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June 20, 2020
Readings for the Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Biblical Wisdom
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is prudence.”- Proverbs 9:10
Current wisdom:
“I believe in myself”- a denizen of the post-modern age
Donna Tartt, a novelist deeply influenced by her Catholic faith, offered this about trusting yourself:
What is a wise life? As Christianity has faded from the center to the margins in the West. The Nicene Creed is replaced with the simpler secular creed – "I believe in myself." This affirmation—that you should believe in yourself as the ultimate source of meaning and value—is the secular colonization of the religious impulse. Everyone has to worship something or someone. You can’t make people not believe. The gods of illusion just redirect human belief. Believing in myself is celebrated in daytime TV, inspirational books, and Disney movies. The truth of this questionable adage in seen as self-evidently true. It is as if the garage door of unreality has forever closed off the minds of the self-believers to any real experience of transcendence. Since, there is nothing else to believe in beyond me, this pseudo wisdom goes, I might as well believe in myself. This is, of course, quite contrary to the biblical view of the human condition. Humility is to see oneself as you really are – mortal, limited, doubting and prone to self-destructive behavior.- The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
To proclaim the Gospel is to say to the unbelievers, baptized and unbaptized, the way out is to believe in Christ, not yourself. Does it matter in the end? Yes it does.
The Problem: How to deal with evil?
So, you believe in yourself. But what if you are untrustworthy. What if you are like a somewhat disreputable friend that you mother, who hopefully loves you, has warned you against. For instance, as your mom points out, you have been selfish, self-preoccupied and prone to bad decision making since you were a youth. You do bad things. Even if you don’t believe in good and evil, you still can believe that you can make decisions that undermine your own happiness or the happiness of whomever you are supposed to care about. No, it is not really just your life. You didn’t bring yourself into the world or raise your self and you, alone, did not even build the interstate highway system. You really owe something to others. Why do you not have greater care for our imperfect world? Is there any indication that, when you burn it all down, you can do better? You cannot escape your participation in the same dysfunction that gave us our dysfunctional world. Please don’t make it worse.
Have you ever thought why are world is so screwed up? For the Greeks, the problem of moral evil is a problem of ignorance, bad social environments or a significant mental health issue. So good public education, counseling, the right drugs and parenting classes should set the world right. Easy right? The Greeks, a host of secular reformers and day-time talk show hosts don’t quite grasp the thread that runs through human self-destruction. What secularist and pagan ideas of evil miss.
The Judeo-Christian critique:
The pagan world, the secular world and Sin.
Yes, ignorance, bad upbringing, and, even, mental illness help explain the existence of moral evil in the world to some limited extent. But in the Judeo-Christian Tradition, it is recognized that something else is fundamentally and destructively operative. You could have grown up in a loving family, be a well-educated, graduate from the Wharton School of Business summa cum laude and steal from others, cheat on your spouse and abuse your children when given the first chance.
Of course the word that describes this common human phenomenon is ‘sin.’ Sin’s existence is not explained by ignorance, bad upbringing, or mental illness. Sin is something everyone experiences, but doesn’t obviously recognize. We sin when we both know that what we are doing is wrong and then intentionally do it. In St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans 7, he confesses,
If we are flawed, we can’t really trust ourselves. If we can’t trust ourselves completely, and trust needs to be complete, then we can’t vouchsafe our own lives. Even Catholics struggle with broken marriages, despair and loss of all whom we love. Our happiness must lie in something permanent, which, is to say, something that can’t be taken away from us. That transcendent power ought to enter back into space and time to rescue us from our own self- degeneracy. We need a savior, who is the ground and means of our happiness. Do you want to be helped? First, recognize that there is something that blinds you to reality that is called sin. Sin leads to death – not physical death – but something far worse. That is what the Gospel is about today.“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:15- 19).
St. Matthew’s Gospel: Fear of the Lord and Mission
The Gospel of Matthew, has five major speeches. This Sunday we hear a passage from that discourse that is specifically focused on discipleship, mission, persecution and martyrdom – the great commandment to go out into God’s world and proclaim God’s kingdom. Jesus, in his ministry, confronted the sinful, the self-satisfied and the self-reliant; probably all these qualities in one person. Jesus talks to his disciples about death because it is the implacable, unrelenting challenge to our self-reliance. Physical death is scary and can hurt – a lot in some situations. Jesus teaches that the disciples, however, shouldn't fear physical death but fear the one who can cast body and soul into Gehenna – for Christians, the second death. In the modern escapist, secular world, some believe that they don’t wake up after death.
