Daily Reflections ...

There are few things more divisive than faith. More accurately, few things are more divisive than faith held by people who have not understood the heart or the spirit of their faith. Faith lived on the surface, with the attention on practices and rules, will inevitably conflict with those from other religions living their faith that same way. Sparks fly when practices and rules vie with one another for supremacy. It quickly becomes a matter of who is right and who is wrong.

Now, back to today’s text. This is the problem Jesus is experiencing in this recent series of readings from John’s Gospel account. Jesus attempts to challenge their limited understanding of ‘truth’. He confuses them because he uses their sacred texts to support his argument.

This raises the critical and sensitive question: do we do the same thing? In what ways do we fail to see that there are more profound ways of understanding our texts and teachings, even if that calls our current practices into question? Who or what do we serve: the Living God as revealed in Jesus Christ or our way of interpreting the things of God?

It is not being suggested that we can dispense with things at the heart of our faith. Instead, we are being challenged to engage with what is at the heart of it all—a deep and personal relationship with the God who loves us and calls us to reveal that love in a world so deeply in need of it. Everything else we believe and know is at the service of that.

by Shane Dwyer