Wednesday of the 10th Week in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 18:20-39 | Psalm 15:1-2,4-5,8,11 | Matthew 5:17-19
Elijah stepped out in front of all the people. ‘How long’ he said ‘do you mean to hobble first on one leg then on the other? If Yahweh is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him.’ But the people never said a word. (1 Kings 18:21)
Probably because King Ahab was glowering down at them, so everyone was torn between declaring for God and being beheaded by his guards, or sticking with Baal and being literally thunder-struck.
And so no one knew that God’s faithful were in their midst, for as God later revealed to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:18, “I shall spare seven thousand in Israel: all the knees that have not bent before Baal, all the mouths that have not kissed him.” That figure is probably not numerically accurate; most numbers in the Bible are likely gematric in nature, so “seven thousand” should probably be understood as “a really large number”.
So we have a large crowd of believers all thinking, “God, you know I love You, but I really don’t want to die right here, right now.” That’s actually quite understandable; even true believers nowadays would have a hard time standing up to a raving jihadi with a very large knife.
But there’s a modern twist to this tale. We live in a society that’s largely tolerant of all religions, yet many people have trouble wearing their faith openly, and instead choose to display their discomfort with their beliefs instead.
As a sacrament is “an outward sign of inward grace”, so I’ve coined the somewhat clumsy term secularment to mean “an outward sign of inward turmoil”, and there are plenty of those, such as:
- getting a question about the Catholic faith that you can’t answer…and getting angry at the questioner, or
- wearing a T-shirt with a large FCUK or dancing Mardi Gras skeletons to mass (it’s awfully tempting to go up to the former and hint: “Are you secretly asking yourself, ‘FCUK! Why did I come to church today?'”), or
- deliberately arriving late for mass, leaving after receiving Holy Communion, and generally placing your arms across your chest throughout (“yeah, I really don’t want to be here!”)
I think the root cause of such secularments is largely the same as for the Israelite faithful under Ahab’s reign: FEAR. In the modern context, it’s respectively:
- fear of looking like a idiot for believing in something you don’t even understand, so that anyone can poke holes in your faith, or
- fear of being shunned by your peers who adopt that particular dress code like a tribal uniform, or
- fear of finding out too late that all the “nonsense” you were fed in catechism class was actually true (“mom said I’ll go to hell if I don’t go to church, so I’ll do the bare minimum just in case, but don’t expect me to be happy about it”).
Now, a sage figment of George Lucas’ imagination has something unintentionally Catholic to say on this subject:
Indeed, such inner turmoil generally leads to turning away from God and His graces, and towards short-term enjoyment before long-term suffering. After all, without God, what hope do we have for life after this existence?
This is something we should all be on our guard against; none of us are immune to such fears. Therefore, brothers and sisters, let us remember to:
- turn daily to God,
- ponder scripture frequently,
- grow in understanding of our shared faith,
- seek harmony between our inner faith and outward actions, and
- love both God and each other to the best of our abilities.
Amen.