Sunday Gospel Reflection, September 13, 2020: Forgive your neighbor's injustice...

Forgive your neighbor’s injustice…

Why is it so difficult to show mercy to another?

  The Book of Sirach is full of wisdom sayings, maxims that were intended to help the people of Israel espouse right conduct and build community in the context of a faithful relationship with God.  And so it is not surprising to find advice on dealing with anger and sin:  when we enter into relationship with the Lord, can we live in a state of anger?  Is anger not precisely the contradiction of the love we are called to?  Sirach preaches mercy instead:  Forgive your neighbor’s injustice, he says, and do not refuse mercy to another like yourself.  And if we should sin, we are called to stand before God and request that he forgive us as well.  Psalm 103 assures us that our God is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion, precisely because God desires relationship with us.  God’s capacity for forgiveness exceeds our own; indeed, it is limitless.

  Jesus will expound upon the limitless mercy of God in his parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew’s Gospel.  Although the man’s master forgives him his entire debt because the servant begged him to, that same servant shows no mercy to those who are in debt to him:  he mercilessly has his fellow servant put in prison until he pays back his debt.  To truly experience the mercy of God, Jesus is saying, we must know our own need for that mercy – we must be able to embrace our own brokenness in order to show compassion to our neighbor.  Such recognition of our own need for mercy is essential to a shared life in community; it is a recognition of our own need for change, an awareness that Christ died to pay the debt for all humankind, for all time.  What good is Christ’s sacrifice if it does not inspire mercy and compassion from our hearts?  If we are baptized into a life in Christ, if we live for the Lord, as Paul tells the Romans, then we need to be ever conscious of how we are connected to the Body to which we belong, for our identity flows from that Body.

  What kind of community are we creating if we cannot forgive?  How can we create a place of mercy in our heart where God can be celebrated if we are unable to show mercy to another?  How can there be mercy for us if there is no mercy for our neighbor?  We all stand in a similar place of brokenness, before God and before one another.  The Lord asks us to recognize the limitations of our neighbors and to be mindful of the unity he espouses, building community and relationship through the forgiveness and mercy he modeled for all.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, February 23, 2020: Love your enemies...

Love your enemies…

How do we live out holiness in the context of community?

  Already in the Torah, God is preoccupied with the holiness of community.  In the Book of Leviticus, God instructs Moses to tell the whole Israelite community that they shall not bear hatred for their brother or their sister in their heart.  Instead, he says, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  To follow the precepts of the Lord, to participate in the life he calls you to, is to be holy, and these particular precepts tie us to our community in the most significant of ways.  God calls us to a holiness firmly grounded in the context of community.  In Psalm 103, the psalmist understands all of the blessings he has received – pardon, healing, redemption, kindness, compassion, mercy and more – within the context of community.  To know that God loves us and blesses us allows us to love God and to love all:  this is the essence of community.

  If Leviticus says we are to find holiness in the context of each other, then Paul’s statement to the Corinthians – you are the temple of God and the Spirit of God dwells in you – explicitly equates the people with the body as a whole; to destroy the temple would be to destroy the bonds of community.  And our identity comes from that context of community:  community belongs to Christ and Christ to God.  It’s not up to one or the other to consider himself wise, but for all to belong to each other, even those who seem to fall outside the limits of what we define as our community.  If we follow the dictums of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, we are to love our neighbors but also our enemies!  We must bring grace where there isn’t any; we must bring good where there’s evil, rather than increase the evil in the world.  In the context of community, such attention to grace is absolutely necessary.  If we are, as Jesus states, children of our heavenly Father, we know the infinite love that is ours; to know that infinite love should engender the same love in us for others – all others.  If God cares about our enemies so much, loving them as he loves us, who are we to do anything differently?  Community, Jesus is saying, is always bigger, greater, larger than our narrow confines – and in it, we are called to be holy, perfect, just as our heavenly Father is perfect, in love. 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, March 24, 2019: If you do not repent, you will all perish!

If you do not repent, you will all perish!

