Facing The Barriers To Our Faith
In my years of trying to grow in faith, and to help others to do the same, I have observed that we often run into barriers. Our faith in God’s love and mercy goes only so far and no further. These barriers to our faith come in many different forms.
Sometimes our faith runs into the barrier of someone else’s opinions or beliefs about God. We come across a person – or a group of people – who are unable or unwilling to accept or love certain people, and they convince us that God is also unable to accept or love these people. In the gospel story of Jesus and the adulterous woman (John 8:3-11), Jesus shows us that God’s love and mercy are not limited by the opinions of a group of people – or even by their laws.
Sometimes our faith runs into the barriers of our own life experiences. Because we feel anger or revulsion toward people who have hurt us or people whom we don’t understand or even fear, we set the same limits on God’s love. Another, more common way of saying this is that “God hates all the same people we do.” When Jesus said, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” He was encouraging us to love beyond divisions and battle lines. In each gospel story, as Jesus extends God’s love and mercy to more and more people, He is showing us a more expansive view of God’s love than we are able to see with our own limited perspectives.
Another common barrier to faith is ignorance. I am not using this as a derogatory term that applies only to certain people. Every human being, no matter how well educated, is still more ignorant of life than knowledgeable. That is to say that all of us don’t know more than we know about reality. Our understanding of the interior workings of other people’s thoughts and feelings, and the reality of their life experiences is extremely limited. But just because we are unable to understand what motivates people or what lies behind their speech or actions does not mean that God does not understand. God, who is all-knowing, is never blinded by ignorance.
When we hear scripture stories from the Old Testament, we frequently hear about a God whose love is limited by disapproval, disappointment and even wrath – which are all limiting human qualities. This God destroys people who don’t measure up to His standards by sending natural disasters (the flood in Noah), compels people to believe in Him by cursing them and their children (the plagues of Egypt) and tests the faith of His children by the amount of suffering they can endure (the Book of Job).
In these passages, we are seeing a perspective of God through the limited experiences of people who had never met Him face to face. They lived in primitive societies in a cruel world, without medical care or pain relief – a world where children died frequently and where daily life was a painful struggle for survival. They could only see God at work in the limited context of their personal experiences of suffering and in the unfairness of their lives. Their faith in God’s love extended only as far as the next natural disaster or disease that struck them or their loved ones.
When Jesus entered the story of life, He offered us a new perspective of God, which we call the “New Testament.” It did not, in any way, cancel out the Old Testament, which was the old way of seeing God, but it offered a radically different vision. This God did not cause suffering but went to great lengths to alleviate it – healing the sick, the blind, the lame and the lepers. This God did not compel belief through punishment but encouraged it with patience and understanding. This God did not send suffering upon people to test their faith in His love but suffered Himself to prove it.
When Jesus died on the cross, the final barriers to our faith in God’s love were meant to be destroyed forever; and yet, each time we refuse to love and accept another person, we resurrect them.
