity, a sufficient margin to protect its freedom, in order to guard its power to say no at any moment and to build on this refusal. It is because a man can say no that his yes can attain a full resonance; his fiat is then not only in accord, but on the same dizzy level, of free creation as the fiat of God.
Faith is a dialogue, but the voice of God is almost silence. It exercises a pressure that is infinitely delicate and never irresistible. God does not give orders; he issues invitations: “Listen, Israel”, or “If thou wouldst be perfect...” The decree of a tyrant is answered by a secret resistance; the invitation of the master of the banquet is answered by the joyful acceptance of the one “who has ears”, who makes himself the chosen one by closing his hand on the gift offered.
More profoundly than the divine reserve in regard to man's freedom, “the Lamb who has been slain from the foundation of the world”2.10indicates the ineffableness of the “suffering God”.2.11 In creating a “second freedom”, God arouses a relation of reciprocity. The Father is father without imposing his fatherhood; he offers himself in his Son, and every man is a son of God. “You are gods,”2.12 sons of the Most High, “gods” on the condition of recognizing ourselves as sons in Christ and of saying with the Holy Spirit: “Abba, Father.” The freedom of sons is identified and coincides with the gift of God, the Holy Spirit.
That is why God consents to be unappreciated, refused, rejected, expelled from his own creation. On the cross, God took the part of man against God.
The Christian is a miserable man, but he knows that there is someone still more miserable, the beggar of love at the door of man's heart. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man listens to my voice, and opens the door to me, I will come in to him and will sup with him, and he with me.”2.13 The Son came down to earth to sit at “the table of sinners”.
From all eternity, God has thought only of the salvation of man. Man ought to leave this care to God, and not seek for it before all else; he ought even to forget it. He ought to think of the salvation of divine love, for God has been the first to love; we do not know why.
The attitude of God becomes clearer if we understand what is mysterious about love-- all love is always reciprocal. Love is possible only because it is miraculous, because it immediately engenders reciprocity, even if the latter is not conscious, refused or perverted. This is why every great love is always a crucified love. It produces a gift equal to its own grandeur, a royal gift because it is free. In awaiting a fiat of equal vastness, love can only suffer and be a pure oblation until death and the descent into hell.
John of Saroug, a Syrian writer, raises human love to the level of Christ. “What man,” he asks, “has ever died for his spouse, and what woman has ever chosen as her spouse one crucified? The Lord has espoused the Church, bestowed upon her a dowry by his blood, and forged for her a ring from the nails of his crucifixion.”2.14
The sin of man is not disobedience. Disobedience is only an inevitable consequence of it. Sin is to repudiate the gift of communion, to refuse freedom, to give up filial love. God died that man may live in him. “It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me.”2.15 Paul dies and Christ lives in him; this is the full development of the person of Paul, his entrance into the nuptial pleroma.
Science imposes its vision of visible and verifiable things and obliges me to accept them. I cannot deny an earthworm, nor a virus, but I can deny the existence of God. This is because faith, according to St. Paul, is “the evidence of things that are not seen”.2.16 It transcends the order of necessity. “Blessed are those who have not seen and who have believed” means blessed are those who are not compelled, forced, constrained.
Faith thus appears as a step beyond reason, commanded by reason itself when it reaches its limits. Faith says: “Give up your puny reason and receive the Word.” It is a transcendence toward evidence, toward the hidden reality that reveals itself. It suppresses all demonstration, all intermediaries, all abstract notions of God, and it makes that someone who is the most intimately known immediately present.
The insufficiency of the proofs of God's existence is explained by a fundamental fact: God alone is the criterion of his truth, God alone is the argument of his being. In every thought concerning God, it is God who thinks himself in the human mind. That is why we can never prove his existence rationally nor convert another by arguments, for we can never do so in the place of God. We cannot submit God to the logic of demonstrations nor enclose him in a chain of causes.
if God is the sole argument of his existence, this means that faith is not invented. It is a gift, and it is to its royal and gratuitous nature that man must bear testimony, for faith is given to all in order that God may effect his Parousia in every human soul.
In accordance with his desires, the Word has chosen so strange a form that it constitutes a stumbling block. The Gospel is a chronicle of the life of Jesus, a collection of his words. However, there exist so many texts; there are the apocryphal gospels, the prophets of Pepuza, the wonderworkers and the messiahs even to our days. How can we choose?
