It is raining today, off and on; at times, the trees toss and the house is beat upon by water flung sideways. This mirrors what I find on my screen when I look through pixels to what is happening in the world: it seems, to many of us, that the stream of evil is beyond us, like a mountain of grey, slimy water breaking and receding, each tide higher and higher. Many of us are wondering where God is. We feel on the edge of something monstrous, beyond our power and control...all does seem lost when we see a parade in Spain including cross-dressed children primed for abuse, when magisterial doctrine that keeps us sane is held in a jugular grip by those charged with protecting it, when we see the despair on the faces of the lockdown-poor in our land, when we see widespread anxiety about the encroachment of shadowy forces of power bolstered by fears of AI and transhumanism, when genocide is no longer news, when death seems to reign. Indeed, indeed, in our day, it seems that Satan "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born": it seems that Yeat's great poem is no longer a nihilist's imagination but a living image. It also feels, perhaps, that we are the disciples wondering what to give as bread, and Christ is turning to us, saying, "What do you have?" We know instinctively this is a moment of faith. But we find that we don't know what that means in the face of so much evil.
Is faith an intellectual assent, or an emotional one? What if it is neither, at least neither alone? What if it is more than the sum total of the parts of us? Imagine Jesus traveling along a dusty path with His disciples, teaching peripatetically, their questions coming fast and furious; He stops, and suggest they sit for a spell, to rest, and to hear him; the stopping to hear indicating something they need to hold in their hands, something weighted such that it requires the ground to be still with them (it is recounted in all four Synoptic Gospels almost word-for-word, indicating something they all deemed essential): "For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." Imagine: the words hit them with the weight of worlds, of the Creator; each of them—small, insignificant to the world they inhabited, but nascently the most important in history for their being chosen by Him—tries to hold the weight.
"Do you mean...What do you mean?"
They can't hold onto it. Can any of us move mountains? What was He saying? What is this faith? Certainly not just an intellectual assent to doctrine; certainly not an emotional state kept alive by praise music pulsing through speakers on the way to another work day. No human intellect, no human emotion, has the power to move a mountain, even if this is a colloquial phrase meaning "large problem." Dots are not connecting here; Christ often, though, spoke of the power of His healing in terms almost of a communion of intent with the other: "Your faith has healed you"; "He could not [my emphasis] do works of power in Nazareth, because of their lack of faith in Him." There's manifestly, then, something more to faith than just believing that God exists, or feeling it, which fades like the high at the end of a retreat when daily life asserts itself again.
The great biblical scholar, John L. McKenzie, wrote astounding words about faith in his book on the New Testament, The Power and the Wisdom: "As we look at the act of faith, we see that the degree of surrender to Jesus grows . . . it is surrender of self to the extent that one buries one's personal life in the life of Jesus and ceases to exist as a detached unit of humanity" (169-170). Here again we see the indication of communion and power flowing forth from that communion; yet---what is this communion, this faith that means that each of us, the faithful, would "move mountains" and "do greater works than these"? McKenzie, a scholar who could dance almost effortlessly on the razor's edge of historical context and mythos, that deep underlying, unchanging, supra-historical reality so essential to understanding the Divine, claims that we must look at the Gospel-writer's words, and indeed, the Lord's own words, first as part of an historical context—that of the Torah, the life of Israel—and yet, at the same time, we must hold onto the tension that the Jews lived in from the time they waited, in the words of the great Martin Buber, at the foot of the navel of the cosmos (Sinai) for God to establish a relationship with them, a family relationship like none other. We too must live in the tension of time and eternity as we listen to the words of Christ about faith.
If, then, Christ is speaking about the mustard seed to Jews at a time in history when His terms, his teaching, would make the most sense in light of the Torah and the faith journey of the Jewish people, perhaps a look at what faith might mean in that context will help us ground our understanding of how faith can indicate a power in communion, in a surrender of self. Rabbi Fohrman of Aleph Beta gives us the word in Hebrew for "faith": in key places, turning points in Exodus, it is "emunah" in our Arabic script. The rabbi takes us back to the moment when the Jews— having seen God rescue them from Egypt and miraculously get them across a sea, feed them with bread showing up on the ground day-by-day, meet them at Mt. Sinai, allow them to experience Him speaking with Moses, receive the Law from His own hand—were at the edge of the Promised Land. Spies had just returned and reported milk and honey, yes, but also giants. Fear had set in and many complained that "God has sent us here to kill us"; "Would that we could return to Egypt." Like a record forcibly spun backwards, their shrill tones scratched, undid all: the song of care, the protection, the relationship that had been built over time and struggle in the desert. They accuse God; it is the antithesis of "emunah," or "faith," because this word in the Hebrew is closest to the English "steadfast."
