For Whom would we Give Up our Life?

Fourth Sunday of Lent

There are a few people, but probably only a few, for whom the average person would give up his or her life.  I think any parent (any good parent, anyway) would give up his or her life for the child.  Siblings sometimes would give up their life for each other.  But generally the list of people for whom another person would give up his or her life is pretty small.

That is what is so impressive about those who serve in the military, law enforcement, or fire departments: they have made a commitment to give up their lives for total strangers.  It is quite humbling for me riding along with our MSP Troopers and seeing them walk up to cars, many with guns in them, and even while they practice safe approaches to the vehicle to limit their chance of being attacked, it still has happened all too frequently that they are in a situation where they may have to lay down their life, not only for a family member or friend, but for the citizens who may not even know they exist.  

If we think about it, giving up our life for a stranger is maybe a little easier if that person is good, maybe what we consider a productive member of society.  But what our first and second reading remind us this weekend is that we weren’t good.  This is an important aspect of salvation history: God loved us and entered into covenants with us to give us life and happiness, but we never lived up to our end of the bargain.  In the Garden of Eden, before we even had sin, we disobeyed God.  God saved Noah and his family because they followed God, but not long after that, Noah’s sons messed things up again.  Abraham did pretty well, but he still had inherited the sin of Adam and Eve that we call original sin.  Moses received the Law, the Ten Commandments from God, and no sooner had God given the Law, then the people broke it.  Even Moses himself couldn’t enter the Promised Land because he had disobeyed God on their journey through the desert.  King Saul disobeyed God, so David was chosen, but even David committed murder to cover up his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba.  Solomon started worshipping foreign gods, even though he had built the temple in Jerusalem, because of the influence of his foreign wives, and most of the kings who followed him were just as evil.  And so on and so on.  No one, not even the prophets, were good enough to earn heaven.  We all were, as St. Paul said in the second reading, “dead in our transgressions.”

And that’s what makes the familiar line we hear in the Gospel so powerful.  It’s not simply a sign that people hold up at football games behind the goal posts.  “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  ‘Of course he did!’ we might say to ourselves.  We are so used to God dying for us, to save us from everlasting death and Hell, that we might be a little numb to the power that is in those words.  We might die for family or friends.  We may even die for a good person.  But Jesus died for those who were His enemies: those who worked against Him starting with Adam and Eve, those who clamored for His death in Jerusalem, and for us who have nailed Jesus to the cross each time we sin.  The power of what Jesus did comes from the fact that we were, before baptism, the enemies of God, working against God, happy to do our own thing, rather than follow God.  Even the most just man, because of original sin, was still an enemy of God who could not earn salvation.

How comfortable have so many of us become with the killing of God.  We take it as a matter of fact, and it is in the sense that it has happened.  But it should not have happened.  Jesus is the light of the world, and came not to condemn us but to save us, but we preferred darkness; and so we tried to snuff out the light.  But the light conquered our darkness, as light always does.  

Think of the person who troubles you the most; maybe you even hate that person.  That person has harmed you in a way you find unforgivable.  And now you have to die for that person tomorrow so that he or she can live.  Really think about it; what would be your reaction?  What would be your honest reaction?  Jesus’ reaction was love; not begrudgingly, not with caveats and conditions, not as one forced to do what is for the best, but not the best for Him.  Jesus died for us because He loved us.  He let us kill Him with our sins because He loved us.  We did not earn salvation, nor can we; “this is not from you; it is the gift of God.”  

The question is whether or not we will respond to God’s gift of salvation.  Will we choose the light, or do we prefer darkness?  Do we believe in Jesus, follow Him, and so find eternal life, or will we be condemned because we do not believe?  We are not worth dying for.  But Jesus died for us anyway.  Accept that love of God that died for you so that you may live.  

Putting Sin to Death

Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion

It might seem cruel of Jesus to say, as He did: “Whoever wishes to come after my must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”  Why does the path to Jesus have to go through pain and suffering?  Why does the path to Jesus have to go through death?  Is God sadistic?  Does He love seeing His children in pain?  What is it about following Jesus that the cruelest torture the Romans could imagine would be the image of being a disciple of Jesus?

God does not rejoice in the death of His children.  He is not a sadist.  Pain and suffering were not part of the plan.  But we chose to reject God, and through our sin, death entered the world.  While we have had original sin washed away from us in baptism, we still feel its lingering effects, like the cold winds of winter that try to keep spring from coming.  We still have the tendency to say no to God and yes to our disordered desires: eating or drinking too much; using our gift of sexuality not in accord with God’s Word; tearing others down by what we say; unforgiveness and vengeance in our hearts; power, greed, control.  

God had to put all of that, and more, to death, because as long as it lives, it could take over.  It had to die.  And so Jesus took all of our disordered desires upon Himself, and let them be killed in Him, on the cross, as He gasped for breath, desire for air competing with the excruciating pain of the nails in his body.  The death of sin became the opportunity for life in Christ.

God does not see sin as we do.  It is not simply a mistake, a bad choice, a wrong road that one goes down.  It is antithetical to who He is; a perversion; a warped way of living.  Sin is darkness to the light of holiness, and in the presence of the light, the darkness has no choice but to be destroyed.  There is no other way to deal with darkness.

Today as we venerate the cross, we have the opportunity to nail to the cross all the sins that we have committed.  As we come and genuflect or bow, and maybe kiss the cross, we bring with us the sins that led Jesus to a cross, to have to put to death every sin that was ever committed and will ever be committed.  As we come to venerate the cross we bring our darkness so that it can be put to death.  