The testimony of the apostles? Yes, but it is not absolutely convincing. It leaves a sufficient margin for doubts. There is a difference between a state of doubt and the difficulties of faith, but a thousand difficulties do not make a single doubt, as Newman said so profoundly. Historical criticism has dealt hard blows to all naive beliefs. There is a lack of irrefutable historic documents to prove even the earthly life of Jesus, without speaking of his heavenly life. This is very good; it is perhaps the best proof of the truth of the Gospel, for Jesus never imposed himself, never directly proclaimed his divinity. He asked only: “Do you believe this?” He never addressed himself to reason, never set forth proof or argument, never asked: “Do you know? Are you convinced? Are you conquered?” God's desires converge toward the heart in the biblical sense, and this focal point overthrows man's wisdom. Here the Holy Spirit rights the scales of justice and a careful man, like Job, weighs the proofs and the evidence, gives up the phantoms of doctrines and receives revelations. From this depth the words of St. Paul sprang forth: Nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.2.17 Here the famous paradox of Dostoievski is verified: “If one were to prove to me as a + b that truth is not on the side of Christ, I should remain on the side of Christ.” This means that the truth that one proves as a + b can never be all the truth, that the truth of Christ is not commensurable with the truths of reason, that God is not only the object of faith but also the means which reveal him. The expressions, “the divine eye”, “the eyes of the dove”, mean that it is God who looks at himself in us. Invisible to creatures, God is not invisible to himself, the Fathers say. “What is born of the Spirit is Spirit” means that man lives by the divine life. We see God by God, and it is this mystery that conditions and safeguards the mysteries of faith. God, affirms St. Gregory of Nyssa, remains always the “one sought for”, the mysterious one. And St. Gregory of Nazianzen declares: “You have all names and how can I name you, you the only one that cannot be named?”
Man asks himself at least once in his life: “Where do I come from; where am I going?” This question is as old as the world. It seems that Christ had heard it when he said: “I come from the Father and I am going to the Father.” This answer is repeated in the Creed. The symbol of faith, between the atheist's limitations and the agnostic's abdication, designates precisely the abyss of the Father.
Here the inspired argument of Dostoievski has its place. Man is defined by his Eros. “Where thy treasure is, there also will thy heart be.”2.18 If love, in the image of God, is the formula of man, it is evident that one can love only what is eternal. God and man are correlative, as Father and son. “The abyss of the heart aspires to the abyss of God.”2.19 “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.”2.20 “It is in function of Christ that the human heart has been created; like an immense jewel case, it is vast enough to contain even God. That is why nothing here below can satisfy us... For the human soul thirsts for the infinite... everything has been created for its end and the desire of the heart is to run toward Christ.”2.21
“The light of Christ,” says the office of Prime repeating St. John's prologue, “enlightens every man coming into the world.” Does there exist a single man to whom the faith has not been offered?
According to the Fathers, the Holy Spirit is the very essence of the gift of God. That is why there is one prayer that has never been refused, one which the Father always answers immediately, and that is the request for the Holy Spirit, the epiklesis. The man who seeks honestly and sincerely, who knows how to listen to the silence of his mind, can formulate the prayer of his heart in a conditional form: “If thou art, answer me, and send the Holy Spirit.” “O God, if there is a God, enlighten me.” Thus prayed a great Englishman who found both faith and an episcopal vocation. This is also the “if” of the inquiring and sincere Thomas to whom, however, it was given to say: “My Lord and my God!” Between the saddle and the ground, the rider may find grace, says an English proverb.
The Church cultivates the faith of martyrs and glorifies their confession: “It is thou whom I desire; in seeking thee, I struggle and I crucify myself with thee, in order to live in thee.”2.22
The martyr and confessor, the believer and the witness are synonymous. The homologia or proclamation is inherent in faith. Every believer tells what he has seen in God. He confesses publicly during the liturgy: “We have seen the true light; we have received the heavenly Spirit.” He is a truthful eyewitness. From the depth of the eucharistic chalice, his faith can repeat the words of St. John: “I write... what we have heard, what we have looked upon and our hands have handled: of the Word of Life.”2.23 For faith, what is invisible is more intimate and better known than the visible. According to the beautiful words of Tauler: “Certain ones undergo martyrdom once by the sword; others know the martyrdom of love that crowns them interiorly,”2.24 invisibly for the world.
However, the confession of the martyrs is given to all in their last hour. In the face of the violence of death, the Credo resounds, and at the moment of death, it suppresses death. “Whether... life or death... all things are yours.”2.25 Thus even death is a gift, according to St. Paul. The believer is born, lives and dies in the miraculous, the permanent dimension of his faith.
God remains hidden, but he offers his saints and martyrs as “a spectacle” to
men and angels. The pure of heart see God and by them God allows himself to be
seen.