Being Catholic Today. Laurence McTaggart
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Peter fails because he stops at doubt. His need brings panic; he must cross over to Christ. He ignores the truth that Jesus is coming to him, just as he ignores the comparatively irrelevant Archimedean principle (he’ll sink). But there is no necessity to leave the boat, because when Jesus arrives the wind will drop and the waves become calm. Don’t just do something, sit there!
This is the truly amazing part of the Gospel, and the easiest to forget: that God moves long before we do. Before we can call, he is there. Before we can repent, he has forgiven. We will see this again in later chapters, so I will leave its expansion to those applications. For now, it simply means that there is no place to which Jesus cannot follow you. The reason is that, because of his love for you, there is no place where he does not want to follow you, just to be with you, and to draw you back to the Father.
Man of little faith, why did you doubt? Doubt everything you like – yourself, your strength, your worthiness, even God and his love. Faith does not erase those doubts, because they are truth, truth about us. Faith adds another, contradictory fact, a fact about God: the Lord is coming to save.
What about the creed?
If this is what faith is about, then it shows us how important the Creed is, and what the teaching of the Church’s magisterium is for. Doctrines are vital because they attempt to encapsulate and apply the content of the Gospel. They derive their significance from the personal contact with Christ which is that content; the wonder or amazement of which John Paul II has spoken. This can be demonstrated from the simple experience of the Church’s history and life. For example, as we will see below, the only way to express adequately in human language the intensity with which Jesus gives himself to us in the Eucharist is to talk of eating his Body and drinking his Blood; and to mean that, literally. Less controversially, when discussing the nature of Christ, the early theologians insisted that Christ was fully human, because ‘what was not assumed by God in Christ was not saved’, and the Christian hope is of salvation of the whole human person.
The Pope and the bishops have the task of interpreting human need and divine response in each age and all circumstances. This is a sufficiently daunting commission to encourage one to have sympathy with them. Even more so, when one realizes that they do so, and can do so, only in union with the whole Body of Christ; including you and me.
This tells us, further, how to interpret the Church’s teaching. Any given doctrine is not the result of speculation, but is forced on us to express our faith. So, in turn, we say that we believe the doctrine, that is, say it is true, because the doctrine says what we mean by putting our faith in God, revealed in Christ. Conversely, pick a doctrine, and we can try to work out what it really means in the light of the Gospel it expresses. Take murder. The Church agrees with many others that in most instances it is wrong to kill. Why? Because each human life has an equal value in God’s sight. Conversely, I am loved by God in and for myself, regardless of how tall I am or what I do. Hence, you are too. So it would not be consistent with the good news of my own life to take yours.
If only life were that simple all the time. We are nearly ready to tackle some real problems. But first, we need a few doctrines to provide ammunition, protection and shorthand. In the next few chapters, we shall look more closely at the figure approaching across the storm-tossed waters. Who is he, and what does he have to do with us?
Our God comes, he keeps silence no longer.
Psalm 50:3. Grail translation
In this chapter, we are going to look at the central doctrine of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the Incarnation. The essential idea is that Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man. As we approach this doctrine we are faced with a number of difficulties. One is the seeming contradiction in saying that the same person can be omnipotent (divine) and hungry (human). Another has arisen more recently but is just as acute – that Jesus was (or should I say ‘is’; that’s another problem!) a man and not a woman. The Incarnation seems to feed into Christian chauvinism, the devaluing of women, and, historically, probably has done so.
Once again, I ask you to take it on trust that these issues have resolutions, and suggest that the way forward is not to keep banging our heads on intractables or waving a number of political flags in either direction. Let’s try to get to the heart of the matter, and then see. Having put down any weapons, let’s listen to a story from the Mass, slightly edited.
You formed us in your own likeness, and set us over the whole world, to serve you, our Creator, and to rule over all creatures. Even when we disobeyed you and lost your friendship, you did not abandon us to the power of death, but helped us all to seek and find you. Again and again, you offered us a covenant, and through the prophets taught us to hope for salvation.
Roman Missal, n. 118, Eucharistic Prayer IV
We can read this in a number of ways. One approach is to take it personally. We all have in us a sense of being and of reason and love, which is the likeness to God. We also have a sense of difference from plants and other animals, a sense of understanding and control. We also have the sad knowledge of what we have done with that sense and the power that comes with it. You also know in yourself, if you are honest, ways and examples of lost love and friendship, instances in which you are not what you could be, best intentions frustrated.
But there is also hope, which gets you up in the morning, makes you try again; possibilities of reform, of forgiveness. Either of these senses, of sin and of grace, can be to the fore or fade out of sight from time to time, but recognizing the idea of them is enough for now. A very good way of praying is to take that text above, put it in the first person singular, ‘I’, and the present tense: you do not abandon me to the power of death.
The story is also a history. It is told, mostly, in the documents that make up the Old Testament, the first, and longer, half of the Christian Bible. On the face of it, some may think that there’s little point in having the Old Testament. If you open it at random, there is a fair chance you will find something incomprehensible or irrelevant. Some of it is downright irreligious, or even shocking; for example, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the name of God, described in the books of Joshua and Judges. There were quite influential movements in the first years of Christianity which said the Old Testament should be ditched. Not only was it disedifying and even scandalous in parts, but with the coming of Christ it had become, literally, history, to be replaced by the New. The main group were called Marcionites, after their leader, and they failed because they were discredited by a far bigger mistake, of which more in a moment.
But there is something reassuring about the realism of the Old Testament. It has three main sections: the history and law books, such as I Kings or Exodus; the Prophets, such as Isaiah or Jeremiah; and the ‘writings’, a miscellaneous collection including the Psalms, Proverbs and the Song of Songs. There is virtually no human aspiration, hope, virtue, failure, betrayal, emotion or drama that cannot be found in there somewhere. Early monks used to make the same claim of the Psalms alone. Once noticed, this fact is significant. There would be something odd about a religion that addressed only what is true and noble in us. Not just odd, but totally abstract, even useless. Think back to Peter, and his raw need for God. That need comes from sin, from weakness, from a damaging history. The Old Testament tells your story and mine in the form of the story and prayers of Israel.
That is as far as we have got up to now; the realization of doubt and emptiness, and the instinct that there is an alternative. Plus the not altogether comfortable hypothesis that we are loved by a God who is about to do something about all three. Here we have the full and richer purpose of the Old Testament in Christian scripture and life, expressed in the continuation of the prayer with which we began:
Father, you so loved the world that in the fullness of time you sent your only Son to be our Saviour. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary, a man like us in all things but sin.