Gospel Reflection Luke 6:36-38

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus makes very clear the benefits of us not trying to take the place of God. We should be unburdened from judging and condemnation. We should release from ourselves the yoke and strain of unforgiveness. 

The great sin of our first parents was to make themselves like God. The creature tries to usurp the place of the Creator. Or course, this futile overturning of the cosmic disorder cannot come to pass. We follow the path of Adam and Eve when we put ourselves in God’s place, choosing to whom we will be merciful and not, deciding who will be forgiven and who will be condemned. To act this way is the same type of disorder as the first sin. It is not within our purview to judge and condemn. 

Something amazing happens when we stop trying to be God. When we allow the cosmic order to its natural place, within God’s will and submission to His providential direction; we the creature derive great benefit. As we fall into place, as it were, we become more alive. We draw nearer to the source of life. Our heavenly Father wants to give us good gifts if only we will open ourselves up to receive them. 

An important footnote on the concept of withholding judgment; Jesus does not mean for us to suppress or ignore our apprehension and understanding of things that occur. He is not teaching a “go along to get along” message. Quite the contrary. For example, we could not work to stop injustices done to the poor or weak if we completely shut off our minds and hearts and adopted the apathetic agnosticism that our frequent post-modern interlocutor demands. A common retort to Church teaching is that we should not judge. Thus, when we speak out against immorality, Christians are told we are being hypocritical. “Your own Bible tells you not to judge!” Such a rhetorical move misses the point entirely, completely erasing Jesus’ message. 

We are not to judge with an unrighteous or unjust standard. We are not to put ourselves in the place of God and judge the eternal state of a person or condemn their soul. We are ever to act without compassion and mercy. But we are told to remain strong in our faith and to earnestly contend for the truth. Our very faith involves the sharp distinction between good and evil. We cannot submit to the Lordship of Christ and remain under the dominion of darkness. The very affirmation of Christianity is a rejection, and de facto judgment, about the world. We understand and affirm what the Church teaches about these things. Our interlocutors often have no problem judging the Nazis for committing heinous atrocities, quickly taking up the cause of social justice, and effectively judging what Christians are advocating (i.e. they are judging that we are judging, a doom loop of regress based on a fundamental misunderstanding). The contemporary rejection and fervent seizing on the matter of judgment is based on a very clever equivocation and selective, subjectivized reading of the text that bears little to no connection to the teaching of Jesus. 

Gospel Reflection Matthew 17:1-9

Today’s Gospel reading gives us St. Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration. To witness such an event must have been utterly breathtaking. St. Peter manages a response to what he sees and hears before him. Likewise, when we encounter the living God in a profound way, it provokes a response in us. We cannot encounter God and remain in our prior state. St. Peter also recognizes that it is good for him and the other disciples to be there. The frequent connotation of the word St. Matthew uses for 'good' in verse four is 'beautiful' or 'excellent in characteristic(s)'. 

It might seem that God the Father offers a rebuke, for there are cases where we see St. Peter tending to get ahead (or outside) of himself, to say the least. Yet, I think what we see happening here on the mount of transfiguration is the loving Father telling St. Peter and us what the right response is when we encounter Him. We are to listen and follow Jesus. While it is the right general response to want to do something. However, that thing we may be inclined to do, even if it seems right to us, may not be what God wants. It is easy for us to get off-kilter. Here the Father tells us exactly what we must do. In response to His giving us grace and mercy, as we encounter Him in prayer, service, fasting, worship, and so forth, is to continue to follow Jesus. To listen attentively to what the Son says to us. To fervently emulate the example of the Son.

Gospel Reflection Matthew 5:43-48

Today’s Gospel reading tells us that God “...makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” This is one of the hardest truths from Sacred Scripture for us to understand. We wonder why those who do evil are able to continue, given that God is perfectly Good and Just. God only does not stop their wicked deeds, He causes the sun to shine upon them and gives them rain for the harvest. 

As we explore this idea, it helps to remember that God is not limited in the goodness or grace He can give. There is not a fixed supply such that some people receive grace at the expense of others. We are also told elsewhere that the wicked and impenitent will pay the price for their deeds. That payment may not be required right now, but it will be extracted if they remain set against the ways of God. We further know that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance ad faith. If we keep in mind that justice and vengeance belong ultimately to God, that He is not limited in the love He can give, and that He wills the greatest good for all His creatures, we can better see why Jesus tells us to pray for our enemies and those who persecute us. 

The act of prayer is always transformative. We cannot enter the presence of God or encounter Him and remain unchanged. First and foremost, prayer changes us. For example, when we pray “thy will be done” we must bear in mind that the Father’s will is explicitly for us to be conformed to the image of the Son. We are asking God to change us. To make us more like Jesus who gave His life up to take away the sin of the world, and prayed for His enemies in the process. Jesus had (and still has today), many enemies. 

