Sunday, March 6, 2011

the three progressions


Homily
9th Sunday in Ordinary Time
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas
6 March 2011

Not everyone who says Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

Tonight's readings provide for us a convincing pattern for our life, a way to be rock solid in our approach to reality and our expectations for life and for ourselves. There is a great progression from the first reading to the second reading to the Gospel. It is a pattern that we will do well to pay attention to.

The first challenge any person faces in life is to find a way to live a good life. Each of us must find a way to know what is good, to love what is good, and to choose what is good. The alternative is to allow ourselves to be destroyed by evil, and to become less and less of a person because our lives are dominated by evil. The first challenge in life is to be a good person instead of a bad person. We make this distinction all the time. When we talk about someone, we usually say that he is a great guy, or she is a great gal. We recognize that for the most part, even though the person in question is far from perfect, that their lives are not dominated by evil. They make more good choices than bad choices. Therefore it is easy to have a relationship with these people. This is not the case with people whose lives are dominated by evil. If a person's life is caving in on itself, it is frustrating to be in relationship with that person. There is no goodness on which to base the relationship. The relationship is always shaky.

Moses pleads in the first reading for the Israelites to take the commandments of the Lord into their hearts and into their souls. He tells them to bind the commandments of the Lord as a band on the wrist, or as a pendant on the forehead, so that they might never forget them. Moses knows from experience that the Israelites are a broken people. They are sinners. He knows that their natural desire to do good and avoid evil needed the reinforcement of God's commands. The commandments that Moses is telling to the Israelites - do not be idolatrous, honor your father and mother, do not kill or steal or lie, are not rocket science. Any naturally good person can endorse these commandments by the light of natural reason. Yet in delivering the commands of God, Moses reminds man that our reason can and must always be purified by faith in God's revelation of Himself. The rules of how to be good are ultimately grounded in and guaranteed by God who is the source of all goodness, who is goodness itself. So our reason and our desire to do good must always be purified by the light of faith, in the context of our responsibility to stay in relationship with God. We always need God's commandments, lest we go off the path toward authentic goodness.

We see this played out in our moral culture today. A person does not need God's commandments to come to the conclusion that abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage are not good things. A non-Christian can reasonably conclude this. An atheist can be against abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage by the light of reason, without believing in God. Yet what we see is that reason can easily be clouded, and can readily use the light of revelation and God's commandments. Even though abortion and contraception reduce life instead of increasing life, and do not cure an illness but interrupt a natural goodness in the body, there are many who have concluded that abortion and contraception are exactly like all other health care. Yet they are obviously different. In the same way, notwithstanding the subjective desire to love other people and to be in meaningful relationship with them, there are some who wish to minimize the uniqueness of marriage between a man and a woman, and the natural advantages inherent in the complementarity and fruitfulness of this union, so that any relationship can be called a marriage, can be considered identically the same, even though objectively they are not the same. So when the natural light of reason fails to create a consensus among thinking people, the light of faith, and God's commandments, are there to purify reason, and to give light to true and lasting goodness. In turn, reason also can and does purify faith, as when suicide bombers reduce life in the name of God, any reasonable person can identify the inconsistency here. Faith and reason thus have a necessary and complementary relationship to each other.

So Moses tells us that our first responsibility in life is to become a naturally good person, aided by our obedience to God's commandments. Our first responsibility is given by baptism, when we refused to be mastered by sin. It is to not to settle for mediocrity instead of goodness, and not to rationalize our sinfulness so that we might not inherit a curse instead of a blessing. Yet St. Paul tells us in the second reading that this is just the beginning for us. We are not ultimately made to follow rules of how to do good and to avoid evil, either nature's rules or God's rules. No, man is not ultimately a slave to rules. He is a free creature created in the image and likeness of God so that he might love with all his heart, and all his mind and all his strength. Thus, we strive to be good so that we have the greatest opportunity to love God and to love one another. Love is man's origin, love is his constant calling, love is his perfection in heaven. We are good so that we can fulfill our ultimate destiny to love, so that we can respond to Jesus' commandment to love one another just as He first loves us, so that if God is the one who loves us most perfectly in Christ Jesus, that we can in turn fall in love with Him and make our friendship with Christ the fundamental relationship of our lives. St. Paul says this is the second opportunity and responsibility that we have, to mature beyond the rules that keep evil from destroying us and to move into an intense relationship of love with Christ Jesus, who is both the law of goodness and goodness itself. Because Christ Jesus took on our humanity in the incarnation, it is possible for us to enter into the most personal and intimate relationship with the one through whom all good things come, for He created all that is good. Thus, being a good person naturally leads us to the perfect intimate communion of the Eucharist, where the creator of all goodness makes Himself small enough for us to have the most personal and intimate of relationships with Him.

Then Jesus in the Gospel is clear that those who are in intimate communion with Him, will make the final progression in life toward the freedom of obedience, or loving not their own will but the will of the Heavenly Father for them, who knows them and loves them more than they know and love themselves. Jesus came not to do His own will, but the will of His Father, and He did it within the strength of His intimate relationship of love with the Father. Because of His love for the Father, Jesus did His will not because He had to, not because it was easy, but because He wanted to. Jesus in turn tells us who wish to be His disciples that the final progression of our lives is our imitation of His obedience, the freedom that comes not from loving our own will, but in doing the will of the Father, who knows us and loves us and desires what is best for us, even if we do not yet know ourselves, or love ourselves, or know what is best for us. This is the fruit of a real realtionship of love with the Jesus, that in seeing his beautiful obedience to the Fahter, we in turn want to do everything in life with Him and in Him and through Him, and we want to do nothing in life except what He is doing, and we desire in life only to do what He desire for us, only what He asks of us. This for the Christian is ultimate freedom, it is ultimate security, it is basing our lives on the most solid of rock. If our progression in life stops with our loving Jesus but loving our own will more, than the storms of life will come and will tear down our desire to be good, and our intimate friendship with Him. If we love our own will above all things, we are only pretending that we will one day go to heaven. For not everyone who says Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one whose house is built on solid rock, only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

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