By Canon Gerry Conroy
One of the most wonderful things that we can experience in life is the richness of a good relationship between two people. It is not something easy to describe, there are so many words we use, to try and express the different facets of it. Love is the most commonly used, but even love demands of us further clarification, we try to plumb the depths of its richness, so we have poets and artists who attempt to express something of what it is.
Faith is not a word that would immediately jump to mind when we are thinking about that relationship, yet faith is exactly that, a description of the relationship between two persons, between God and us. Like every relationship it’s built around what we know of the other person, a response to what we know of the mystery that has arisen out of an encounter. And here too, this love is not so simply defined; it is not easy to verbalise exactly all that this relationship contains. Here too we have artists and architects, musicians who try to express something of the truth of it.
That little scene painted for us by the Gospel where Jesus stands before his fellow townsfolk and they list off who he is, what they know of him, only for it to become apparent that they do not know him at all, ends with Jesus being amazed at their lack of faith. He is amazed that they do not know him. Of course, the real point of the story is that the people of God, do not know their God. It is not simply a story of how the people of Nazareth did not recognise Jesus as God, but that in what he said and taught, they did not recognise the word of God. They were not willing to accept his teaching brought the freedom and hope that they longed for; they were looking for a different freedom their hope was for something other than what he spoke of. Somewhere along the road of life, the people and God had gone their separate ways.
We might say that the story is a parable of our own society. Our culture and God have gone their separate ways also. I can’t help but feel it has lost its way while looking for all those things we have always sought, things like freedom and love. God is seen as the enemy of love and the destroyer of freedom; they no longer want his love or his freedom, preferring their own versions. And we are all in danger of succumbing to the same delusion, for we are bombarded day and night with an understanding of freedom and love that is far from what Christ spoke of and showed in his life. The axis of perception has shifted from spinning around Christ to spinning round our desires and we have become dizzy in the new confusion and are ourselves in danger of losing a Christian understanding of love and freedom.
The ingenuity and power contained in the skyscraper are wondrous and testament to the glory of man, but they are of a different order to the beauty of the Cathedrals raised in glory to God in past ages. We need to stop and think of what we are creating for the future and the foundations needed on which to build that future. We profess our faith in Christ; that means we recognise Christ to be not simply the Son of God, it also means we believe we will find in him, and not the world, the revelation of the truth of who we are, the revelation of true love and of true freedom.