A woman was staring at me on the bus. It was a bit disconcerting. She didn’t seem to blink. But I could tell she wasn’t really looking at me. I was a representation. That’s what you are when you wear a clerical collar in public. 

Finally, she opened her mouth: “Well, I wish I had your faith.” 

I find it helpful in these situations to respond with a question. “What is it that you think I have that you would like to have?” I asked her. “Certainty,” she replied. “You’re wrong,” I said, “I don’t have certainty. Certainty is the opposite of faith. If you’re certain about something, you don’t need to have faith in it.” 

She sat down next to me, and for the next dozen or so stops we had an anonymous conversation about the nature of the seventh fruit of the Spirit, faithfulness. 

Whatever it is that I have (and presumably most of you have), it’s clearly not something the majority of people in British society have today. If you go to church regularly you are in a minority of 5%. A cultural identification with Christianity persists more widely. But the 2021 census found that the proportion of the population who claim any kind of affiliation to Christianity has fallen below 50% for the first time. Western European society can’t even be compared to the unfaithful slave in the parable we have just heard who says, “My master is delayed in coming”. Our culture believes that there is no master, or rather that we are the masters, and the house is ours to use as we please. 

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes modern Western society as operating within what he calls the “immanent frame”. That is to say that we explain our reality and answer all the questions we believe to be important without reference to the transcendent or the supernatural. We no longer believe that extreme weather is caused by the wrath of God or illness by evil spirits. Most people seem to lead a contented life without praying or coming to church or opening the Bible. 

Scientific rationalists hubristically claim that they have taken away the need for such superstition and provided answers to all the meaningful questions. But I wonder, is it that modern society can now answer all the questions without faith, or is it that there are some questions we have just stopped asking? 

We never got round to discussing what prompted the desire for faith in the woman on the bus. But I suspect she had started asking questions to which she had not found ready answers. Why have I experienced this terrible loss? What is the point of my life? What truths can I live my life by? Where can I find peace? 

And, as I told her, she was wrong to think that I have neat comprehensive answers to these questions that provide me with spiritual certainty. But what I do have is a vocabulary and a grammar that can begin to construct some answers that resonate with my experience, my feelings, and my understanding of the world. 

To be a faithful person in late modern Western society is not to possess some piece of knowledge or insight that other people do not have. Much less is it to supplement or replace a scientific certainty with a spiritual certainty that eradicates doubt and ambiguity. 

Rather, to come to faith is to reach a point of rational frustration, a dissatisfaction with the norms of the immanent frame. And at that moment, faith does not flood in with its creeds and doctrines to give us comfortable and certain answers. At least, it shouldn’t. Faith is staying in that place of unknowing, while coming to believe that, at the limits of our understanding, we are met by truths that surpass full comprehension. But we are not left blind. The Bible, the Christian tradition, Christian teachers and friends all give a language to help us make sense of the work God is doing within us. In the words of Thomas Aquinas’s great hymn which we sang here last night, faith befriends our outward sense as we grow in understanding of God and God’s purposes for our lives. 

Good Friday is, for me, the ultimate point of rational frustration. It seems to go against everything we would imagine God to be if God were simply our projection. How can this be the God we need? A God who submits to human violence. A God who dies.  

And if this day is true and meaningful, then it brings us to multiple points of rational frustration about the shape of our lives. Why do we strive for security and affluence when God becomes so undefended and vulnerable? Why do we work so hard to justify ourselves and compete with others when God gives himself so utterly to redeem us? Why do we crave power when God is supremely manifest in total humility?  

The Czech philosopher and civil rights activist Jan Patočka used similar terms to rational frustration when he spoke of people who have been “shaken”. Patočka, who had an enduring interest in Christianity as he resisted Communist oppression, described the shaken as “those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about.”  

Good Friday is the day when the earth shakes, literally. We read in Matthew’s Gospel that as Jesus breathed his last, “the earth shook and the rocks were split.” All our certainties fall apart, all our neat answers prove inadequate. The immanent frame is no longer satisfactory. And Patočka spoke of a “solidarity of the shaken.” We are not alone in our rational frustration. There is a coming together, like Mary and John at the cross, of those who are on a new journey of understanding beyond their old comfortable answers.  

I think we are living in times when more and more people are becoming shaken – shaken by the turbulence of the global economy, shaken by the threat of war, shaken by the terrifying reality of dramatic ecological change. And the challenge for the Church is whether we can overcome our own institutional crises to draw these shaken people into a meaningful solidarity, communities that work for sustainability, for peace, and for compassionate interdependence. Because what meets us in our rational frustration is not a set of ideas, what meets us is the Kingdom of God. Faithfulness is not faithfulness to doctrine or beliefs, it is faithfulness to God’s ways with the world, the kingdom that is revealed by this king whose throne is the cross and whose crown is a crown of thorns. 

The parable of the faithful and unfaithful slaves is about openness to receiving that Kingdom and a willingness to play our part in bringing it about. The returning master is obviously the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. But the moral of the parable is not to live in a state of apocalyptic fervour. That’s a mistake made by many people in our times. The Pew Research Center found in 2022 that 39% of Americans believe that we are living in the End Times. 10% believe that Jesus will return within their lifetime. This causes many people to interpret the horrifying events of our age as welcome signs of Jesus’s return, and so fatalistically accept, even celebrate them. 

Living like this is to misinterpret the parable. The Venerable Bede observed that, “It is not numbered among the virtues of a good servant that he hoped the Lord would come quickly, but only that he ministered faithfully.” We are not called to believe the world will end tomorrow; we are called to be faithful to God’s Kingdom today. And that is a source of immense hope and resilience and as the future of our world looks less and less secure. There is a saying attributed to Martin Luther: “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, today I would plant a tree.” Keeping the faith in these faithless times is about staying true to the ways of the kingdom that has been revealed, regardless of whether cultural norms draw us towards complacency, or whether geopolitical and ecological events draw us towards despair. 

I didn’t have the time to say all of this to the woman on the bus as we sat together for those dozen or so stops. But I wanted her to understand that God hasn’t privileged me with some secret knowledge that makes my life easier than hers. I don’t have certainty, about God or about much else that’s going on in the world. But I live in a place of unknowing where God meets me in prayer and worship, in silence and in scripture, in the solidarity of the shaken and in the shakenness of creation. Attending to that, submitting to that, wrestling with it, delighting in it – this is what I believe faithfulness to be.