8th Sunday in Ordinary Time (02.03.14)
Sin Deflects God’s Word
Self-inflicted exile initially brings shame and suffering. Our first parents had first-hand experience of the loss of ‘The Garden of Eden’. They would have shared their story with their children. That initial sense of loss would lessen with passing generations. There would have been an inevitable realignment to the new predominant reality, unless the memory was held as sacred. A respected memory preserved as sacred in the hearts and minds of successive generations can be inspirational. Jewish people are exemplary in keeping alive the memory of being God’s Chosen People. (See the commentary for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord – Sunday 2nd Feb 2014)
Self-inflicted exile brought humanity the infection of sin when our first parents disobeyed God. Sin causes us to suffer the pain of distancing ourselves from God. This in turn reduces, even disables, our innate ability to recognise and appreciate God’s unconditional love for us.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of excusing or denying our human failings, an activity in which Satan all too willingly collaborates. The more humanity distances itself from God the more widespread becomes the occurrence of negative thinking. In this Sunday’s (8th of the Year) First Reading, we hear the prophet Isaiah (49:14-15), repeating his Jewish contemporaries’ lament about their Babylonian exile, brought about by their own disloyalty, six centuries before the birth of Christ:
“The Lord has forsaken us; my Lord has forgotten us.”
This cry reveals a people’s awareness of their self-inflicted torment. To assuage his people’s suffering, God, through Isaiah, responds with powerful imagery:
“Can a mother forget her infant,
be without tenderness for the child of her womb?
Even should she forget, I will never forget you.”
Because the bond between mother and child is so profound, so intense and unconditional, this love stands as an apt metaphor for describing the depth and extent of God’s love for his people. God is saying that even if his people break the covenant, his love for them remains intact. The question for our generation is – will people today be receptive to God’s call to them, as were the people six centuries before Christ?
Then, God’s people were enslaved by a cruel, despotic regime of daily deprivation and torment. Today, God’s people are enslaved by decades of self-deception and self-excused, un-repented sinfulness. Our western world has legalised massive numbers of direct abortions, rampant pornography, blatant self-indulgent promiscuity, substance abuse and the misuse of power at all levels to hitherto unknown depths. The accumulative effect of this daily defiance of the God’s Love for them cannot but deaden people’s awareness of God. Is God’s powerful metaphor from Isaiah, proclaimed today, heard by listening congregations? Does it activate, within them, a real desire to be an evangeliser in the home, at work, among friends and colleagues?
The question needing an answer is: Is God’s Word prevented from fully engaging with humanity because of humanity’s increasing fascination with Evil? If this is so, one immediate effect is the fading of the critical voice of conscience.
Satanic temptations have built in, devilishly clever, systematic self-excusatory explanations. Were this not so, Satan would have seriously underestimated the alignment of our conscience with God’s unconditional love.
In this Sunday’s Gospel (Matthew 6:24-34) Jesus teaches the need for a unified application of willpower. We cannot serve two dialectically opposed masters. Jesus said to his disciples:
“No one can serve two masters.
They will either hate one and love the other,
or be devoted to one and despise the other.
You cannot serve God and mammon.”
Many in Europe attempt to disprove Jesus’ teaching. Strip away the subterfuge and people are revealed as being at loggerheads with God, now regarded as a sort of equal. If previous generations suffered from an over-accentuated fear of God, current generations have taken the proverbial pendulum to the other extremity with an added twist.
Whether they understand it or not, many today have surrendered their personal choice to the universal master of deceit, Satan, under the banner of ‘political correctness’. It is proving deceptively spiritually suicidal. The appearance of God’s presence remains in buildings and state pageantry but is largely just empty symbolism. The core of living faith in people has been either surreptitiously stolen or seriously compromised so that just the shell remains. Ancient parchments of Scripture and monuments, historical and modern, have their part to play but nothing can replace the evidence of a visibly lived faith.
In his first Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul tells us: (3:16-18)
“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple
and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?
If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person;
for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.
Do not deceive yourselves”
Blessed John Paul ll (soon to be declared a Saint) put it eloquently in ‘Ad Gentes’ (21)
“You who are laypersons in the Church and who possess faith, the greatest of all resources – you have a unique opportunity and a crucial responsibility. Through your lives in the midst of your daily activities in the world, you show the power that faith has to transform the world and to renew the human family. Even though it is hidden and unnoticed, like the leaven or the salt of the earth spoken of in the Gospel, your role as laity is indispensable for the Church in the fulfillment of its mission from Christ.”
In partnership with Pope Francis and the bishops, as successors of the Apostles, all the Baptised are called to be an unquenchable force for truth and life in a world where, presently, evil and death might seem to have the upper hand.