How To Fix Us

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  There’s only so much repair work that can be done on an object before you have to buy a new one.  Patching it together eventually does not work.  As kids, when we would get a hole in the knees of our school uniform pants, mom or grandma would patch it up.  But if the patch got a hole in it, or if the stitching kept coming undone, mom and dad would break down and buy new navy blue pants.  Or maybe you had something that was duct taped together, until the adhesive started to wear out, and you had to finally get a new whatever rather than just taping it up again and again.  
    When we talk about the human person and following Christ, we’re not talking about a simple repair.  We need a comprehensive overhaul.  We may think we just need a few tweaks here and there, but in reality, what Christ desires of His followers is not possible except by His grace.  In order for our righteousness to surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees, to live the deeper law that Christ gave in the Beatitudes, we can’t just muscle through ourselves.  The new law requires grace.  In order to exhibit the virtues St. Peter enumerates in the epistle, we cannot simply struggle hard enough in order to live that way.  We need Christ’s grace to transform us.
    When we talk about conversion, we often use the Greek word, metanoia.  That word comes from two Greek words, 𝜇𝜀𝜏𝛼, meaning change, and 𝜈𝜊𝜐𝜍, meaning mind.  But, perhaps better than mind is the idea of seeing the world differently.  Conversion, from the Latin words cum and versio, meaning to turn towards something, means that we see the world differently because we have turned ourselves towards Christ and have taken on His mind.  But it even goes beyond the intellect.  Conversion–metanoia–means that even our hearts are changed so that we re-direct our loves to the way that Christ loves.  
    And only when we love the way that Christ loves and see the way that Christ sees can return a blessing for a curse.  Only when we allow the grace of God to change us can we not only avoid murdering others, as the commandment prescribes, but also avoid hatred towards the other in our heart, the deeper meaning of the word “anger” that St. Matthew uses in the Gospel.  
    We don’t have it in this passage, but our Lord raises the bar for the sixth commandment as well as the fifth commandment.  Only when we allow the grace of God to change us so that we love as He loves can we not only avoid committing adultery and fornication, but we go deeper and avoid even using someone in our hearts and minds.  And for the eighth commandment, not only do we not swear by anything–not by heaven, not by Jerusalem, not by our head–but we let our yes mean yes and our no mean no.  We speak straightforwardly.
    Too often we try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and then get frustrated when we cannot live up to the standard that we want, or the standard to which Christ calls us.  But we have to recognize that we are broken, and that Christ alone can repair us.  This is not to say that we are totally depraved, as some Protestants hold.  God still made us good, and that goodness exists in us no matter what.  However, that goodness does not always operate in us because of sin and our draw towards it.  And the healing that we need, the repair, only comes by what Christ has done for us.  Only He can heal what has wounded us.  It would be like trying to heal our own compound fracture without having any medical knowledge beyond a basic grasp of the body.  We might get some things right, but we will never be able to heal ourselves as we need to be healed to be whole again without the help of the Divine Physician.
    And this should give us hope.  Our salvation does not rest on us alone.  We do have to cooperate in it, and Christ gives us many opportunities to work with Him in going to heaven, but if we could save ourselves, all that Christ did and taught would be wholly unnecessary, which means that Abraham would have been able to go to heaven without a redeemer.  But that would make the sacrifice of Christ unnecessary, at least for some, which would be cruel to make a Son go through if it were not truly necessary.
    This is the great battle between Christ and the Pharisees.  They complained about the Lord always spending time with sinners, but the sinners were the ones who knew they were broken and couldn’t fix themselves.  The Pharisees thought they were fine, that they could live the Old Law perfectly on their own, and so did not need a redeemer, which made many of them miss out on the salvation Christ was offering.  

    Like the first line of the Coldplay song, “Fix You,” says, we tried our best but we didn’t succeed.  We tried to fix ourselves, but it didn’t work.  We needed a healer, a Salvator, to use the Latin, to fix what sin had broken in us.  And that’s precisely what Christ came to do.  He came to fix us so that we could offer blessings when we are cursed, so that we could be compassionate, so that our lips would not speak deceit.  Christ came so that our hearts and minds could be changed not only to avoid the grave actions of sin, but even to change the heart whence those grave actions arose.  We cannot do it on our own.  We cannot repair ourselves enough to be prepared for heaven.  We need Christ to fix us.  Christ who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.   

Spiritual Sicknesses

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Many people, when hearing what the book of Leviticus said today in our first reading, have a very negative view of the rule that was set out when someone had some sort of skin disease.  Many shudder at the idea of a person being ostracized, sent away from the community, because of an illness which, in most cases, was beyond that person’s control.  But, even today there are some illnesses which cause separation from the community.  The community does not want to become infected, and so people are quarantined, or at least told to stay home.  We do not want sickness to be mingled with health.  We need a doctor to heal the person before they can resume their normal duties and be joined once more to the community.

