29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Bishop of Lake Charles
Immaculate Conception Church, Maplewood
October 16-17, 2010
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Luke 18:8
Have you ever had someone ask you the question, “Just who do you think you are?” It is the kind of question a parent asks a child in reprimand. It is also the kind of question that “stops the action,” stops all argument and causes you to think. It is a rhetorical question, because it is a question that carries with it a commentary. Jesus asks one such question in the Gospel today.
Jesus asks, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). As I learned recently of the results of the Pew Research Center on knowledge of religion in the United States, I wondered myself. One thousand people representing a broad cross section of the populace were asked questions concerning their knowledge of religion, not whether they believed, but simply what they knew. Interestingly the most knowledgeable were atheists and agnostics. When it came to Catholics, they were no more knowledgeable or not than their Protestant counterparts. Concerning one particular Catholic doctrine, Catholics were asked about what they knew the Church taught about the Eucharist. Forty-five percent responded that they did not know that the Church taught that in Holy Communion Catholics receive the body and blood of Christ under forms of bread and wine, that there was indeed a change that took place. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8).
As I have spent the vast part of my life in religion, as a seminary student and now as a priest and bishop, I have come to certain conclusions about faith. There are, to be precise, three articles of faith that I think are essential. They are by no means exclusive, but they have fundamental implications for everything else we are obligated to believe. They are also Catholic because they are found both in the Bible and Sacred Tradition.
The first is that Jesus died for our sins. The Scriptures speak about His death for sin countless times. One of the most notable occasions is found in St. Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus is teaching about the need for service and how the greatest is the one who serves. Then He says of Himself. “The Son of Man … has come, not to be served by others, but to serve, to give his own life as a ransom for the many” (Matthew 20:28). A ransom is a price paid to secure the release of a hostage. The hostage is mankind. The hostage taker is sin. Jesus is the price of the ransom. This means that Jesus is sacrificed, and this sacrifice is seen in what He does on the cross. Without sacrifice Jesus remains an eloquent teacher, a profoundly good man. Offered as a sacrifice, however, Jesus manifests Himself as the Lamb of God, the sacrificial offering for the sins of humanity. Sacrifice is what the message, work, and mission of Jesus Christ is all about, because without sacrifice there is no redemption. Sacrifice lies at the heart of the Christian message. Jesus’ death is not optional. A Gospel without sacrifice is no Gospel. Religion without sacrifice is merely fellowship.
The second essential article of faith, found throughout the Scriptures, is that of the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, the early Christians relived that sacrificial death of Jesus Christ in a meal that they referred to as “the breaking of the bread” or the Eucharist. For the early Christians when they ate the Body of the Lord and drank His Blood they entered into His redemptive sacrifice. Just as the Jews participated in the Exodus by eating the Passover, Christians entered into Jesus’ redeeming sacrifice by eating the Eucharist. For this reason St. John the Baptist seeing Jesus at a distance points to Him and says, “There is the Lamb of God” (John 1:36). St. Paul says the same thing less symbolically. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul reminds us of what Jesus did the night before He died. He took bread and wine and said those remarkable words, “This is my Body” and “This cup is the new covenant in my Blood” (cf. I Corinthians 11:24, 25). For what purpose does Jesus do this? To leave us a meal? Yes, but not just a meal. This meal is a participation. It is a living memory, a memory that brings into the present the past with a promise of the future. At this point in the text, St. Paul writes, “Every time, then, you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes” (I Corinthians 11:26). There is only one sacrifice, but it knows no time and no restrictions. The Eucharist is properly speaking a sacrificial meal that joins us to Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection.
The third essential article of faith is the need for a Church. What authority teaches the Gospel of Jesus’ sacrificial death? Who will ensure that the Gospel message is valid and accurate? The simple fact is that God had called together a people to be His own, the Jewish people. They were a group set apart, with a hierarchy, a priesthood, a liturgy, a worship, a structure, sacred texts, and a tradition. The early Christians saw themselves as the inheritors of this tradition. For that reason the earliest Christians called themselves a “church,” a word in Greek, “ecclesia,” that translates the assembly of God’s people. In short, the early Christians saw the Church as the Body of Christ, spoken of in the Letter to the Ephesians. It reads, “For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body” (Ephesians 5:29-30). It is this Body that continues the proclamation of a sacrifice made by Jesus Christ for the sins of humanity remembered and brought to life in a sacred sacrificial meal that we call the Eucharist. As the Letter of St. Peter will state, “You, however, are a ‘chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people he claims for his own…. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people; once there was no mercy for you, but now you have found mercy” (I Peter 2:9-10).
To answer Jesus’ question “will he find faith on earth?”, the Catholic needs to know the answer to the question “who do you think you are?” The answer is not confused nor is it ambivalent. The answer is rooted in faith, a faith that proclaims a sacrificial Lord, whose redemption is relived in a sacrificial meal, whose continuation is assured by a Body of Christ with whom the Lord promised always to remain. “I am with you always,” He promised, “until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). If we live with that hope, then the Lord will find faith when He returns.