Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, La raccolta della manna. (From Wikimedia Commons)

On the Roman Catholic calendar, this Sunday was the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time. The readings today (Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15, Psalms 78:3-4, 23-24, 25, 54, Ephesians 4:17, 20-24, and John 6:24-35) concerned God’s gift to man: bread, literally to feed our bodies, and spiritually to feed our souls.

Deacon Doug Souza took today’s readings and related it to the father who is tempted to take time away from his family in order to provide for them: an extra job or overtime, for example. Yet as he says, “no amount of material goods can take the place of a father’s loving, attentive prescence at home.” He then talks about God, in that He suffers no such temptation: that no matter how much God provides for us, He’s always by our side because that’s what we need the most.

What interested me the most about today’s readings, however, wasn’t God’s provisions for us, or that He’d always be by my side. It’s important, but a part of the Gospel reading was especially interesting given the project of this blog:

So they said to him, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” So they said to him, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” (John 6:28-33)

Here, Jesus’s disciples request their own shibboleth for one who comes in the name of God: they imply that, since in Exodus, God gave bread to the Israelites, that might be a good indicator that a person should be believed in. Jesus explains that only God gives true nourishment, and as He says immediately after:

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” (John 6:35)

What I find fascinating about this is that the crowd doesn’t necessarily believe in Jesus unquestioningly: in fact, they want to make sure He’s on the level with the God they know. God provided manna from Heaven: will Jesus do the same? Surprisingly, Jesus accepts the contract and makes a pledge, in contrast to other times he’s been challenged. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gets angry when He’s tested:

Then the Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap him in speech. They sent their disciples to him, with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone’s opinion, for you do not regard a person’s status. Tell us, then, what is your opinion: Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not?” Knowing their malice, Jesus said, “Why are you testing me, you hypocrites?” (Matthew 22:15-18)

Why is it different, here? Prima facie, it seems God answers to those who have a noble intent: the disciples asking Jesus about the bread genuinely want to understand the signs, whereas the Pharisees were merely trying to entrap Him. God knows the minds of all, so Jesus responded accordingly. But going back farther into the Bible, there are two more examples of questioning or testing God: in Genesis, Abraham bargains with God (Genesis 18:16-33) regarding the fate of Sodom and Gommorah, and God responds as if this was normal.

Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat, Job (From Wikimedia Commons)

This seems to back up the case: Abraham was righteous, so God listened and responded pleasantly. But the other example throws a wrench into the works: God’s response to Job (Job 38-40). Like Abraham, Job was righteous (Job 1:1): even if he wasn’t as great as Abraham, he’s at least equal to or better than the disciples in John. So why does God respond so violently? In fact, God responds almost in the same manner Jesus does with the Pharisees: He gets angry, He asks why He’s being questioned, and answers the question with another question.

To add more to the confusion, Job was asking for the same thing the disciples were asking for: a sign that God’s there:

I cry to you, but you do not answer me; you stand off and look at me, then you turn upon me without mercy and with your strong hand you buffet me. You raise me up and drive me before the wind; I am tossed about by the tempest. Indeed I know you will turn me back in death to the destined place of everyone alive. Yet should not a hand be held out to help a wretched man in his calamity? (Job 30:20-24)

So what’s different about the disciples and Job?

The Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan toward Ephraim. When any of the fleeing Ephraimites said, “Let me pass,” the men of Gilead would say to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he answered, “No!” they would ask him to say “Shibboleth.” If he said “Sibboleth,” not being able to give the proper pronunciation, they would seize him and kill him at the fords of the Jordan. Thus forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell at that time.

A shibboleth is a litmus test: it’s used to determine if truly part of a group they say they belong to. It’s a cool word, but to understand why I chose the name instead of any of the other cool Biblical words, I need to tell a little story:

In the Beginning…

I was born and raised Roman Catholic. My father was unobservant, citing his years in Catholic school as the main impetus. My mother, however, was particularly stubborn about making sure my brother and I went to Church as much as possible and that we attended CCD (a Roman Catholic form of religious education). She also wanted to make sure we went through each of the Holy Sacraments all Roman Catholics go through as children: Reconciliation, First Communion, and Confirmation.

For most of my childhood, I was unquestioning about this process: I believed in God, I was a Catholic, and going to Church and CCD were just part of being a kid. I didn’t understand my friends who didn’t have to go to CCD or worse yet, didn’t believe in God. However, as I got older and entered my teenage years, I started to grow more and more apathetic. By the time I was ready to go through Confirmation, I was having my doubts. My mother, who wanted only the best for me, said I could drop out of Catholicism only after I went through Confirmation. I begrudgingly complied, and left the faith shortly thereafter.

It wasn’t because of any one event: I was a teenager, I thought I knew better, and arguments for atheism were compelling. Looking back, despite years of CCD, I don’t think I ever understood what I was supposed to believing in. I knew all the stories of the Bible, but I didn’t know why I should care or what it meant to be a Christian. It just seemed like a waste of time, and I, as an arrogant teenager, was proud to be able to lord over my friends who still believed how much I knew better than them.

