This Sunday's Gospel
contains a number of ideas but they all can be
summarized in this apparently contradictory phrase:
"Have fear but do not be afraid." Jesus says: "Do
not be afraid of those who can kill the body but
cannot kill the soul; fear rather him who has the
power to make both the soul and the body perish in
Gehenna." We must not be afraid of, nor fear human
beings; we must fear God but not be afraid of him.
There is a difference between being afraid and
fearing and I would like to take this occasion to
try to understand why this is so and in what this
difference consists. Being afraid is a manifestation
of our fundamental instinct for preservation. It is
a reaction to a threat to our life, the response to
a real or perceived danger, whether this be the
greatest danger of all, death, or particular dangers
that threaten our tranquility, our physical safety,
or our affective world.
With respect to whether the dangers are real or
imagined, we say that someone is "justifiably" or
"unjustifiably" or "pathologically" afraid. Like
sicknesses, this worry can be acute or chronic. If
it is acute, it has to do with states determined by
situations of extraordinary danger. If I am about to
be hit by a car or I begin to feel the earth quake
under my feet, this is being acutely afraid. These
"scares" arise suddenly and without warning and
cease when the danger has passed, leaving, if
anything, just a bad memory. Being chronically
afraid is to be constantly in a state of
preoccupation, this state grows up with us from
birth or childhood and becomes part of our being,
and we end up developing an attachment to it. We
call such a state a complex or phobia:
claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and so on.
The Gospel helps to free us from all of these
worries and reveals their relative, non-absolute,
nature. There is something of ours that nothing and
no one in the world can truly take away from us or
damage: For believers it is the immortal soul; for
everyone it is the testimony of their own
conscience.
The fear of God is quite different from being
afraid. The fear of God must be learned: "Come, my
children, listen to me," a Psalm says, "I will teach
you the fear of the Lord" (33:12); being afraid, on
the other hand, does not need to be learned at
school; it overtakes us suddenly in the face of
danger; the things themselves bring about our being
afraid.
But the meaning itself of fearing God is different
from being afraid. It is a component of faith: It is
born from knowledge of who God is. It is the same
sentiment that we feel before some great spectacle
of nature. It is feeling small before something that
is immense; it is stupor, marvel mixed with
admiration. Beholding the miracle of the paralytic
who gets up on his feet and walks, the Gospel says,
"Everyone was in awe and praised God; filled with
fear they said: ‘Today we have seen wondrous
things'" (Luke 5:26). Fear is here simply another
name for stupor and praise.
This sort of fear is a companion of and allied to
love: It is the fear of offending the beloved that
we see in everyone who is truly in love, even in the
merely human realm. This fear is often called "the
beginning of wisdom" because it leads to making the
right choices in life. Indeed it is one of the seven
gifts of the Holy Spirit! (cf. Isaiah 11:2).
As always, the Gospel does not only illumine our
faith but it also helps us to understand the reality
of everyday life. Our time has been called "the age
of anxiety" (W.H. Auden). Anxiety, which is closely
related to being afraid, has become the sickness of
the century and it is, they say, one of the
principal causes of the large number of heart
attacks. This spread of anxiety seems connected with
the fact that, compared with the past, we have many
more forms of economic insurance, life insurance,
many more means of preventing illness and delaying
death.
The cause of this anxiety is the diminishing -- if
not the complete disappearance -- in our society of
the holy fear of God. "No one fears God anymore!" We
say this sometimes jokingly but it contains a tragic
truth. The more that the fear of God diminishes, the
more we become afraid of our fellow men!
It is easy to understand why this is the case.
Forgetting God, we place all our confidence in the
things of this world, that is, in the things that
Christ says "thieves can steal and moths consume" --
uncertain things that can disappear from one moment
to the next, that time (and moths!) inexorably
consume, things that everyone is after and which
therefore cause competition and rivalry (the famous
"mimetic desire" of which René Girard speaks),
things that need to be defended with clenched teeth
and, sometimes, with a gun in hand.
The decline in fear of God, rather than liberating
us from worry, gets us more entangled in worry. Look
at what happens in the relationship between children
and parents in our society. Fathers no longer fear
God and children no longer fear fathers! The fear of
God is reflected in and analogous to the reverential
fear of children for parents. The Bible continually
associates the two things. But does the lack of this
reverential fear for their parents make the children
and young people of today more free and
self-confident? We know well that the exact opposite
is true.
The way out of the crisis is to rediscover the
necessity and the beauty of the holy fear of God.
Jesus explains to us in the Gospel that we will hear
on Sunday that the constant companion of the fear of
God is confidence in God. "Are not two sparrows sold
for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the
ground without your Father's knowledge. Even all the
hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid;
you are worth more than many sparrows!"
God does not want us to be afraid of him but to have
confidence in him. It is the contrary of that
emperor who said: "Oderint dum metuant" -- "Let them
hate me so long as they are afraid of me!" Our
earthly fathers must imitate God; they must not make
us afraid of them but have confidence in them. It is
in this way that respect is nourished: admiration,
confidence, everything that falls under the name of
"holy fear."
