For March 26
Thursday in the Fourth Week of Lent

St. Paul tells that “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7). Today’s readings highlight the enduring challenge this has been for us through the ages. For sight is also a gift from God. When our sight is informed by our faith, we can see the needs of the world with the eyes of Christ and live as his disciples. But when our faith and our sight are out of sync, we are often thrown into turmoil and then we tend to jettison one or the other.

In the first reading from Exodus, the Israelites had seen what their faith told them were signs of God’s presence—thunder, lightning, a thick cloud. They had seen and heard Moses speaking to God, and they had seen him disappear into the cloud to hear what God had to say to them through him. While Moses was with them, they had faith that God was looking out for them. When they lost sight of him for awhile, they also lost their faith in God’s providential presence. As the psalmist plaintively puts it, “They forgot the God who had saved them.”

In the Gospel passage, the opposite occurs. Jesus is speaking to people who have seen his miraculous healings. He has recently healed a crippled man on the Sabbath and they have turned against him. Why? Faith tells them that only a holy person can perform such miracles. But their faith also tells them a holy person would not break the Mosaic Law and according to the Law, no work may be done on the Sabbath. So they deny the evidence of Jesus’s holiness that they have seen in order to maintain their faith in the Law—but at the cost of impoverishing their understanding of God.

We all have such moments when our particular understanding of the ways of God, of the way we believe God ought to act, bump up against an opposing reality. What do we do then?  The Israelites reverted to the idol worship they had been called away from long before. The scholars of the Law of Jesus’s time redoubled their efforts to find answers in the words that had formed them as the people of God. But in looking backward they missed the new thing that was happening, the new way in which God was present to them. I think this is what Jesus means when he talks about having eyes to see and ears to hear. He’s inviting us to see the new things that are happening. We may think they challenge our faith, but they may in fact be challenging us to expand our understanding of faith.

We are living through such a time now. The coronavirus pandemic has upended our lives in a very short period of time. Some people have never lived through a disruption like this. Even for those who have, the current circumstances create a different impact than previous crises. The uncertainty, sudden lack of control, and isolation from others have hit our mobile, self-service lives hard. It may have shaken our faith in a God who has promised to be with us always if we just try our best to live according to the easy yoke of Jesus’s law of love. It may be tempting to give up on God or on the world. Some have chosen one of those paths. But let’s not forget the God who saved us in bad times and enriched our lives in the good times. When our faith and our reality collide, we have the opportunity to open our eyes of faith wider and ask the question that always has an answer, though perhaps not the one we were expecting: where is God in this?
—Christine Szczepanowski

Today’s readings are available on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website.