Bob and Nick

It wasn’t for another 5 years before I seriously considered my faith again. I was a Philosophy major, which is a small enough major that you wind up taking the same classes with a core set of people. Within that group, there were two interesting people: Bob and Nick. Both had sharp minds, could argue articulately and cogently, and both were in the hardest analytical classes the college offered. Both were also devoutly Christian. It was paradoxical to me: how could two incredibly smart and rational people be so mistaken about a major part of their life?

The First Shibboleth

Statue of Pier Gerlofs Donia, known for his legendary strength and size and the invention of a famous shibboleth (From Wikipedia)

As the more outgoing of the two, I set out to get to know Bob first. We would walk and talk after class, and even though he was 3 years my senior, he was incredibly receptive to my admittedly primitive arguments about whatever we were talking about in class that day. In one of these walk-and-talks, the topic of Jesus’s credentials came up, and  I made a boneheaded comment about how you didn’t need to believe in the Crucifixion to get Jesus’s message: that he was a perfectly interesting philosopher in his own right.

Bob interrupted me and provided me with my first shibboleth: he told me it is impossible to be a follower of Christ if you don’t believe in the Crucifixion and subsequent resurrection. It wasn’t up for debate, and referenced John 3:16.

At this point in my life, all I knew about John 3:16 was that it was on placards crazy people brought to baseball games. When I got back to my dorm, I looked it up. It read:

For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Based on my background, I understood the premise of the contract God is providing, but I still didn’t understand the full implications of what it meant to truly believe in God just yet. However, for the first time in my life, someone made the distinction between Christians and non-Christians so painfully simple: if you believe God gave us Jesus as a sacrifice for our sins so that we could live forever, you were ostensibly Christian. Otherwise, you weren’t.

The Second Shibboleth

It took a full two more years before I got to know Nick. During that time, I had taken a few classes that analyzed the Bible, and they provided more clues as to what was really going on in it. I learned that Jesus wasn’t just some old version of Ghandi or a washed-out hippy: everything he did had an ulterior motive, and He was as sharp as a tack. I also started to understand how the Old Testament helped frame the New Testament: that you couldn’t just omit the Old Testament and still understand the works of Jesus.

In my junior year of college, I moved in with a few guys off campus. As luck would have it, one of those people was Nick. Nick was a man of many interests, and loved to talk about anything with anyone who’d listen. He was also acutely aware of his surpassing knowledge, and would regularly ask if  I knew what he was talking about. I suppose most would find that condescending: to me, I thought it was a great opportunity to get inside the mind of a true believer. He’d explain something, I’d interject, and he’d provide a cogent response to what I said. It was great.

It wasn’t until I met Nick that I knew someone who would explain, in painstaking detail, the theology and motivation behind being a Christian. In this, he provided the second shibboleth. It wasn’t enough to believe certain factoids about the life and times of Jesus: you needed to understand the whole picture; that there were subtleties to belief and faith that most people ignore or take for granted. To base one’s faith on a punch list of facts that you agree or disagree with was like reading the Cliff’s Notes version of the Bible: you get the gist, but you lose the meaning.

In order to help me understand the full meaning of what it was to be a Christian, Nick recommended I read two books by C.S. Lewis: The Four Loves and Mere Christianity. I didn’t think I was ready for a whole book advocating Christianity, so I opted to start with The Four Loves.

The book changed my life. It was as if C.S. Lewis wrote the book specifically for me. He got it: he understood the human condition, he understood what Friendship was, and he understood the problems associated with it. That’s not to say I liked it because I agreed with him: I liked it because he made sense. Throughout the book, he describes four different types of “loves”: affection, or need-based love, Friendship, Eros (romantic love), and divine love, or Charity. It is with the last section that I finally understood the full implications of John 3:16, the passage I looked up years before. It finally clicked.

A New Beginning

Nick eventually graduated, and I found myself in my last year of college feeling compelled to understand Christianity more, and what it meant to be a Christian: the shibboleths of faith. Everything I read and everyone I talked to about it added more and more weight to coming back to the faith. It no longer became a question of whether I’d believe, but how I’d come back. What were the terms? What parts of the faith were still inconsistent with what I believed?

I eventually did read Mere Christianity, where C.S. Lewis expanded on Nick’s teaching: Christianity isn’t something you can turn on and off at cocktail parties. Everything has to be framed within it. When I left college, I read the Bible, cover to cover. It provided the final background to understand the two shibboleths I’ve been given: who God is, where He is coming from, and what He expects of me. Since then, it’s been a slow process to rectify years of bad habits and faulty beliefs.

Afterword

I provide this lengthy exposition to help understand the Shibboleth’s meaning to me, and to provide the background for the motivation behind this blog. I hope to explore other tests of faith and what it really means to believe in God. Hopefully this blog can act as a point of inspiration for and discussion with others who have gone through or are going through a similar struggle of faith. There are no easy paths, and it’s always best to have a friend along the way.