In our Gospel today, Jesus, the Divine Physician, goes right into the middle of that illness to heal that person of their illness and restore them to the community.  Jesus does not condemn the law separating lepers from the greater community.  In fact, He even upholds the law that the leper was supposed to show himself to the priest and offer what Moses prescribed, fulfilling the law.  Jesus cures the man, thus eliminating the separation that the illness created.  Jesus wants to make us whole, and He goes into the very heart of our illness to do so, so that we can once more worship and be united with the community.

Besides physical illnesses, there are also spiritual illnesses.  These illnesses we call sin.  Now, it’s no longer popular for priests to talk about sin.  It’s no longer popular for people to hear about sin.  But it’s a reality in our lives.  It is an illness, and one that can kill our souls!  What kind of a doctor of souls would I be if I didn’t tell you about the current illnesses that are spreading?!?

Just like all illnesses weren’t leprosy and didn’t separate a person from the community, so not all sins separate us from sanctifying grace, the grace which saves us from eternal death.  In the first letter of St. John, we are told, “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not deadly.”  All sin is bad, but not all sin severs our relationship with God.  These may be sins like gossip, ill-thoughts against another, little white lies, etc.  We should not ignore these and pretend they have no effect on our spiritual health, any more than we should ignore small illnesses.  Sometimes, if not treated, they develop into or make us more susceptible to bigger illnesses.  So certainly we need to deal with them.  One way to deal with them is simply by receiving the Eucharist.  When we receive the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Jesus which saves us from sins, Jesus washes away our venial sins (St. Ignatius of Antioch calls the Eucharist the “medicine of immortality) and strengthens us to not commit those sins again.  Another way is by confessing them in the Sacrament of Penance.  When we confess venial sins, even if they have been previously forgiven through reception of the Eucharist, we are strengthened and receive more grace to avoid sin in the future.

But there are also sins which are deadly.  We also use the term mortal.  Mortal sins are the sins we commit that are gravely wrong (they are grave because they cause spiritual death), we know they are wrong, and we freely choose them anyway.  These sins, like murder, missing Mass on purpose, stealing, major lies, pornography, and unchastity with ourselves or another, etc., deprive us of God’s sanctifying grace, and sever our relationship with God.  We are cut off like the leper in the community.  

And because we are cut off from God, we cannot simply receive the Eucharist, the very Body and Blood of Jesus, and have our sins cleansed.  When we sin mortally, we tell God that we want no part of His rule in our life.  To receive the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin is uniting our sinful state, our deliberate rebellion against God, with God Himself in an act of sacrilege.  St. Paul clearly teaches this in chapter six of his first letter to the Corinthians.  He corrects those who are Christians but who are committing sins of immorality with prostitutes because they are joining prostitution to the Mystical Body of Christ.  St. Paul also says in chapter 10: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and also the cup of demons.  You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and of the table of demons.”  He also says in the following chapter, “A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.”  For that reason, the Church has held, from the time of the apostles, that no one who is conscience of grave sin is to present himself or herself for the Eucharist.  

But just like in the Gospel, Jesus wants to heal us.  He does not want us to be cut off.  In the Sacrament of Penance, with sorrow for our sins and an amendment to avoid those sins in the future, we cry out like the leper, “‘If you wish, you can make me clean.’”  And through the ministry of the priest and the prayer of absolution, Jesus also says as He did in today’s Gospel, “‘I do will it.  Be made clean.’”  Through the Sacrament of Penance, the ordinary way to have mortal sins forgiven, our rejection of God is healed, and God restores sanctifying grace to us, so that we can live forever.  We are returned not only to spiritual health, like the leper, but are also, like the leper, restored to full worship with the community.  God does not leave us in our sins, but seeks us out to heal us.  But He will not force His healing upon us.  Inspired by His grace, we have to respond and reach out for His help in the Sacrament of Penance.  And God heals us and strengthens us to avoid those sins in the future.  

And we can then proclaim to others how good God is to us!!  We can be like the leper who cannot contain, even though Jesus tells him to, the good news that God has healed us.  What a powerful witness to those who are afflicted with the disease of sin: to know that there’s a medicine which can heal them!  Right now I hear confessions every Saturday from 3:30-4:30 p.m. and by appointment.  What a great blessing it would be if I had to add another hour on a different day of the week to be able to handle all of the people coming to the Lord to be healed, either from small sins or big ones, and restoring those who are mortally ill to full health and the ability to receive the Eucharist.  Don’t doubt the extent of God’s mercy.  Don’t limit the exercise of His healing on your soul.  Celebrate God’s healing in the Sacrament of Penance.  Be made clean!