SOME YEARS AGO the journalist Richard Ingrams edited an anthology entitled Jesus: Authors Take Sides. In it he assembled the views of well- known authors about Jesus and his significance, ranging from those who held traditional Christian views to those who rejected them. For some it wasn’t the person of Jesus that was the problem but those who claimed to represent him and so often misrepresent him.
Maeve Binchy, who sadly died recently, left a wonderful legacy not only of literary achievement but also as a fine human being. She made it possible to say “I have lost my faith” despite the fact that she had been brought up in a devout and loving Christian home. This took courage in an Ireland where religion was the done thing; it was expected of everyone and those who questioned were considered suspect.
The blind expectation however that everyone must believe – and believe in a particular way – failed to recognise that coercion and faith are incompatible. Faith by its very nature is born of the freedom to choose and the suppression of that freedom meant that important faith questions were left unanswered. Conformity was the order of the day with many sharing the English schoolboy’s view of religion – “believing wot you know ain’t true.” Theo Dorgan, writing in this newspaper last Saturday said this about religion: “I found that I was an agnostic, not an atheist. Even as a gawky and often simple-minded teenager I thought it extraordinarily presumptuous to claim that there could be no God because I did not believe in one. I mean I allowed for the possibility that I might be proved wrong. I am still unpersuaded by the many ingenious ‘proofs’ for the existence of God that thinkers down through the ages have offered, and I am equally unpersuaded by the hectoring tone and hysterical righteousness of ‘scientific’ campaigning atheists.”
Archbishop Dermot Martin spoke recently of the need to present the message of Jesus Christ in a manner which responds to the challenges adults face regarding their faith in today’s world: “Being a Christian today can never involve shallow flight from the realities and complexities of the modern world.” He suggested that the emphasis on religious education in schools, although important, has perhaps taken away attention from the need for adult religious education which “treats men and women as adults” and addresses “the questions which adult Christians have to face as they live their faith in today’s changing world.” Tomorrow’s Gospel reading describes an encounter between Jesus and Peter.
Jesus had claimed that he alone was the source of strength and sustenance for his followers. We are told that hearing this “many of his disciples no longer went about with him.” He does not damn them to hell and makes it clear that people must choose by asking those still with him “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter responds: “Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter and those who remained with him must have wavered like the others but they stayed because of their experience of the spiritual vitality and truthfulness of the message of the one they had come to know as the Son of God. And what is significant is that despite setbacks and denials along the way they stayed to the end sometimes at great cost, a path chosen by millions ever since.
In Richard Ingrams’s book Philip Toynbee, one of the contributors said this about Jesus: “Jesus of Nazareth: that scarcely visible young man; but from whom light streams forward into the New Testament, into the early Church, into all later history.”
God will never be without witnesses who turn up in all sorts of unexpected places – even in a boxing ring. When Katie Taylor won her Olympic gold medal millions applauded her success but at every opportunity she declared her faith in Jesus Christ and in one interview asked “Where would I be without God in my life?” That’s really what Peter was saying – as do people of faith everywhere. – GORDON LINNEY