Memorial of Saint
Bonaventure, bishop and doctor of the Church
(Isaiah 7:1-9; Matthew 11:20-24)
The singer and songwriter John Denver sang a beautiful
ballad about his uncle Matthew. The
refrain emphasized that Matthew was raised on joy and found love the only way
to live. The verses told how Matthew
lost everything in a tornado – farm, home, and family – everything, that is, except
his faith. The ballad asserted that Matthew’s
faith in God was “as solid as a stone.”
It is the kind of faith that Isaiah exhorts in today’s first reading.
The situation appears hopeless for the small kingdom of Judah. Its neighbors have coalesced their forces
against it. Its people are trembling. In the midst of the crisis Isaiah admonishes the
nation not to lose heart but to keep their faith in God. In what has become a definition of biblical
faith, Isaiah tells the people: “’Unless your faith is firm, you shall not be
firm.’” He means to say that their faith comprises their very existence.
Unfortunately some of us count faith as something less
than that. We sometimes see faith as an expendable
quality of our lives, helpful mostly for celebrating life’s thresholds: the passages
from childhood to adolescence, from living mostly for oneself to sharing one’s
means with another, from life itself to death.
But we do not accept its ultimate meaning. If this is the case with us personally, then we
need to repent and accept faith for the claim that Isaiah makes of it. Without our faith in Christ we will cease to
be.
