A few days ago, while reading a book, I came across a fact, and a concept that derives from it, that struck a chord. The fact is that for most of their history before Jesus, the Jews did not believe in an afterlife. They had the concept of Sheol, but this was a place where people were neither rewarded nor punished; it was a kind of limbo, like the Greeks’ Hades. In Jesus’ time the Sadducees denied the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body after death. (see Mk 12, 18 – 27)
The concept that sticks out of this fact is what can be called disinterested faith.
Well, for most Jews it was not totally disinterested. Until about a century before Jesus, Jews followed the Law and prayed to God not because they wanted to go to heaven or to avoid going to hell. They believed that life stopped at death. There was no heaven and no hell. They did so to be rewarded here on earth. The wealthy were rich because God was rewarding them for being good. The poor and the sick were in that condition because they, or even their ancestors, had sinned.
Jesus clearly refuted this belief. He scandalized his disciples when he proclaimed that it is more difficult for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Mk 10,25). He also debunked the other side. When questioned about who had sinned to cause the blindness of the man blind from birth, Jesus replied that this had occurred to show the power of God (Jn 9, 1-12), in other words it was not due to anyone’s sin. On another occasion when eighteen men had died crushed by a falling tower, he stated that these men where no more sinners than others (Lk13, 4), implying that the accident had nothing to do with sin.
So why disinterested faith? Just think of the prophets. They were far from wealthy. They were often reviled, ostracized, and sometimes even killed. Not much of a reward, but they loved God anyway. They just wanted to do God’s will even if it cost them. Rather than seeking to please God for the sake of some present or future reward, for these people a life of virtue and love of God was an end in itself. That is an example of disinterested faith.
Why did it strike a chord? Because I do not have a disinterested faith. Do you?