Are you being called to change during Lent?

  When, in the Book of Exodus, Moses flees Egypt, he enters into his own personal exile.  Far from his own people, he marries into a Midianite family, seeking to live peacefully among them.  But God wants to use Moses as his instrument:  I have come down to rescue my people from the hands of the Egyptians… This is what you shall tell the Israelites, God says. Moses, however, resists until God offers him God’s name:  I am who am, that is, I am who has always been and is now and ever shall be, actively working throughout all of time, for you and in you.  God’s self-identification challenges Moses to own Moses’ own heritage – I am the God of your fathers, God reminds him. Moses must now claim his identity as one who is to lead his people to a land flowing with milk and honey, a land where they will bless the Lord with all their being, as in Psalm 103, giving thanks for God for that reclaimed identity:  all their past, all their hope for the future, all their gratitude for what God is doing in their midst in the here and now.  It is as call to radical transformation, first for Moses, and then for the people he will lead out of Egypt.

  In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus likewise calls the people to radical transformation: if you do not repent, you will all perish!  Using the parable of a fig tree, Jesus reminds them that they must not be complacent about their position as baptized people.  The fig tree represents the patience of God; like it, we are to bear fruit.  Years after Jesus’ death, the baptized Corinthians don’t seem to have realized this lesson.  Paul tells them that they must choose active relationship with the Lord.  It is not enough to be baptized into Moses and in the cloud and in the sea; they must take care not to fall, never allowing themselves to become complacent but rather always looking for and embracing the transformation Jesus calls them to.

  The season of Lent is not just a reminder to be good for a time; it is about our own radical transformation, about growth and change, about embracing our full identity as baptized Christians and acting upon it.  We are called to come alive with the Lord, to live with the Lord, doing what we ought in order to live in relationship with the Lord.  Are we being called to change during Lent?  Actually, we’re being called to so much more:  we are called to open to the radical transformation Jesus desires in us and invest our lives in an active relationship with him, one that will bear fruit.

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com

Sunday Gospel Reflection, February 24, 2019: Love your enemies...

Love your enemies…

How do we rise above enmity and promote justice?

  In the First Book of Samuel, David has more than one opportunity to kill his enemy Saul.  On one occasion, David enters Saul’s camp and finds Saul lying asleep with his spear thrust into the ground at his head.  Rather than act on this opportunity, however, David merely takes Saul’s spear and water jug, demonstrating his justice and faithfulness to God while yet asserting his superior position over Saul.  Knowing that Saul is the Lord’s anointed, David chooses not to have Saul’s blood on his hands, opting to remain in right relationship with God instead.  Psalm 103 tells us that merciful and gracious is the Lord; David likewise elects to be merciful, demonstrating forbearance and remaining open to God’s will.

  David may spare Saul out of concern for the Lord’s anointed, but in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus suggests a posture toward our enemies that is even more radical:  Jesus calls upon his disciples not just to love each other, but to love their enemies, and to pray for those who persecute them.  For Jesus’ audience, the disciples, the word enemies brings to mind first and foremost their Roman oppressors.  Jesus is thus challenging the disciples to love and pray for the very people who occupy their land, tax them heavily, treat them with violence & injustice; the disciples are to meet injustice with justice and faithfulness.  It is a challenge we continue to face today whenever we are confronted with injustice in our world.

  In effect, Jesus’ teaching calls us to work to break through our own limitations, to take down any walls we erect separating those we love from those we don’t, so that love can flow from us to all people.  We are to be merciful in the model and image of the heavenly one, as Paul calls Jesus in his letter to the Corinthians, conforming to Jesus’ teaching of love and mercy in ways that are life-giving.  In essence, Jesus is calling us to allow God’s power in us to help us rise above any insult, injury, or persecution, embracing even those who seek to harm us, trying to match our love to God’s love, trying to enter into the depth of God’s love for all.  Only that love can banish all enmity, as it brings the world into one community, united in mercy and compassion, with justice as its goal.

Image source:  www.wordclouds.com