The Seriousness of Sin and the Greatest Miracle

Reflection for the 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, 26th Sept. '21.

The opening collect of today's Mass makes, what to many, would seem an extraordinary claim:

O God, who manifest your almighty power, above all by pardoning and showing mercy.

We are perhaps so used to the idea of God performing great miracles in the Bible - parting the Red Sea, raising the dead, healing all kinds of disease and sickness, rising from the dead - that we can forget that the greatest miracle he performs, is what he does on a daily basis throughout the world, forgiving sinners of their wrongdoing.

Partly, of course, this is because we are living in an age which has entirely forgotten the importance, or the seriousness of sin. St. Catherine of Genoa puts it this way:

[T]he sweet God loves with a pure love the creature that He has created, and has a hatred for nothing but sin, which is more opposed to Him than can be thought or imagined. 

Sin is so utterly opposed to the goodness of God that it requires an extraordinary action of His power to be able to forgive us and stay in relationship with us. The fact that He does it, gives us a fresh sense of the meaning of the words: God is love.

It is important, however, that we do try and interiorise the significance of that fact. For, if we do not, then what we will end up doing is, in our minds, taking away from the fulness of the glory of God. That is to say, if we regard sin as nothing so serious, then we must, of necessity, not regard God's holiness as anything so great, either. God's 'otherness', his utter-goodness, means that He can, by nature, have nothing to do with sin. But, if we carry on as if sin is no big thing for Him, then we must understand Him to be reasonably at home with sin, and perhaps not that holy, not that 'utter' in His goodness.

Thus, in a very real way, the hatred that we manifest for sin in our lives is a reflection of reverence, the worship that we have for God. That is to say, if I have a deep reverence for God, then my concern over my sins will be likewise deepened.

If we were unsure over how seriously we should take sin in our lives, the Gospel makes it really plain. 

[I]f your hand should cause you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter into life crippled, than to have two hands and go to hell, into the fire that cannot be put out. And if your foot should cause you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter into life lame, than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye should cause you to sin, tear it out; it is better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell where their worm does not die nor their fire go out.’

Our Lord's language here is firm, but it is because He - being God - can see the seriousness of human sin. Seeing it, He is urging us to take the means necessary, against it.

His words are not, obviously, directing us to mutilate ourselves - that would be a sin in itself. Our Lord is using the Rabbinical language of hyperbole to make a point. If your hand were causing you to sin, then you should cut it off; but, your hand isn't causing you to sin - it is your mind & heart where you choose what to do with your hand that caused you to sin. The problem is in your mind & heart, and it is there that the radical action needs to be taken.

This brings us back to the opening prayer.

O God, who manifest your almighty power, above all by pardoning and showing mercy; bestow your grace abundantly upon us and make those hastening to your promises heirs to the treasures of heaven.

Who are those hastening to [God's] promises?  Well, it needs to be understood in conjunction with the earlier clause - it is those receiving God's pardon and mercy. And who are they?

Well, if forgiving and showing mercy are the greatest manifestations of God's power, then the Confession box really is the room of miracles, par excellence. It is there, more than anywhere, that God's forgiveness is imparted. And it is there that radical action is taken to convert mind and heart. If your heart is causing you to sin, then the answer is to cut it open before Jesus in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and let Him there do His work of healing.

It is an extraordinary miracle of God's power, that you and I can, in spite of our sins, be heirs to the treasures of heaven. What a tragedy, if even knowing that, we do not hasten towards that promise, today.

When the Light for a Christian is the planet, and not Jesus Christ, something has gone wrong.

The BBC Sunday programme is rarely a place for hard-hitting analysis of topics of serious religious import. The programme, invariably, discusses its matter through a secular, liberal lens, and highlights various examples of religious people who seem to have adapted the demands of their faith in such a way as to fit in comfortably with the views of the progressive bien pensant. Treat it as such, and it provides a rather wonderful window on the way in which its editorial team would like all religious people to conduct themselves.

However, even I double-took, this week, hearing the interview with the Episcopalian Bishop Mark Strange. In the course of his interview, in which he was talking about how to encourage the government to make more climate change commitments in advance of COP26, he began using increasingly religious language, culminating in this extraordinary statement:

... and I think that people, having seen that darkness, might now want to be looking for the light; and the light, for me, is the planet, which is still ours, and beautiful, and which we're not destroying [at the moment].

