If We Trust We Can Love

If We Trust We Can Love

Saturday: Eighteenth Week of the Year: August 6, 2016

Year II: Habakkuk 1:12 to 2:4; Psalm 9:8-13; Matthew 17:14-20

The Responsorial Psalm calls us to a trust that transcends time: “You will never abandon those who seek you, Lord” (Psalm 9).

In our single reading from Habakkuk (1:12 to 2:4) God answers a question we keep asking throughout history: “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (1:1). God’s answer is that we should not ask “how long,” but trust him: “There is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.” No matter how bad things are, or how inactive God seems, we keep re-affirming our hope: “You will never abandon those who seek you, Lord.”

In Matthew 17: 14-20 a man addresses the same question to Jesus specifically as a Savior who is not saving: “Lord, have mercy on my son…. I brought him to your disciples, but they could not cure him.” What is different in this story is that the disciples are included. The father expected them to be able to heal. And in fact, Jesus had sent them out with this power. “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.” ¹

 So why have they failed?

Why do the disciples of Jesus seem to be failing today? Why has the Church not been able to heal society of its compulsion to keep destroying itself, throwing itself into “fire and water” by blind economic practices that keep packing tight the powder keg of poverty all over the world until it explodes in violence? Why have Christians not reformed the prison system, which responds to crime with a simplicity so primitive it could be called savage: just locking people in communal cages that become “universities of crime”? Why do church-going supporters of the death penalty believe that by killing those who kill they are showing respect for life? Why do we still prefer to make war against those who hate and attack us instead of asking ourselves (and them) what we are doing that makes them hate us so much? Why is it that the same Church ministers who condemn so unconditionally politicians who will not vote to make the sin of abortion a crime have been unable to keep their own believers from committing it as a sin? Why do we who are urged constantly to keep “changing our minds” through “repentance” (metanoia) prefer to demonize our enemies with propaganda instead of searching our own souls?

Nevertheless, “Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy and he was cured instantly.” After this experience of God, the disciples asked Jesus why they were unable to heal. He said, “Because you have so little trust. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed… nothing will be impossible for you.” We need to accept Jesus’ way of saving the world. Then we will be able to show our society the power of God.

Initiative: Give God’s life: Be a “priest in the Priest.” Be willing to lose your live to save it and save others.

Footnotes:

¹Matthew 10:1.

Look To The End Beyond

Look To The End Beyond

Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, 2016, Year C 

The Responsorial (Psalm 97) calls us to remain conscious of a basic truth we sometimes forget: “The Lord is king, the most high over all the earth.”

We need to remember the vision in Daniel 34: 7:9-14: “To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.” We need to remember this because what we see on earth often seems contrary to it. The “dominion and glory and kingship” that all, or even most peoples and nations recognize is not always God’s. If we had to pick the god that most nations primarily serve, it would be either Mammon, god of wealth (Matthew 6:24), or Mars, god of war. These are the two values that seem to determine most government policies, rule most political debates, and swing most elections. But is that really so bad?

The goal of politics is to promote the “common good.” Aristotle identifies this all-inclusively with the “happiness that is the goal of human actions.” This makes the goal of politics the “best of ends,” (see Ethics, 1099b30). But governments usually focus on the more restricted good of their own citizens only, and only in this world.

This keeps politics distinct from religion and results in our goverment giving high priority to prosperity and defense. But even in pursuit of these goals, governments must not exempt themselves from the rule of God, especially in a country that defines itself as “one nation under God,” appeals in its Declaration of Independence to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” and claims its citizens are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” In pursuing the common good, however defined, governments must not forget that “The Lord is king, the most high over all the earth.”

The vision of Jesus transfigured in 2Peter 1:16-19 and Luke 9:28-36 prefigured our own transfiguration by grace, the gift of “sharing in the divine life of God.” For us who have “become Christ” by Baptism, everything in human life is transfigured.

Christians are “aliens and exiles” on this earth (1Peter 2:10-11), no matter how passionately involved we are in reforming and renewing its social structures and policies. We pursue a “common good” that is as different from what people perceive it to be as Jesus transfigured on the mountain top was different from what people perceived him to be on ground level.  “Our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior” (Philippians 3:20). The happiness that we know as the real “goal of human actions” is the divine union with God that he has made our destiny, and which we can only receive through “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Politics is not the “best of ends” for Christians, for whom political goals are often too exclusive and too short-sighted. Christians aim first at the “glory of God,” then at the common good of the whole human family, both in this world and the next.

Initiative: Give God’s life: Recognize “America first” as a denial of the faith. We are third.