“Look, we have left everything and followed you.
What then will we have?”
Matthew 19:27
It’s of course Peter who asked what everyone else was thinking, but no one else ventured to ask. He asked it in response to Jesus’ reflection on the encounter with the rich young man who wanted to know how to acquire eternal life. Peter wanted a more straight forward, and perhaps easier, answer to question of what one must do to get into the kingdom of God. Perhaps, the sub-text behind Peter’s question went something like this: “If this rich guy’s riches are not a sign of God’s blessing and if he has to get rid of all of that stuff in order to get in, and given that we have left everything, do we qualify? Are our deeds enough?”
Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question is telling. On the surface it is: “Yes, it’s enough Peter.” (Everyone who as left houses or brothers or sister or father or mother or children or fields for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life. (Mt. 19:29)) But like most of what Jesus says it is delivered with nuance and framed in a way that says: “It’s not that simple, Peter. This isn’t merely about your action or a particular formula one must follow to inherit the blessing. It’s not reduceable to a matter of making a vow of poverty. It’s a matter of noticing and acting on what it is that facilitates and what it is that inhibits one’s ability to follow me.”
Here is a story that illustrates our overwhelming urge as human beings to reduce an invitation to ongoing relationship with God to the miniscule world of religion where we set up a system of rules and regulations that define who is and who is not allowed into the kingdom of God. And not only do we come up with this list of religious “answers” or “essential tenets,” we make that list synonymous with the word “faith”. These dos and don’ts become the things that define the faith, or my faith. Faith becomes a commodity I can have more or less of depending on the degree to which I can stick to the rules or adopt the tenets. Faith becomes a personal set of practices that prove my devotion. Or faith sadly becomes something that the one outside the fold looks at and says: “I could never have that much faith.”
Yet this idea of faith has little, if any, resonance with what the Scriptures call faith. In the Bible faith is used not so much in the sense of a noun but an adjective. Faith in the Bible is about being a faithful person. Faithful to a relationship. Influenced by, acting out of, working within the bounds of a covenant relationship with God. Surely, that faithfulness manifests itself in certain behaviors. But the behaviors grow out of the relationship. They are a response of gratitude for the relationship. They are what we do because we want to honor and protect the relationship. They are practices that seek the Other’s best because that One is seeking our best.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb 11:1)” Now there’s a circumlocution for you! Faith, in other words, is something that inspires faithfulness. We trust in a relationship with the One whom we have not really seen. Faith is living in the assurance of God’s love and grace and acting out of that conviction. Faith is living into and out of our trust. Faith is being faithful.
Jesus’ first invitation to his disciples pretty much says it all: Come and see, follow me, abide with me, stay with me. This invitation to simply be with him, abide in the place that he has made for us and allow him to abide in the place we have made for him is a sign of God’s merciful and persistent pursuit of relationship with us. It is a mercy that is, as Jeremiah says, “new every morning.” Every day is an opportunity to live into the source of our hope and act out of the conviction that the One we have not seen loves us with a love from which nothing can separate us. This is the substance of our faith. This is what it looks like to be faithful.
David Rohrer
10/21/202