Trust in God

Don’t worry, God is with us.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Jesus says that to us today in the Gospel with all the love and compassion that he had for those first disciples. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God. Have faith in me.”
Once I come across at the bottom of a poster some spectacular words. They read: "I am not afraid because I love." I thought to myself – this is a very powerful message.
Month of May is dedicated to the special devotion to our Mother Mary. What a person of faith Mary had to have been. Faith that somehow God would care for her in her pregnancy, in the childbirth, throughout her life, at the foot of the cross. Faith that his plan was working through this wonderful child of the common life. Faith that she was changing the diapers of the Son of God.

It can be difficult – indeed it is difficult in the midst of painful human experiences, even in the midst of human error – to hear these words, to understand their meaning and to embrace them as the Gospel intends.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

As Jesus spoke to his disciples in the Gospel of John, he was preparing them for his own death, an event also unimaginable and incomprehensible to them. “I am going to prepare a place for you,” he told them. “And then I shall come back to take you with me. You know the way.”

Jesus knew his disciples well enough to know that even the prediction of his passing would send them into a tailspin. “We do not know where you are going,” they protested. “How can we know the way?” His answer was simple. His answer was clear. “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.”

There was darkness ahead for Jesus. There was humiliation and unspeakable suffering in his future. We hear in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, “even though they found no charge against him that deserved death, they begged Pilate to have him executed.” Jesus was to face physical destruction. But for him, the moment of his greatest weakness and exposure to the effects of sin would become the moment of his greatest display of power. In the nakedness and shame of the cross, he clothed us all with redemption and fullness of life.


The Gospel is reassuring today. And, at the same time, it presents to us a call and a challenge that reaches into the most profound and very deepest parts of our being: “Have faith in God. Have faith in Me. Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

We need to remember, especially in difficult times, that faith, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, is “confident assurance about things we hope for and conviction about things we do not yet see.”

The night always gives way to the dawn. The darkness always gives way to the light. And, in our faith we know that the cross always gives way to the resurrection. Jesus is the way. And our hearts are not troubled because his way leads us who believe, who have faith in God and faith in Him, to a vision of something larger than ourselves, stronger than the apparent claims of our weakest moments. His way leads us to a suffering that cleanses us of sin and bathes us in grace. His way leads us from a confusion that pleads “We do not know where you are going,” to the clarity that responds “To the Father through Me.”
When we see things happening in the church or in our world the way they should not, it is not time to blame God for abandoning us to our own whims and caprices. No, God is always with us. It is rather a time for serious soul searching, a time for us as individuals and as a church to ask ourselves: How can we get back on God’s track? What is God saying to us in these events and crises? We should not let our hearts be troubled. He will provide…