There is always great opposition to the light of Christ. Though the darkness shall not overcome the Light, the forces of darkness remain until one day they are wiped away. If Jesus has enemies, then we should expect to have enemies as His followers. It is spiritually deleterious to send back the same hate we receive. When we return hate for hate, violence for violence, we cease to remain in the light of Christ. It is easy to love those who love us back and to quickly adjust our views as the sands of life shift. 

Jesus asks us to draw strength from the divine power and go beyond what we are naturally capable of doing. To bless those who hurt and persecute us is indeed a supernatural act. We can only do this by walking with Christ, taking strength and encouragement from Him through the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Gospel Reflection Matthew 5:20-26

In Today’s Gospel, we again find justice as the central theme. Righteousness in the biblical sense has primarily to do with our ‘horizontal’ conduct, how we conduct ourselves toward others. It also carries with it a judicial standing or approval, which generally speaks to our condition of acceptance before God. What Jesus teaches us is that the latter conceptualization cannot be detached from the former. The way we are toward our fellow man has a direct correlation to our standing with God. In fact, I would argue that the standing we have with God is conditional upon our righteousness toward others. The readings from the prophet Ezekiel chapter 18 lend strong support to this idea. We cannot be ‘right with God’ unless we are ‘right with our brother’. 

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The first thing we hear from Jesus today is that our approval or standing must go beyond that of the scribes and Pharisees. We know from other Gospel readings that these groups were often targeted by Jesus for their hypocrisy; outwardly being pious yet spiritually distant from God. We cannot do what merely would appear righteous to the outside observer. Instead, we must have total alignment from the interior to the exterior. Jesus teaches us that it is not what is outside that defiles (makes us unclean) but what is inside us determines our being defiled. We then get several examples of what this means. These are not abstractions, either. We can easily remember times when we were perhaps violently angry with another person or when we wrote them off in our own minds (or told others) that someone was useless or foolish. We have seethed internally in anger at another person as we smiled at them. We have muttered under our breath or perhaps wished ill on someone we perceive as our rival or competitor. 

Jesus asks us to let go of these things. He wants to cleanse us and relieve us of these burdens. Most of the time, we burden ourselves by holding fast to the finite. We continually choose to see only a fixed pie, not enough to go around. We take an effectively Malthusian view of our lives. We want to hoard and ration. We can only care so much, we tell ourselves. There’s a limit to what I can tolerate, we repeat over and over. When we don’t actively and continually offload these burdens to the Lord in prayer, when we don’t receive the necessary infusions of grace through the sacraments, we find ourselves saddled with the weight of sin and the anxiety-provoking feeling of painting ourselves into a corner of finitude.

We need spiritual, emotional, and mental energy that cannot come from any finite, temporal source. We need the body and blood of Jesus to nourish us. We need to pray and unload our burdens to God in prayer. We need the cleansing of reconciliation. We need to hear things in music and song that elevate our minds to the heavenly realm. We need to fill our minds with good literature, poem, and Scripture. We need to habitually give of ourselves so that the other becomes a habit of mind. These practices, which are brought before our eyes constantly in the Lenten season, are how we can be righteous and avoid the pain of being imprisoned “until the last farthing.”

Gospel Reflection Matthew 7:7-12

In Today’s Gospel, Jesus reveals more of the Father’s will for us. Like most earthly Fathers, He is eager to give us good things. But He is capable of giving us things that are beyond what is possible for any creature to give another. First and foremost, God gives us the gift of ‘being’. Our very existence from moment to moment is given by God. To exist is not owed to us. We are radically contingent. This contingency can even be scary sometimes if we reflect deeply enough. It is possible, in principle, that we might not exist in the next moment.

Certainly, our earthly days are known to God and us. Yet, when we are born, we are given this gift on a permanent basis. Yet, I want to stress the gratuitous nature of our existence. The whole of the cosmos, all that is not God, is in the same state we are. From here, God wills that we actualize more of who we are made to be. We have these potentials for beatitude within us that manifest more of who God is the more they are actualized. The Father desires that we come to Him and ask for these things. This is, I think, bound up in the concept of seeking and knocking the Lord Jesus refers to in the opening verses today. We need to seek God and only Him for the eternal immutable truths and transcendent reality to which we are naturally drawn.

The Father may give us these good things in various ways, for God delights in utilizing secondary causes to bring about His desired effects. Further, we must remember that God is the only One able to give from pure love and from infinite abundance. Only He can give us the things we need for eternal life and happiness. 

Gospel Reflection Luke 11:29-32

Today’s Gospel presents what may sound to us like harsh words from Jesus. “This generation is an evil generation…” The same thing could be said about our generation today, and likely about every generation from Adam until today. The specific context of Jesus' comment here is the unbelieving hearts of those who were witnesses to the Son of God incarnate, demonstrating in word and power that He was God among us and the Messiah. To experience Christ when He walked the earth and demanded even more signs was the epitome of denial and stubbornness.

