Standing on the giants of faith

ON the day I graduated, I vividly remember thinking that I was done with slaving over old books and that with hood and gown I was ready for everything that life would throw my way. It is a strange thing to realise in later life that we know so much less than we did in our youth! Of course, graduation was just the beginning and, like most folk, I have learned much more at the university of life than I ever learned in the hallowed halls.

There is learning; there is even learning to learn; but there is nothing to equal what we learn on the journey and what we learn from those with whom we share the journey.

Each succeeding generation is truly blessed if it realises the advantage of having learned from those who have gone before. It was Sir Isaac Newton, who said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. This is just as true in the world of spiritual development as it is in any other discipline.

Chapter 11 of the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews contains a section that for some reason makes the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Some people think it is just a list of names but, in fact, it is a description of past heroes of faith who endured; but who never saw the completed work or who never reached the pinnacle they sought. It culminates with these words: And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise.

It is an admission that the story is never fully completed, the race never fully run by one generation, but that those who have gone before are like spectators in a great gallery looking on to see what their successors make of their legacy. Nothing, in fact, speaks more of eternity or of some sense of everlasting destiny than the continuum that connects us to the past.

That said, nothing in the great narrative of faith makes us a past-preservation society. We may be privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants, but we need to take what they taught us and reframe it so that it speaks with relevance into the confusion and challenges of our time and place. The heroes of the past are remembered because they spoke to the urgent needs and injustices of their time and place. In succession it falls to us in our turn to take the substance of our faith and make it relevant and accessible in the context we now find ourselves.

“Each succeeding generation is truly blessed if it realises the advantage of having learned from those who have gone before.

There is a paradox in this – for at one level we exist in an atmosphere where professing a faith in God is perhaps more counter cultural than ever before, maybe even infra dig or anti-scientific. While at one and the same time nothing is more relevant in society today than the values and the beliefs that lie at the heart of a deep faith in God.

In the economy of faith, the poor, not the mighty appear first on the balance sheet. Violence is rejected as the way to establish power and authority. Truth and justice are sacred as is the created order. God is not distant and disinterested but gentle and compassionate - suffering alongside those who suffer. That’s the message of Jesus and if you tell that story you can add your name to the list of the faithful.

This article appears in the March 2021 Issue of Life and Work

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