The problem, of course is that we do wake up. Paganism and the Christian world understood that it won’t be a bed of roses on the other side. Jesus who rose from the dead taught that the other side of death is not nothingness. Jesus counseled that we ought to have a rational, rather than irrational fear of death. It is rational to be afraid of the pain of death, but it is wiser to fear spiritual death, because spiritual death is going to last forever. Thinking that your life ends at physical death is not reason, it is rationalization. Worse news – that death starts on this side of the grave in the greedy, self-centered, angry way of life.
If we don’t love God, we ought to at least fear him. Fear can lead to respect. Humility is the virtue we want to nurture. Humility is to be in touch with reality. The unbeliever may not understand reality, but we do. The great grace of humility or Fear of the Lord is the foundation of Christian life. How to develop that Christian virtue? Here are some ideas.
Fear of the Lord: The foundation of wisdom
The Gospel teaches that the basis of all humility, that is, human contact with reality, is fear of the Lord. This is God’s world and it will keep turning without me or you. Learn Fear of the Lord in thought, word and deed.
Fear of God in Thought
How we think about God affects how we love God. The Father is not a senile old codger that doesn’t care what the young folk are up to as long as they are happy. Nonsense. If our lives have any real significance, they must have real consequences in the world to come. So yes, it’s better to love God; but when you are not feeling the love, at least try to feel the fear of God. As the Book of Proverbs tells us, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (9:10). It’s not the ideal, but it’s a start. Try not unnecessarily harming God’s creation. Here is your homework: HOMEWORK: Spare the life of a bug, because it is God’s bug. You didn’t make it.
Fear of God in Word
Imagine that you get to heaven’s gates and meet St. Peter, the keeper of the keys. You are asked, what do you bring with you that makes this place heaven. You would say, “Jesus is my kind of guy. I really admire him.” St. Peter will say, “You are not ready.” The next day you will say, “I am a hard-worker and pretty smart.” St. Peter will say, “you are not ready.” This goes on for what seems like an eternity. You are so frustrated and, finally, a purgatory later, you say, “Ok, I got nothing.” St. Peter then says, “Now you are ready.” Wealthy and decadent America has all too comfortable a familiarity with the Divine that drives out respect for God. St. John Henry Newman said, “Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day.” You fear God in what you say and how you listen. HOMEWORK: Let someone you don't admire, tell you what to do. May'be God sent them.
Fear of God in Deed
Jesus worked (see Mk 6:3); and so work for human beings is more than punching the clock, doing our time and collecting a paycheck. Work is a sacred duty, a redemptive act, and a participation in the life of Christ. Work brings us closer to Christ by working to complete creation. A house chore, a homework assignment, sports practice, or an office job is an essential part of our sanctification, not a necessary inconvenience. So the next time you grumble because you have to do something, like the dishes, make your bed or show up for work on time - remember that it is an honor because work has been redeemed by Jesus. Love your work. HOMEWORK: Secretly do someone else’s chores. What a joy.
Fear of the Lord and Pelagianism
In Late Antiquity, the adage “believe in yourself” was dubbed “Pelagianism.” Pelagius, a fourth century Irish theologian, was the first self-help guru. He argued that God gave human beings the means to salvation without grace. In other words, humans can save themselves. St. Augustine argued against this conception of salvation. Human beings, their pride and weakness, was too weak a foundation to build any lasting happiness. The Church eventually condemned Pelagius’s teaching as heretical in the year 418.
Our lives may be rich with choices, but, in the end, every choice the world offers ends in frustration or heaven. Wisdom is to know how to choose and be free to choose the good. The root of wisdom is fear of the Lord. None of this, in the end, means that it is wrong to believe in yourself; the point is that it is wrong— wrong in the sense of self-deceiving—to believe only in yourself and, by extension, to believe that you can save yourself and others ought to also. Jesus send his disciples out for a reason and he sends us out for the same reason.
Trusting only in this world is to fall prey to the pagan gods – the gods of illusion. The gods of illusion creep into our lives through our divided hearts. The lie the serpent told Adam and Eve in the garden wasn’t that God doesn’t exist—that they never would have believed - it was that we, too, could be gods. That is a lie leading to self-destruction. Jesus sends us out warning, 'don’t be worried about your death – instead fear looking into the Father’s eyes in the world to come.' It is a holy thing to want to be accountable for how we used the gift of our lives.
Enrichment: The Journey Home
A good example of the challenge of proclaiming Christ to our secular culture is discussed in an episode of “The Journey Home.” Leah Libresco Sergeant and Sr. Theresa Alethia Noble, two wonderfully intelligent former atheists, who appeared on Marcus Grodi’s show and told their stories. I thought the most remarkable thing they said was that fear of hell meant nothing to them. They were sure that there was nothing after death anyway, so why worry about hell? They might fear dying, but once you are dead … the big nothing. Weirdly hopeful atheistic thinking. But, that is how some think. Well worth listening to these to smart people reflect on their lives.