God Works His Salvation Even When The Apostles Are Confused

Saturday of the 6th Week in Course 2023

“Don’t tell anybody what you witnessed here, until the Son of Man rises from death.” Suppose you had committed to follow somebody, and were really impressed with His miracles and teaching and desire to help people live lives of love, and then He said that. You might fall into discussion with your colleagues and talk about distracting ideas, like “what is this rising from the dead?” or “We just saw Elijah, but Moses, too. Is that what the rabbi told us about the return of Elijah?” Or you might, like Peter, suggest getting involved in a construction project. So on a purely human level, we can understand why Jesus tried to shut the whole discussion down, and just tell them that John the Baptist was a stand-in for the prophet Elijah. The disciples, even the three key ones, Peter, James and John, were always getting things about Jesus mixed up in their heads.

In the letter to the Hebrews, we read this shortened testimony to the theological virtue of faith, by which we believe in God as He reveals Himself to His people. Now it’s pretty easy to come to an understanding that there is a God. That can be believed without the virtue of faith, because, as St. Paul says to the Romans, in chapter one of his letter. If there is no being whose very being is His existence, and on whom all creation is dependent for its existence, then there is no possibility of anything existing. In other words, we just look around us and ask “why is all this?” The very fact of creation means there is a Creator. But God is way more than the ground of our existence. He has revealed Himself to humans, particularly in the divine-human writings we call Sacred Scripture, as three persons in one divine nature, God who loves us into being and redeems us through His Son’s redemptive death and sanctifies us by the working of the Spirit in His sacraments.

The author of Hebrews goes all the way back to the beginning of human existence. Right after the fall of the first humans, we see Cain, who offered improper worship, and Abel, who gave right worship and paid for it by losing his life to a jealous brother. Abel believed and was accepted by God because of his faith, which led to right living and right worship. Enoch was taken up into heaven–but not the Beatific Vision because Jesus had not yet died and risen. That, too, was a product of faith. Noah, whose story we have heard here recently, by faith did something that to his contemporaries sounded crazy. But his ark of wood–really God’s ark–saved his family from the flood that wiped sin from the earth. This was a prefigurement of Our Lord, who on a wooden cross died to wipe sin from the hearts of those who would believe in Him and be incorporated into His Body. All of the OT testifies to the love of God, a love that was so self-sacrificing that it issued in the death of Our Lord, a love that has the power to bring us all up to divine communion. For which we give thanks to the Lord, Amen.