In our generation today, some claim that they do not believe in God because there is not enough evidence. Yet, when it comes down to brass tacks they probably would not believe in God if “copyright God” were stamped on every molecule under a microscope or drawn in cloud lettering in the sky. These signs would be explained away, and even more evidence desired. The noted atheist scientist Peter Akins once said that if wound up face to face with the Lord one day, say in an afterlife scenario, he would simply attribute it to insanity.

It is a source of consternation and befuddlement that two people can look at the same arguments and evidence and come to different conclusions. For example, how one can understand the demonstrations offered for the existence of God by St. Thomas and still conclude God does not exist. Or those who look at the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and still claim there was a conspiracy or group hallucination that brought about this belief. Surely, these people are rational. We may charitably think they approach these subjects with a reasonably open mind. Still, the frequent echo is more evidence. More reasons to believe. In a way, they are saying “God, if you are there, give us more to go on.”

From Jesus’ time until today, there is always a division among people about God and especially about the nature of Jesus. Aquinas says there is more than merely the intellect involved when it comes to the elements of faith (the existence of God not being one of them, but that is a different subject for another day). Since today’s Gospel concerns the reception of Jesus and His proclamation of the Kingdom, we can hover on the points of faith. To affirm Jesus as the Son of God incarnate involves the will as much as the intellect. The will must move us to believe beyond what is perfectly perceptible or what may be grasped by the intellect. Perhaps the most philosophical words in the New Testament are “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” In this state of honesty and humility, God reaches down to us and brings us across the chasm where the intellect cannot see. First, though, I think our will must be quieted. The work of the Holy Spirit does this. He can bring us to a state where we are able to see clearly what God asks of us in response to His grace and we can accept or reject His offer.

As Bishop Barron says, faith is not sub-rational. Faith is supra-rational. Faith gives us things to believe that we are not able to attain on our own. We cannot reason from effect to cause, or vice versa. We need help from somewhere beyond our purview. Thus, the contrast in response between the repentance of Nineveh and the hard-heartedness of the Israelites in Jesus’ audience. Nineveh is moved to repentance, and an act of faith in the God of Jonah – taking Him seriously. They do not demand Jonah perform more signs and wonders.

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Gospel Reflection Matthew 6:7-15

 In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus teaches us how to pray. We receive both a specific set of petitions we are to make our own and at the same time a pattern of how to approach our Heavenly Father with thanksgiving and petition.

Much has been said on the Our Father. What caught my attention today was that after the conclusion of the Our Father, Jesus emphasizes forgiving wrongs others have done to us as a dependent condition for receiving forgiveness from God. In a short span of four verses, three of them are about forgiveness.

Sin and justice can be challenging concepts. How do we ever get at a one-for-one relationship between the harm done and the recompense provided? Can we really render what is due to the other in these circumstances? How can we truly make things right with others in the sense that they are placed in the same position they were before as if the transgression never occurred? The scars remain. The memories live on, no matter how hard we suppress them. Likewise, it seems impossible to conceive that God can forgive and forget our sins. God is all-knowing; He knows the beginning from the end. Nothing catches Him by surprise.

If I steal a car from you, we can quantify the value of the car and the value of the lost time for being without it. I can give you this amount in cash. Justice has been done from a purely economic standpoint. But something else is still not right. You do not trust me anymore. You think of me differently. I have revealed a deep flaw in my character to you, such that you are concerned I might do it again or something worse. You no longer leave your car unlocked at night. You get a security system. You look at me and secretly wonder what evil I am devising.

When we move beyond the tangible and economic, we get to the deeper spiritual issue. The fracture in relationship. The break in community. Our social bond is severed. Yet somehow God asks you to forgive me of my trespass against you in the deepest sense. He asks you to send away (the Greek root for ‘forgive’) the sin I have committed against you. He asks you to release it. Somehow the great mystery of the infinite Triune God, the Son takes upon Himself the sin of the world (John 1:29). In this sending away of sin, nothing is left over.

Thinking of all the wrongs we have done, and the wrongs done to us, we might quickly realize how many transgressions we have yet to release. I believe this is sometimes because we do not fully trust in divine justice. We cannot see how some people could or should be forgiven for the pain they have caused. We can lose sight of how much we have been forgiven. We scoff at those who bring us this message from the Gospel because they have not been through what we have been through. “If only you knew my pain,” we think. But God does know your pain. The Lord Jesus suffered immeasurably on every level. And we do not forgive merely for the sake of keeping things copacetic or functional or economically balanced. We forgive because that is what God asks us to do. When we hold tightly to the sin others have committed against us, we are weighted down from ascending to holiness. When we forgive, we are most like Jesus Christ.

To release these burdens, only through the power of grace, allows us to be fully actual. The ‘how’ of this process is a great mystery. Yet, by the love and grace of God, it can be done. Some of the great saints have done this. Think of Pope St. John Paul II forgiving the man who tried to assassinate him. Think of the great Christian martyrs, from Polycarp to Thomas More. The Lord Jesus even said from the cross “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”