This plain cross reminds us that there is no path to life except through it.  The only way to deal with sin is by killing it.  Bring all of your disordered desires, as I will bring mine, and let them die with Jesus.  Let darkness have its time today.  Let us keep watch, though, for tomorrow night, as darkness falls, light will have its eternity.

Freedom without Consequence

First Sunday of Lent

            This weekend is not just the first weekend of Lent, but also is the opening weekend for the movie “300: Rise of an Empire.”  I had seen the last “300” movie, and given it’s importance at Michigan State University (if I yelled out, “Spartans, what is your profession?” I know I would get a particular response), I thought I would see the sequel which deals with the battle between the rest of the Greeks and the Persians.  It was very bloody, and earned the R rating that it received.  However, at one point, and I don’t think this gives anything away, the Greek general is speaking with the leader of the Persian navy, who says to the Greek: “I can offer you freedom without consequence, without responsibility.”

           

That is the seductive lie that our first parents were told, and which they swallowed hook, line, and sinker.  Adam and Eve had paradise in the Garden of Eden.  They were truly free.  They wanted for nothing, and everything responded to their will, because they responded to the will of God.  Their only responsibility was to not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  But the serpent, the Devil, the Father of Lies, seduced Adam and Eve into believing that they could be God’s equal.  Satan convinced them that they could have freedom without responsibility or consequence, that they would be answerable to no one.  And so they ate.  And by Adam’s act of disobedience, death entered the world as the order that God planned for the world was disrupted.  Because Adam had disobeyed God, the plants and animals would no longer obey Adam and Eve; Adam and Eve’s body would no longer be subject to their mind and soul; and Adam and Eve would both work to dominate each other, rather than work in a loving partnership.  Adam and Even thought that they could have freedom without responsibility or consequence, and so sin and death entered the world.

            This is what St. Paul reminds us in our first reading when he says, “Through one man sin entered the world, and through sin, death.”  One man represented all of humanity.  And in his exercise of freedom, we all received the consequences.  This is what the church calls original sin: not that we are born with a personal sin, but we receive the consequences of the disobedience of our first parents with the perpetual desire on earth to misuse freedom; to pretend that we can have freedom without responsibility, without consequence.  Who here has not experienced that desire, that temptation?  Who here has never wanted to do whatever he or she wanted and not have to worry about what would happen later?  We are born under the illusion that such a reality is possible, that there are actions that never affect anyone else.

            And because Jesus shared our human nature in all things but sin, Satan wanted to try to get the Son of God to fall.  Satan wanted to seduce Jesus into believing that He could use His power any way He wanted to, without any responsibility or consequence.  “Command that these stones becomes loaves of bread”; “throw yourself down”; “prostrate yourself and worship me”; in other words: “do whatever you want to do.”  But Jesus, as the new head of the human race, the new Adam, succeeds where Adam failed.  Because He is the author of freedom, He knows that freedom always has responsibility, always has consequences, and that freedom truly comes not from doing whatever we want, but from doing what is right.  He knows that to do whatever we want only makes us slaves to our passions and to the Evil One, whereas controlling our passions and resisting sin allows us to have true freedom by living according to the order God originally created for us. 

And so He rebukes Satan and the temptations he offers, and not only begins to undue the shackles of slavery which had formerly bound us (the shackles which will be definitively broken by Jesus freely submitting to the consequence of sin, though He did not know sin, and dying on the cross), but also, as our preface will say, “by overturning the snares of the ancient serpent, taught us to cast out the leaven of malice, so that, celebrating worthily the Paschal Mystery, we might pass over at last to the eternal paschal feast.”   He teaches us that we can use our freedom well and not be seduced by a false view of freedom.

Each day we are faced with countless opportunities to use our freedom that God has given to us.  We can use our freedom poorly, thinking that freedom does not involve responsibility or consequences and means that we can do whatever we want.  And when we do that, we lock the shackles of slavery around our necks, wrists, and ankles, and hand the key over to the ancient serpent.  Or we can use our freedom well, and claim “the abundance of grace and…the gift of justification,” so that we are not slaves to our passions and sins, but can “reign in life through…Jesus Christ.”  May our penitential practices this Lent purify our understanding of freedom so that we may share in the eternal freedom of the children of God in heaven.

***************DURING THE RITE OF SENDING ONLY***************

My dear Catechumens, I want to address you now, in a specific way.  You have been preparing, coming to know Jesus and accept the invitation that He extends to all people: to receive the benefits of His freedom and be cleansed from original sin through baptism; to be strengthened to profess His Name to all people through confirmation; and to come into full union with Him through the reception of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.

My dear candidates, I also want to address you.  You are already one with us in baptism, which is no small thing, because you have been claimed for Christ already and washed clean of the stain of original sin.  You have also been preparing to know Jesus more deeply, and have been preparing to join the one Church of Christ, to receive that gift of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation by which you can spread the faith, and to come into full union with Jesus through the reception of His Body and Blood.

Catechumens and candidates, you are a witness to us of how Christ continues to call people into His Church, into the fullness of truth, and how to live freely.  You are a witness to the world that the lie that freedom is doing whatever you want is just that, a lie, and that true freedom only comes from life in Christ.  Thank you for your witness.  May you be upheld in that witness during this time of final preparation for the Easter mysteries and receive what Christ intends for each of you as you begin your new pilgrimage with us as full members of the Catholic Church.