The faith intelligent !

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your might." Mark 12.30

When Jesus is asked what the first commandment is, he responds by quoting the "Shama Israel" from (Deuteronomy 6.5) ; text that the Jews knew perfectly. But here, Jesus adds a word to the text of Deuteronomy, it is the word "thought". Jesus makes a very important connection between the need to love God and the seat of our thoughts.

It is as if Jesus wanted to emphasize that a true love is not just a blind love, but rather a well-thought, reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent love.

"Have a wise and intelligent faith !"

Many people think that to love God, you have to give up thinking by yourself, that faith and intelligence can not go together. Jesus denies this conception of faith. He emphasizes that we do not have to sacrifice our intelligence in the name of faith.

To this notion of blind obedience required by law, the Lord adds a new dimension : intelligence. For Moses, wisdom and intelligence were in the practice of the law : "You will observe them, and you will put them into practice, for that will be your wisdom and your intelligence..." Deuteronomy 4.6 Jesus invites us to to go further than blind obedience. He invites us to enter into weighed, thoughtful, intelligent obedience.

To love God is not reserved for the gullible, the ignorant, who is told what they must believe and do, to prove that they love God. Well-thought faith has nothing to fear from advances in science, philosophy, research. On the contrary, our love for God can only be rooted more deeply, the more we penetrate in the discovery of his infinite intelligence. "Our Lord is great, powerful by his strength, his intelligence is infinite." Psalm 147: 5 Having been created in the image of God, we are called to have a wise and intelligent faith.

Jesus invites everyone to be responsible for his faith, and he asks each believer to think for himself about the reasons for his faith.

My prayer on this day

Thank you Lord for inviting me to love you with all my being and therefore with my intelligence. Sometimes I ask myself questions without answer, but you like to see me trying to understand, and not to be satisfied with the explanations.

You do not ask me to be gullible, but to believe intelligently. Amen !

Paul Calzada

Source (The Thought of the Day)