SENSUS FIDEI

Friday in the 9th Week of the Ordinary Time
Mk 12:35-37

Even in our days, there are people who question the divinity of Jesus. From the days of the priest-turned-heretic, Arius, until today, there are people who hold that Jesus is only human. Still others, believe that Jesus is the Son of God only in the sense that He was adopted by God and, thereby, divinized.

Jesus posed this question to the people in the Temple: “How can the scribes maintain that the Christ is the son of David?” His question was not meant to ridicule His human genealogy. The point He wanted to put across was that even David recognized his descendant, the Christ, as kyrios, meaning “Lord”. Courageously, Jesus was actually saying that He was the Messiah. And the people reacted rather unexpectedly: they were delighted, according to the evangelist.

While their religious leaders – who thought that they knew everything that Scripture says about the Messiah – were infuriated by the claim that Jesus made about Himself, the people were happy to know that He was actually the One they were waiting for to come. This shows that there are times when the leaders – religious and otherwise – can be wrong. In the teaching of the Catholic Church, there is what we call sensus fidei. Literally, sensus fidei means “sense of faith”. It is the inherent ability of the faithful to recognize what is congruent or incongruent to the Faith. In the reaction of the people to Jesus’ claim in the Gospel today, we have an early glimpse of sensus fidei. Church history records how many of what we now consider as part of the Church’s doctrine are actually fruits of this “sense of faith”.