Crisis of Faith/Crisis of Love

 by Fr. Thomas Keating

Chapter 3

The Feeling of God's Absence

The gospels tell us both in plain language and through symbolic events how the life of grace which we have received in Baptism grows up from infancy to adulthood. The cure of the son of the royal official and the cure of the centurion’s servant are two examples of this symbolic method of teaching. They show us the dispositions of two people with different degrees of faith and how Jesus dealt with them according to the degree of faith which each one possessed. Let us look at the incidents again.

The story of the cure of the son of the royal official opens with these words: “He came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had changed the water into wine.”

That introduces still another incident-the changing of water into wine. Why does John mention the first miracle of Jesus, as he recounts the second?

If you recall that incident, there was a problem over the wine at the wedding feast. The wine was running out and Mary, the mother of Jesus, was concerned. She spoke to Jesus and after some hesitation he changed an enormous amount of water into wine.

This is a most symbolic incident in John’s gospel and the point of departure from all the other miracles. According to St. Augustine, the water symbolized the Old Law, and the wine the New. The gospel is the new wine, the grace of Christ, which has come to us at the request of the Mother of Jesus.

Now the changing of the water into wine is not the changing of water into better water. It is the changing of one substance into another, into something quite different. And that is precisely the point of this second miracle, and why John recalls the first. What actually happened in this incident is that a man is really changed from something he was, which was very ordinary, into something quite new, which was very good. Christ has come, the miracle of Cana tells us, to transform us-the human creature into something greater-at the price of ceasing to be what we were before.

“So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had changed the water into wine.” Now we are given a picture of the son of a certain royal official who is lying in bed in Capernaum with a high fever. His anxious father, hearing that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, goes out to meet Jesus and begs him to come down and heal his little boy, whom he believed to be on the point of death.

“If you do not see striking exhibitions of power,” Jesus said to him, “you will not believe.” This was certainly a rebuke. There is a great deal of irony in those words, “Exhibitions of power.” You almost get the impression that Jesus despises his own miracles. They are the dreadful necessity for people who will not come around and believe as they should. At this time, there is unquestionably, in the back of his mind, the plan of changing this man’s weak faith into something new, living, and strong. It is a rebuff, there is no doubt about that. Jesus underlines exactly what is inadequate in this man’s petition: it lacks faith.

But Jesus, by seeming to repulse his request, increases this man’s desire. And so the man pleads, “Come down, sir, before my child dies!”

At this Jesus assures him, “Go, your son is safe and sound.”

“The man had faith in the worked Jesus had spoken and went his way.” It had not occurred to him before that moment that Jesus could heal his son without being there.

The withdrawal of God’s felt presence is meant to increase our faith, and without the withdrawal of that sensible presence we cannot but remain on this shallow level exemplified by the royal official.

I wonder what this man was thinking about while he was returning home. He had faith in Jesus’ word for the first time in his life. Up that moment he had confidence only in the power of Jesus as a wonder worker. Now he had faith in his omnipresence. He believed in his divinity.

But faith in the divinity of Jesus is attained at the price of the loss of his physical presence. We can well imagine that on his way home-it was a long night in which he hung on to faith in Jesus whom he had come to believe was God.

Mary told the waiters at the wedding feast of Cana, “Do whatever he tells you.” This man was carrying out the same injunction. The result was that his faith was changed from water into wine.

He was still on the road when his servants met him; no doubt they were running to meet him. They called out to him, “Your son is safe and sound!”

What a moment that must have been for this poor man! He experienced the inward leap which comes to everyone who realizes that he has passed through a profound spiritual crises successfully. He had struggled, believed, hoped. It was a long and painful trial, but suddenly it is taken away. Everything is okay. He made it! And the inward satisfaction comes, one which is superior to any other kind of satisfaction: the joy of knowing that one has wound up, perhaps for the first time in one’s life, on God’s side.

The gospels are rightly compared to wine. They contain real joys which leap up inwardly in one’s inmost being like the sweetness of wine, or even like the exhilaration of too much wine.

In the trill of having believed and of having found out that his hope was not misplaced, a flood of relief swept over the royal official. He was convinced that Jesus was truly God. His whole family believed. His own faith bubbled over on everybody else at home. No doubt there was a great deal of rejoicing, of hugging and kissing and weeping for joy.

In our own spiritual growing up process we cannot escape the crisis of faith. This incident clearly teaches us that it is not merely a rebuke when Jesus seems to push us against the wall and to remove the props which we feel are necessary for our growth. It is rather a call to the transformation of our weakness, a call to union with him, a call to “launch out into the deep.”

The great pity is that we often fail to meet this challenge. We bog down in our demands for Christ’s felt presence or for other props to our faith. If we would allow them to go and believe in his word alone, in his divinity, we would experience the transformation of our faith, the fruit of which is a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit, symbolized in John’s gospel by the wine. Remember that the Holy Spirit is a spirit and cannot be attained by means of feeling or reasoning. By allowing the former relationship to be taken away-or to be torn away-we make it possible to the Spirit to transform our faith into the abiding awareness of God’s presence.

More information can be obtained by reading the book Crisis of Faith/Crisis of Love by Fr. Thomas Keating.  It is offered in our bookstore.