Coming from a professed Christian, this seems to me to be an extraordinary statement. That his light in darkness would be anything or anyone other than Jesus Christ demonstrates that something has gone spiritually out of kilter - and this points us to a spiritual danger in the climate movement.  

The Catechism of the Catholic Church recognises the Christian imperative of caring for God's creation. 

Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things which would be in contempt of the Creator and would bring disastrous consequences for human beings and their environment. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §339)

As such, Catholics do have a moral duty to consider their role in adding to environmental damage through global warming. However, at the same time we need to recognise that this is a home made for us by God - it is not ours, we are mere stewards - and it is a temporary reality.  As Jesus Himself tells us "[h]eaven and earth shall pass away, but my words will not pass away" (Matthew 24.35, Mark 13.31, Luke 21.33). St Paul was conscious that as Christians "we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Cor. 4.18).

If our concern for the environment leads us to begin to find in it the source of human salvation, then we have gone wrong. For us, there is only one light in the darkness and it is Jesus Christ; and the salvation which He promises us is not to be found in this world.

Perhaps some key questions to examine the Christian nature of my environmental concern/activism are these:

Am I acting in response to the call of Jesus Christ? Is it causing me to grow in love of Him? Do I find in it a response to the call to deny myself, take up my Cross and follow Him? Am I acting out of concern for the poor? Are my actions, or those which I support, in accord with true justice and the moral law? Do they amount to loving my neighbour as myself? Am I looking to the future with hope? Do I see my work here as pointing towards heaven?

If the answers to the above questions are 'yes', then your climate activism is probably in a good, Christian place, and I would suggest it is likely nurturing your spiritual life. However, perhaps some of the dangers to look out for are:

• Climate activism which becomes angry or resentful towards others.
• Aggression in promoting my view.
• Hypocritical activism which demands big changes in societal lifestyles, before being willing to change my own.
• Adopting anti-life solutions to the climate, such as limiting birth through abortion, contraception or sterilisation.
• Adopting unjust attitudes to the legitimate desire of poorer nations to improve their people's lifestyles, even at the expense of climate targets.

In the end, there have been very few examples in history of human beings, en masse, coming together and putting aside vested interests for the sake of a greater good. My suspicion is that it is unlikely to occur now, either; and that we will have to accept the consequences of that failure. Welcome to the experience of living among fallen humanity.

However, for the Christian, even that bleak assessment should not be a cause for panic, less still an excuse for sin. We know - or we ought to - that God is in control of human history; and in that assurance, we are certain we will always have light in any darkness - it is Jesus Christ.

The full interview with the Most Rev. Mark Strange is available here, beginning at 1:40. The title image is used under a Creative Commons Licence, available here.

The deafness the Lord really desires to heal

Some years ago, when I was teaching a confirmation programme, I found myself doing a catch-up session for a couple of boys who could not attend one of the classes. These two both went to a very upmarket, public school, and so I was unsurprised when I found the address and was welcome into a really large, and well-appointed home to meet with the two Confirmandi. I was there to teach them about sin, but also about God's love - how God loves every person, completely and unconditionally. I was making this point when one of the boys asked how it can be that God loves everyone when there are so many poor people in the world?

The question was meant really genuinely and not loaded with any ill-will. However, it was a real eye-opener for me that even 2,000 years after the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and in a part of the world where Christianity has saturated our cultural inheritance, there is still, deeply embedded, the idea that wealth and fortune can be a primary sign of God's love and approval. I, of course, went on to explain that our Christian faith tells us just the opposite; that Jesus taught us "[b]lessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6.20). Pope Francis, indeed quoting Pope Benedict, puts it this way:

"Today and always, “the poor are the privileged recipients of the Gospel”, and the fact that it is freely preached to them is a sign of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish. We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor." (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 48)

In the same document, this time quoting St. John Paul II, Pope Francis adds:

"God shows the poor “his first mercy”. This divine preference has consequences for the faith life of all Christians, since we are called to have “this mind… which was in Jesus Christ” (Phil 2:5)." (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 198)

Yet, if God's preferential option for the poor seems obvious when we look to the Scriptures and the words of the Popes, perhaps when we look at the ordering of our society, even the society of the Church, the young man's question does not look quite so out-of-place. What efforts do we see among Christians to manifest God's priority for those of low degree? 

