Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
St. Paul reminds us today that “God is faithful and will not let [us] be tried beyond [our] strength.” This is a good thing to remember in our day-to-day life. We do not have to give in to our temptations; we do not have to sin. God gives us what the scholastics called sufficient grace, or the power of God which is required to say no to temptation. Certainly, venial sins may pop up which are simply due to weakness of our character or pre-dispositions, but when it comes to knowingly being tempted to commit a venial or a mortal sin, we do not have to give in to the temptation and act contrary to God’s will.
But how often do we call upon that grace? How often do we call out to God to save us in time of temptation? Or how often do we rebuke the temptation as having no power over us? In our daily temptations, we can turn to the Lord, and then rebuke, mentally or verbally, that temptation as not being from God. Sometimes out-loud is especially effective, because it gets us out of our head.
The other option, giving in to temptation, leads to consequences. It’s a kind of spiritual law of physics. Just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so in the spiritual life, for every sin to which we acquiesce, there are consequences with which we might have to deal. It is true that sometimes God can withhold that consequence, for a time or for ever, but He can also let the consequence of sin (which is death) affect us.
St. Paul mentions that in his epistle as well. He mentions the fall of the twenty-three thousand as a consequence of immorality, or those who died by serpents on the way to the Promised Land. And in our Gospel, we hear our Lord prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem, because the city did not recognize the time of its visitation.
We tend to look at these things as punishments. We think that God is striking this person or that person down because of evil. But, from other parts of the Gospel, it’s not quite that simple. Our Lord himself, when talking about the tower that fell, or those who were killed by Pilate, argued that they were no more guilty than others. Only God knows how, why, and when to allow the consequences of sin to catch up with a person or a group of persons. And His patience is always for the purpose of allowing for conversion, as St. Peter says in his second epistle.
There’s a rather horrible contemporary hymn that was written, and which was very popular in my first assignment, called “The Canticle of the Turning.” It’s a kind of very, very loose paraphrase of the Magnificat written to the melody of an Irish bar song (sort of the example of everything wrong with contemporary hymnody). The refrain states, “My heart shall sing of the day you bring / Let the fires of your justice burn.” I don’t know about you, but if I have the choice between God’s mercy and God’s justice, I will take God’s mercy every day, and twice on Sundays, as the saying goes.
But what we want to receive, we need to give to and desire for others. Our Lord’s teaching on loving our enemies is one of the tougher teachings of the Gospel. It’s easy to immediately want what we consider to be justice, for the other person to get their just desserts. How often when I am driving do I see a car run a red light, and I opine, sometimes out-loud, that I hope that there’s a cop around to pull them over. I can tell you it’s not so much because I’m concerned about my own safety or the safety of others that I want that person pulled over (which would be fine), but because I want that drive to be punished for breaking the rules, which I strive so hard to follow. If we want to receive mercy, we need to show mercy. If we want others to have Divine Justice, then we need to be prepared for it to fall upon us as well.