Therefore, faith is not just a single moment, for the human who lives in time. It is, at the least, a process in time: at the greatest degree, the degree correlated with the Creator and the Word of that Creator, what is it? Rabbi Fohrman immediately dispels the notion that, at the edge of the Promised Land, the Israelites had lost intellectual belief, for they had gazed on each other's faces in the light of a pillar of fire, in the light like horns radiating from the forehead of Moses. Their failure was something else, something darker, which requires some unpacking, with the help of the rabbi.
Belief in God, he says, is the easy part. St. Paul would agree: "For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Even Pharaoh, who went head-to-head with God, at the moment of his army being drowned, believed in God's existence. No. It is what comes after that defines faith, emunah. It is what comes after the wedding vows that determines emunah, or fidelity, trustworthiness, steadfastness. Vis à vis God, is this on us, as humans?
It is most like a wooing on the part of a bridegroom, resulting via both parties in a deep-flowing marriage over years. The rabbi writes about Moses confronting the Israelites in their lack of emunah: "'In this desert you have seen how God has carried you, like a man will carry his child' . . . Moses appeals to their experience: 'You have grounds for faith, but you in this thing have failed.'" What is their experience, beyond anecdotes? In the beginning, before the unleavened departure, God had told them, through Moses, that He had heard their cries. He had empathy for them. To have trust in someone, we need to know he cares for us, cares for our struggles and pain. Later, on the windswept, sandy dead-end with an army thundering toward them, they had seen God's power to save them; to trust another fully, we must know that he has the power to act for us in need, that he will do what is needed, will "have our back." Finally, at the foot of the great mountain, Sinai, they had dialogue with God; they had known, through Moses, that God understood them, their needs, their humanness.
When I know you have empathy, power, and understanding, I can trust you with my life. Yet, like a marriage, it is a choice for both parties—it is a covenant of love and trust. Rabbi Fohrman puts it best:
When you steadfastly place your fate in the hands of someone who loves you, when you abandon yourself to them, you achieve a dizzying kind of intimacy with them. That intimacy, as rewarding as it is, is also scary. It is a kind of leaving yourself behind, a kind of merging unabashedly with another. There is no more hiding, what of my sense of self, am I losing it all to you?
These words echo those of John McKenzie, when he describes the faith Christ means: "It is surrender of self to the extent that one buries one's personal life in the life of Jesus and ceases to exist as a detached unit of humanity." Just as this Catholic scholar and Jewish rabbi echo each other's words about faith, does Christ's life echo the process of God's relationship with the Israelites in their archetypal journey of emunah? For Jew and Christian, regardless, it is indeed a leap—often, in the darkness, most trusting when we do not feel the empathy, the power, the understanding: in these times, we have to remember, to recall, the times when we have known these three pillars of faith, and hang on to them, because we are limited human beings, and God knows the Long Game. Nevertheless, God always continues to reach out to make this emunah possible. The last, greatest, continuing iteration of this Divine courtship is the Incarnation.
Christ is the expression, the Word, of God. His personhood is of course ineffable, but if we attempt to approach it via Aristotelian and Thomistic language, He is the form of God as expressed, discernible to us limited human beings both in the creative act of the cosmos and in the material level as embodied, as a fellow human being. The Word, the expression of the formal cause of everything, is, in a sense, the communication of the Father from all eternity until now. Love desires communication, communion, and God loves us; God incarnated, suffering, dying, rising is the ultimate, final communication of love, allowing for the power of God, the Spirit, to make His home in the human being. Therefore, the reality of the Son of Man is, rather than an echo of the God in the Sinai wilderness, the same God wooing His creatures over and over into a marriage of trust and covenant. The God we meet in the Gospels is overflowing with empathy, not just in an overall way, as when He wept over Jerusalem: He leans into the dust to gather scattered, despised whores and invalids; He hears and turns toward the high-pitched whine of Bartimaeus on the road to Jericho; He weeps with Mary and Martha peering after their beloved over edge of the death-lands; in a lighter moment, one can almost hear His chuckle of admiration as He feels the bits of straw and paneling fall on him from an opened roof, sees the pallet descending toward him, surrounded heaven-ward by concerned faces of friends. His is a particular empathy for each person, a love-pity that His saints exude for each person placed in their path. Power? It flowed from Him, through Him, to those who counted on His empathy, knew it, hoped for it, risked it in the glare of the town square. He had power to help, to save, to salvage. Did He understand, did He show He understood? The answers to these questions are so obvious in the Gospels that it almost seems to me now, recounting, that these three criteria, pillars, of faith were what He came to show—not through an intermediary like Moses—in particular moments, to particular people, to a particular Church, as He desires to do for all time: "I will always be with you."