The letter of St. James, in our second reading, takes aim at Christians who fail to treat the poor with the dignity they deserve:

Now suppose a man comes into your synagogue, beautifully dressed and with a gold ring on, and at the same time a poor man comes in, in shabby clothes, and you take notice of the well-dressed man, and say, ‘Come this way to the best seats’; then you tell the poor man, ‘Stand over there’ or ‘You can sit on the floor by my foot-rest.’ Can’t you see that you have used two different standards in your mind, and turned yourselves into judges, and corrupt judges at that? (James 2.2-4)

The fact that St. James is writing this is important because he must have been responding to something which was a real problem in the Church. The New Testament writers were not seeking to address imaginary, hypothetical problems in their letters. Rather, they were responding to and correcting the challenges and the problems that they saw. This suggests that this introduction of a distinction between the well-dressed wealthy and the dirty, smelly poor was something which St. James had seen.

And is it not something we see in our world today? I would like to think that if a scruffy, 'gentleman of the road' turned up in our Church today; we'd all be competing to welcome him, as Christ; wanting to sit near him and speak to him after Mass... but I am not certain of it. And how would it be if a homeless person turned up at our work or our place of business? 

These are provocative questions, and they are not looking for easy answers - the problems of poverty, particularly extreme poverty, are nothing, if not complex. But, as Christians, we cannot simply look away because it is hard. 

Listen, my dear brothers: it was those who are poor according to the world that God chose, to be rich in faith and to be the heirs to the kingdom which he promised to those who love him. (James 2.5)   

It may be tempting to think that the solution is to find some sort of programme, or put together some sort of plan, to help people less well off than ourselves. However, that would be imprudent. In the Church there to too much 'go-go' and not enough 'come-come' (cf. Fulton Sheen). My intention, here, is not to drive people into activity, but to encourage thought and reflection. The extent to which we have come to have a care for the poor is a kind of test, which can show me how much I am listening to the Word; how much I have interiorised the teaching of Jesus.

In the Gospel, we read of Jesus' cure of a deaf man. There are people today who wonder why Jesus does not do those kinds of healings in our time. Are there not people with incurable deafness today, who are in as much need of a miracle as that man? And there are others who say that if they saw such miracles, then they would believe in Jesus.

But, the question is would they really? We saw a couple of weeks ago, how after having seen many of His miracles, the people walked away from Jesus when they found His teaching not to their liking. Miracles do not necessarily make people attentive to Jesus' Word.

The reality is that miracles do still happen - but they happen far more frequently in parts of the world where people are materially destitute and rich in faith - where they are open to the Word of God. And this is the fundamental answer to my young man's question. The real blessing, the real manifestation of God's love and preference is found in souls that are open to His Word. For this is real wealth - to be in possession of the eternal riches that come from knowing Jesus Christ, personally.

How familiar are you with Jesus' Word? What place do the Scriptures have in your life, and in mine? Are we attentive to His voice, or, are we afflicted with spiritual deafness?

If I had a pound for every time I have been told, even by Christians, that Jesus thinks something flat contrary to what He says in the Gospel, I would be a very wealthy priest. And I can only conclude that the Christians who say such things are unfamiliar with the New Testament; that they have not sufficiently allowed themselves to hear the Word of God; that their hearts have remained deaf to the voice of Jesus Christ.

We are so privileged, today, that the Scriptures are available in so many different forms: books in every language, audiobooks, ebooks, braille. We really do have no excuse for not knowing the living Word of God, and if we are serious about following Christ we need to make it a daily part of our experience. For, what happens when we do, is that it begins to go down deep inside us. His Word sinks down into our subconscious and becomes within us a fountain of spiritual wisdom. It changes us, heals us of our spiritual deafness and stimulates us to spiritual growth. 

• We begin to see sin as Jesus sees it - a destructive force, sapping our inner life. 
• The desire within us to love God grows.
• Our hunger for the sacraments increases, as we can see more clearly our need for God.
• And finally, our love for the poor begins to show through, as we become sensitive to the place that they have in His heart.

In the words of St. Josemaria Escriva:

How I wish your bearing and conversation were such that, on seeing or hearing you, people would say: This man reads the life of Jesus Christ. (The Way, #2)

Would that that be true of you and me, brothers and sisters; then truly we could say that Jesus has done miracles again in our day - for ears of the spiritually deaf then have become unsealed, and the dumb begun to speak.

[Image: Christ healing a deaf and dumb man, Domenico Maggiotto (Italian, 1713–1794)]