Faith: hunger, encounter, trust (Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19; 10 August 2025)

A reflection on Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19, written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA. 

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
D08 F8NW
10 August 2025
Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-19

Welcome
Today, our second reading, a resounding passage from the letter to the Hebrews, invites us to reflect directly and personally on faith. Perhaps it may help to clear the air by saying that faith does not first of all mean believing lots of things or even behaving in a certain way. Ethics and doctrines are, of course, important — the practical expression of faith and the attempt to express it in words — but they do not arrive at the centre of it all. The centre is once larger than ethics and doctrines and at the same time more personal, more, if I my put it like this, existentially urgent.

Topic
This is because faith is at the same time a quest, an encounter and an act of trust.

Steps
Faith is first of all a kind of hunger of the heart, a quest for meaning and purpose. I am on this journey because I am open to the possibility of God: in technical terms, open to the transcendent. Is there a God? What may I hope? How should I live? Such open questions arise variously from the accident of birth, from the awesomeness of the cosmos and from the intimation of gift and grace. The opening words of Hopkin’s poem The Windover capture the sense of wonder: I caught this morning morning’s minion.

Faith, if we stay with the hunger of the heart, eventually becomes a place of encounter, an encounter. This must seem strange to those outside the faith, but we believe in the God of disclosures: God, in whom we live and move and have our being; Jesus, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell; the Spirit who is the love of God poured into our hearts. Our innermost being is the place of encounter — call it the heart or the soul or my deepest self.

In the wise and poetic words of Benedict XVI: Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Perhaps you can recognise such experiences on your own journey: in love, in loss, in life. Such moments of often elusive encounter are perhaps rare but all the more to be pondered and treasured. They form part of my biography as a believer, a personal foothold in the faith. You can see this in St Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ, at his conversion, an encounter so real it almost went beyond faith to a biographical fact.

And lastly, faith becomes a matter not primarily of belief but of trust. This was certainly emphasised in our resounding second reading. The outstanding teacher of faith as trust in the western tradition is Martin Luther, the great reformer. He was impatient with intellectualisation and even mechanisation of faith in the later Middle Ages and was looking for something much more personal and satisfying. Of course, as an Augustinian, he looked back to St Augustine and, in turn, both Augustine and Luther looked back to St Paul. For all three, faith means first and foremost trust. I trust God and I entrust myself to God. This is not my project; on the contrary, it is my response to the faithfulness of God disclosed in the faithfulness of Jesus himself. In the words of Martin Luther: Faith is God's work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God.
So, in a word, faith for us is a living quest, never over, always alive: a hunger of the heart, an encounter; an act of trust in response to God’s faithfulness in Jesus.

Conclusion
One could go on. My faith comes to expression in how I live and so ethics are important. Because faith and reason, both grounded in God, do not finally contradict each other, we try to make sense of faith in words and creeds, within the community of faith, the church. Even so, doctrines are not really descriptions but signposts, holding us before the mystery. Nevertheless, the hunger is mine, the encounter is mine, and — above all — the trust is mine. On the Synodal Pathway, as we stumble towards our uncertain and certainly different future, the first step can only be such personal engagement with the faith, owned, struggled with, celebrated and lived by us all.