Fourth Sunday of Lent
When I was growing up, if we were flirting with trouble (mostly my sisters, because I was a perfect angel, of course!), my parents would say things like: if I have to pull this car over…; don’t you even think about it…; or other such tried and true methods. They were not cruel, it was just a very direct form of discipline. As all of us kids turned our pretty well, I’d say it worked. But my sister Amanda, the only one with kids right now, often uses the phrase, “Make good choices.” I’d call that the softer approach, but my nieces are also pretty well-behaved (at least, as far as I know), so that approach apparently can work, too!
One major aspect of raising children is to help them to understand the consequences of their actions. If you draw on the wall with crayons, you get time-out. If you touch the hot stove, you get burned. If you don’t do your homework, you don’t get to play outside (nowadays it’s more likely play video games or play on your phone). If you break curfew, you’re grounded. These small lessons about actions and consequences are meant to help young people understand that if we make good choices, there are, generally, good consequences. If we make bad choices, there are, generally, bad consequences.
We see that in the first reading today, and even, to an extent, in our Gospel. The Books of Chronicles of the Old Testament are the abridged versions of the Books of Kings, explaining the actions of the kings of Judah and Israel. The lesson at the end of the Second Book of Kings, our first reading today, is that the people made bad choices. They worshipped foreign gods, they mistreated the poor, they trusted earthly riches and powers more than God, they did not live as God’s Chosen People. God sent them messengers to tell them to make better choices, but they never listened. And what was the consequence? The Temple, the great house of God, was destroyed, and the people were exiled into Babylon. To echo Bishop Barron, there’s a sort of spiritual mathematics going on. If you add sin upon sin, you get death, like 2 + 2 = 4. Notice, that death doesn’t only come because of sin (we see that in other books of the Old Testament), just like 4 can be added to with a few different combinations. But certain actions have certain consequences, or, to put it in St. Paul’s words, “The wages of sin is death.”
Jesus, too, and John the Evangelist, give us this same idea in the Gospel. “Whoever believes in [Jesus] will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned.” Again, the spiritual mathematics of the importance of believing in Jesus. Or, later on, John continues that evil means darkness, whereas God means light. If we do evil things, we envelope ourselves in darkness. If we do good things, we are surrounded by light. This is part of the push to the New Evangelization. We who have received the light (which will be powerfully demonstrated at the Easter Vigil, as we enter into a dark church, at first only illumined by the Paschal Candle which represents Christ), have a responsibility to share it with others. And we should not prefer darkness to light, because otherwise we’ll find condemnation.
But this can tend us to the idea that, if we just check off the right boxes, then we’ll be good. It makes us the author of our salvation, rather than God. It pretends that we have what it takes to save ourselves. If that were so, certainly Abraham, or Moses, or Isaiah would have been in heaven as soon as they died. But they couldn’t be in heaven without Jesus' saving Death and Resurrection. Even those just men and women of the Old Testament couldn’t get to heaven on their own. They, and we, are saved by grace, by the gift of God; it is not earned.
But Fr. Anthony, you may be saying, you just got done saying that good choices lead to good consequences. Yes, I did. But all the good choices in the world couldn’t open up heaven. It was the consequence of the death of Jesus on the cross that allowed us to enter heaven. His good choice led to our good consequences. “God, who is rich in mercy,…” says St. Paul, “brought us to life with Christ….For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God.” Try getting to heaven without Jesus; it’s impossible. You might be able to get halfway there every day, but you’ll never get all the way there. Jesus is the only one who makes salvation possible. And He’s the only one who gives us what we need to accept that gift of salvation. If those in other religions are saved, the Church says, it’s still only because of Jesus. Moses does not save people (nor did he claim to). Mohammed does not save people. Buddha does not save people. Only Jesus does. And anyone who is saved, is saved only through the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus.
God invites us to salvation. He invites us to open the gift that He has prepared for us. But, as with any gift, we can choose whether or not to accept it. In that way, we’re back to actions and consequences. If we accept God’s free gift of salvation, heaven is for us. How do we know that we have accepted that gift? By the way we live our life; by the good choices we make in response to that gift, because of our love for God. We can’t earn it, but neither can we receive it without responding to it. God did not come to condemn us; He sent Jesus to save us. But the way that we can grab ahold of that salvation is to respond to the gift, to live as Jesus invites us; to make good choices when presented with the free gift of salvation.
