“It was faith that made Abraham able to become a father…From this one man came as many descendants as there are stars in the sky, as many as the numberless grains of sand on the seashore.”  Hebrews 11: 1-2, 8-12

If Charles Dickens had not registered the title for one of his memorable novels, we could justify using Great Expectations as a suitable title for this Sunday’s three readings, all of which focus on the Christian Faith on which we base our lives. Faith is the expectation of the life to come that Jesus has assured us that God has in store for us.  All three of today’s readings were written by religious leaders who saw that the faith in God of the people in their communities was at risk of wavering. The writer of the Book of Wisdom directed his words to a large Jewish community located in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, a seaport in Egypt that attracted people of all kinds of beliefs and philosophies from across the known world. The writer of Wisdom had set out to urge his fellow Jews not to forget the God who had chosen the Jewish people ahead of those of every other nation and had led them to freedom and independence from slavery and oppression in Egypt. That writer had urged his fellow Jews not to forget God’s predilection for them and to recall the blessings of their Exodus from slavery by being faithful to celebrating Passover every year.

The Letter to the Hebrews (author unknown, and written in the 60s-70s of the first century of the Christian Era)) was very clearly directed to a Christian community under duress. Persecution of Christians initiated by the Emperor Nero, following the Great Fire of Rome (July 64 CE), was directed against Christians across the Roman Empire and lasted for several centuries under a succession of Emperors, with varying degrees of ferocity. It seems that some of the Jewish converts to Christianity in the community to which the Letter to the Hebrews was directed judged that a return to the practice of their Jewish faith would save them from being tracked down and slaughtered by Roman persecutors

While the main focus of the writer of Hebrews was to present a strong case to his audience to put their faith and trust in the person of Jesus and his message, chapter 11 of this letter gives us a list of our heroes, ancestors and models of faith and trust in God, all of whom are worthy of imitation. He begins with a statement that faith and trust in God are the very foundation of the religion we practice: “Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen. It was for faith that our ancestors were commended” (Hebrews 11: 1-2) Incidentally, this is a veiled invitation to each of us to list for ourselves the names of those people who have been  instruments of God’s love for us throughout the courses of our lives. I suggest we all take the time to compile our own list of those who have reflected God’s love to each of us.

Then, beginning with Able, the author lists all those First Testament characters who had demonstrated faith in action to the People of Israel. But he gave particular attention to Abraham and Sarah, who had gone to extraordinary lengths to pursue in faith the journey on which they trusted God was leading them.  Moreover, the truth that stands out starkly was the fact that they did not live to see it all come to fruition. They saw it only after their exodus from this world to God.

And that brings us to our third reading  –  the gospel-reading from Luke, the message of which is as relevant to us now as it was to the disciples whom Luke describes Jesus trying to teach. Luke wrote for a struggling, early Christian community that was unpopular with the traditional Jewish communities from which they had separated when they had opted for the new Jesus movement.

We know that, in John’s Gospel Jesus referred to himself as “the door”. Through him people would enter into intimacy with God (see John 10: 9-16). In today’s gospel-reading, we hear Jesus using parables to teach his disciples that, through him, God is knocking at their hearts, and that they need to be ready and willing to let him (Jesus) and his teaching into their lives.

And that’s the message for us, too. We all know how we can let activity and busyness distract us from staying connected with Jesus and his message. We can stop listening to the voice and promptings of his Spirit and become disconnected from Jesus himself. His insistent message to his disciples in today’s gospel-reading is to be ever vigilant to his wanting to connect with us. That means that we need to make time and space to seek him out and reconnect with him in the prayer of listening to his Spirit and being present to him in personal prayer. That implies summoning the faith to trust that he will always be with us through everything that touches our lives. That’s what distinguished the faith and trust of Abraham and the other ancestors of faith enumerated in the Letter to the Hebrews, and surely on our own lists of those who have been/are agents of God’s love in our lives. 

Jesus was also making the point to his disciples, as was Luke to his community, that living with faith and trust in God would very likely take them (and us) to unexpected places and expect them (and us) to be open to people, situations and events that might very well surprise them (and us). Living by faith might also call on them to be open to new ideas, new ways of living and to letting go of beliefs and practices that had become fossilised. That last challenge to change comfortable ways of doing things was part of the challenge Jesus put to the religious leaders of his day who were wedded to rigid and legalistic practice of ritual. Faith in practice often calls for flexibility, creativity and imagination.

There is one final point embedded in today’s readings. In calling the Jewish community of Alexandria to celebrate the memory of their ancestors’ exodus from slavery in Egypt into the freedom of an uncertain journey of faith through the wilderness to the Promised Land, the writer of Wisdom was reminding them of the challenge to live by faith that would always be an integral part of their lives. In a similar way, whenever we gather to celebrate Eucharist, we are remembering the exodus of Jesus from death to risen life, and anticipating in faith that the same exodus awaits us.