Justice and Mercy

 Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
    

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  The saints are often known for pithy quotes that make one think, or sometimes chuckle.  For example, St. Theresa of Avila is quoted as saying to the Lord, “If this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder you have so few!”  Or St. John XXIII, who had a particularly good sense of humor, would say to God each night before he went to bed, something to the effect of “Dear Lord, it’s your Church; you take care of it.  I’m going to bed.”  Or St. Theresa of Calcutta, who said, “I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle.  I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”    I bet we all can or have once had the same feeling.
    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.

    There is a small chapel on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the city of Jerusalem from the west, called Dominus Flevit, which, for those whose Latin isn’t that sharp, means The Lord Wept.  It’s called that because it is the place (or at least it’s around the place) where today’s Gospel took place and the Lord wept over Jerusalem.  It’s one of my favorite chapels, because as you attend Mass, you see the present-day city of Jerusalem.  But you see it through a wrought-iron image that includes a cross and a host over a chalice.  Outside of pandemics, I would guess that chapel is used every day.  It’s a great reminder for us that the Mass is the prayer of reconciliation of Jesus to the Father, pleading for, not just Jerusalem, but the world, which should be seen through the mystery of the Eucharist.  May our hearts be moved daily to show the mercy of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Actions & Consequences and A Freely-Given Gift

 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.