THE PHARISEES argued with Christ asking him for a sign from heaven to test him. So, Christ got exasperated and said: “Why does this generation seek a sign? Amen, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” Then he left. (cfr. Mk 8, 11-13)
This gospel episode reminds us that we should never dare to test God. We have to believe God first if we want to know the truth about anything and everything, especially about God, about Christ, and about us.
Human as he also was and is, Christ could also feel exasperated when he was questioned about something the proof and evidence of which are all over. He performed miracles, his teaching was very sublime, he showed compassion with everyone, mercy with sinners.
As St. Thomas Aquinas once said, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”
It’s always a question of faith if we want to know the truth about God, ourselves and everything else. Without faith, we would just be inventing things. Even if we what we think and invent can appear convincing, without faith we will always miss the truth of anything we consider.
Let’s remember that faith is God, who is truth himself, the creator of everything, the first and last lawgiver, sharing what he knows with us. It’s a tremendous gift that would set us on the right path on the many confusing ways of the world.
We cannot deny that we often get entangled with our worldly ways. This is the real problem of inflation that many people today complain about, but limiting it to its economic terms only. That’s when people complain about high prices and cost of production, because of some increase of money of supply that is not properly spread out and shared by the people, or without the corresponding productivity that money supply is supposed to generate.
Inflation in common terms can be described as that phenomenon where there is a lot of hot air in some persons or in some situation without the corresponding substance that such air should come as an effect.
In terms of our spiritual life and our relation of God, there can also be some kind of inflation — the real and ultimate inflation, in fact — when precisely things are done without faith and, thus, we can appear to be making and producing a lot of things and yet miss the real goal of our life. Christ articulated this phenomenon when he said: “What does it a profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?” (Mk 8, 36)
We should take care of our faith because that is the first means we have to establish our relation with God and to truly get in touch with the true reality of things, not just the reality of our own making.
Faith unites us with God in whose image and likeness we have been made. It gives us the whole truth about ourselves, about who we really are. It provides us with all the means we need to face all the challenges of our life.
It is indispensable in our life as we go through the drama of our earthly pilgrimage. With it, we can manage to have hope even in our worst hopeless predicament, as well as charity especially in those moments when we don’t see or feel love around and instead hatred prevails.
What faith also does is to enlighten our mind, enabling us to see and understand things beyond the simply material, temporal and the natural. It lets us enter into the spiritual and supernatural world to which we are poised./PN
