Faith, the inner inclination toward God, the choice to believe, may happen in a flash or develop over time. It’s a feeling, a tendency, an inner movement. But we frequently find that, after the initial moment of epiphany or the first measured decision to believe, faith is something which must be cultivated by continual, conscious action. That action is the basis of our religion, of the moral and ethical organization in our lives which ties us to the holy: to God, His son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Religion is revolutionary. Entering into it is transformative. Our readings for the week certainly exemplify this. They speak of the ruptures and renewals which characterize religious life. The effects of entering into religious traditions, which within Judaic and Christian circles are built upon a notion of communion and relationship with God, are nearly always extreme. Thus Isaiah is able to speak of an eschatological future which is simultaneously a metaphor for entrance into religious tradition: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind,” God says through the prophet (Isaiah 65:17). Living in faith means entering into just such a new world, wherein all is considered possible, all possibilities are imbued with purest hope, and hope is sustained by faith.
The biblical promises and potentialities given through God can initiate a kind of euphoria, can lead us to delight in the possibilities of the kingdom of God. God speaks of that kingdom in the highest, most idealized terms: it’s a place without distress, a place of perpetual youth, and a place wherein death has been conquered by life. People who enter into the kingdom live long, are continually sated, and are able to enjoy innate intimacy with God: “before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear,” God says (Isaiah 65:27).
It’s probable that Isaiah didn’t have only a distant future in mind. The relationship between God and Israel was predicated upon a number of covenantal “conditions,” which existed almost as a map to living wholly in relationship to the divine. If those in the earthly kingdom were able to direct their lives with covenantal and Torah prescriptions in mind, the heavenly kingdom would be, to a degree, actualized, or at the very least mimicked, on earth. In this new kingdom, in the new and perfected Jerusalem, God will rejoice “and delight in [his] people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress” (Isaiah 65:19). Such predictions are common throughout scripture, and yet continually enticing: a world so free of distress and so bursting with joy would, indeed, strike us as a “new” world.
The scriptures do not, and could not, suggest that religious transformation is solely characterized by the new ease of living with God and in God’s image. There’s certainly delight to be found there. But the journey from living without God to living in him is hardly a brief one, and it’s certainly not one we make simple. Even as we hunger for the fulfillment of prophetic promises, we sometimes resist the work required to move toward them. Faith, and religious life, is disruptive; it requires rejecting the empty promises of secular circles, of the world which doesn’t feel inclined toward God. It does not aspire to ultimacy, neither does it exhaust much time imagining ultimacy at all. But because all promises have their glitter, rejections of worldly visions don’t always naturally take root, or appeal to us easily.
Our readings from the gospel and Paul remind us that choosing to live in God is not always a choice the world understands. Jesus does not promise a graceful or pain-free transition from worldly living to Christian living. To the contrary: he assures his followers that “[non-believers] will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name” (Luke 21:12). Societies, he warns, tend to rally against religious living; they tend to want to dismiss and repress it. And he warns that it’s not a condition limited to particular times. To be faithful is to set oneself up as different, to proclaim aspirations beyond the world’s immediate inclinations.
Jesus assures his listeners that even families are not safe from the disruption which moving into faith initiates. Rather, believers will find themselves “betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and…some [will be put] to death” (Luke 21:16). They’ll be hated and despised; all daily pleasantries previously taken for granted will no longer be available.
Our readings vacillate between these two poles, both assuring us that believers will enjoy unimaginable delights, and that the radical decision to believe will lead to strife, grief and innumerable disruptions. And yet they both articulate the same truth. When we decide to believe, and when we elect to form our lives around that belief, our former lives do, indeed, pass away; they dissipate into a now unavailable space. And that can be difficult; it can mean losing familiar access to the people who don’t accompany us. But what awaits us on the other side—the delight of living in radical communion with God, in intimate relationship to heaven and ultimate truth—is itself a new world, and can mend whatever pains are initiated by the disruptive decision to believe. God both requires us to break our hearts a bit, allowing the old to pass away, and promises to fill them with the light of total truth which comes in knowing him. He requires us to leave behind that which is not of him; he also promises us new and limitless homes.
Religious life is a choice. It’s a movement from the comfortable uncertain to radical, unfamiliar spaces of divine truth. Tears may fall along the way; change is never easy. But the space beyond them, the infinite vistas of eternity, are promised as a space wherein tears have no place, wherein life is spent as it was meant to be: in loving God, and in the gift of being perfectly loved by him in return.
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