The Gospels, then, are a story of God creating the conditions for emunah, for Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, making possible that steadfast trust in a Father, emunah precious as the nard poured on his head by one who loved Him. But I think there's more: the mustard-seed-mountain-moving faith. When Christ showed Himself in full glory on Mt. Tabor, two great ones of faith were with Him: Moses and Elijah. Somehow, they were icons of full faith, and they rejoiced to see the Word in all His glory, as fully human and fully Divine, able to relate to individuals in a new, deeper, more personal way. Both these men, in their days, moved mountains: they surrendered all to God, became, in one sense, so given that they shone with the very glory of God, Moses as he came down from Sinai, Elijah as he was swept up in fire.
But this, next to what Christ could do for us, is just a precursor. St. Paul prays it well in Philippians: "That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable to his death." And in His last discourse, Christ prays to the Father that "these might be one with Us, as We are one." Emunah, the consummation of trust, means that I am no longer just me: I believe in Him, I am no longer a "detached human." This is only possible through Christ's complete identification with our humanity, His ransoming us from the pomp and power of Satan.
This is scary. Who am I, then? Will I, like the Israelites, in times of fear, blame God in some way, act like His actions in my life are somehow lacking empathy, power, or understanding? Indeed, there is much around us that seems to require more practical, understandable power. This is not new, though, except perhaps in degree. I think of the comedian Stephen Fry, whom I both pity (he seems a man of great sorrow, like many great comedians) and admire, who scoffed on Irish television at the idea of a God who can allow a child to suffer...yes, as Fry admitted later in an interview with Jordan Peterson, it is Ivan's argument in The Brothers Karamazov. Fry, as Ivan did, has lost all faith, because he does not see empathy, power, or understanding: and so he has lost sight of God. Understandable.
The response, as was suggested to Fry by Peterson, is not an argument, but a person. In The Brothers K, that person is Alyosha, Ivan's younger brother, who, at the end of the novel, surrenders to the ground in ecstasy because he loves God; I would add that Alyosha, spreading the power of goodness around him, is who he is because of Father Zosima, his mentor, who traveled the road of emunah: repentance, the self-emptying of all reliance and care for the power of this world, and the absolute trust in the empathy, power, and understanding of Christ: Alyosha sees through Father Zosima a glimpse of the deep, brooding, maternal hovering of the Spirit, the power of God: the long-game, the understanding beyond understanding, the reasons that only the heart of God can know, the final, loving good at the end of all things, the meaning of pain, of humiliation, severe mercies on the journey to the Promised Land.
Who am I to judge another's pain, another's journey along the road to emunah? I myself am frightened, stupidly so, of losing myself in that absolute trust of God, that faith that can move mountains. I am nothing, though. I'm old enough now to know that. Nothing without a purpose, without a beloved, nothing without my Source and End, the Alpha and Omega. What happens when a human being fully unites with the power, the love, that keeps the stars alight and aligned, that gives me every breath? We will become Christ, in a sense, and He will work His power through us at the level of emunah we surrender to. We in Christ, bring Christ in.
As Rabbi Fohrman says about his own journey, "It is a test we must not fail."
However, if the story of the Jews is a story of failure, again and again, diaspora and slavery, a story repeated, well-known to each honest heart, then how do we succeed? This is why Christ is necessary. He is the Expression of God; God is love, and sometimes divine charity can seem, as CS Lewis said, almost like anger because of its intense desire for the good of the other: an uncompromising desire for the highest good for each person. The Expression of this Charity was to "empty Himself of divinity, becoming like us in all things, even to the lowest point, to death on the Cross." This reminds me of the best fairy tales, the ones about the King who loves the maiden enough to seek her in the darkest places, to gather her like a crushed flower in His great, scarred hands and heal her. This is the deepest empathy: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," followed by the power to take up life again, because He is Life, He always has been. And this is the journey we must all take, as all mystics know, because their hearts search the depths and, I hope, find Christ though they may not know His name; and so, I will give the Sufi mystic poet Lal Shabaz Qalander the last word in hope that he too found, at the end of emunah, Christ—and loved Him: The journey is a test of faith / A challenge to the heart and soul, / A journey of surrender and grace, / A journey to the beloved’s goal.
*Image: Mount Nebo, where Moses looked out upon the Promised Land
