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Just a little over a fortnight ago we entered the season
of Lent, a holy and acceptable time of Christian warfare
against whatever is opposed to God within us, in our
families and in the society in which we live. At the
very beginning of Lent a challenge was thrown out to us:
Repent and believe in the Good News; be renewed in mind
and heart; become a more authentic and true disciple.
Lent calls for honesty, sincerity and authenticity. It
urges us to stop and come before the Lord as we are. It
invites us to lay bare our lives before the Lord so that
we can truly find out the direction in which we are
going, and who it is who is our companion and guide
along our pilgrim journey.
Our God is a God of love and compassion, slow to anger
and rich in mercy. We must come before him and ask him
to heal us, make us whole and help us to move forward
with determination to accept his call once again to
become what he wants us to be.
Of
course, there is no cheap grace. We can only become what
he wants us to be if we are ready to die to ourselves –
die to our sinfulness and selfishness – and live for
him. We grow by dying. There is no other way. In dying
to ourselves we recognize the false masks we have been
wearing – our pride, selfishness, lack of compassion and
love, deafness, unresponsiveness – and we earnestly ask
the Lord to come to lay his healing hands gently upon us
so that we can accept the truth about ourselves even if
it hurts, and act with urgency and courage to rise above
our past ways. The “gods” that we have enthroned in the
shrine of our life and that we burn incense to have to
be dethroned; they have to go so that the true God can
come in and dwell with us.
Two questions that St Bernard repeatedly asked himself
often can greatly help us in this process of
self-knowledge and change: Why am I here? Where am I
going? Finding out where we stand, laying bare our
wounded life before the Lord and resolving to do
something to re-order our priorities so that we can
leave our past behind and walk single-mindedly with
Jesus without short-circuiting the constant call to be
holy as God himself is holy will be the outcome of
answering these questions honestly and sincerely.
The privileged means put at our disposal during this
season are: prayer, which opens us to God and orientates
the direction of our lives towards him; fasting, which
helps us to curb our runaway desires so that we can
listen to God and more easily keep his commandments;
almsgiving, which makes our love of God whom we cannot
see a reality by loving our neighbour whom we can see
and sharing what we have with him. All of us have
pledged to do this at the beginning of Lent.
To
help us from becoming fainthearted and tempted to run
away from the demands of the God’s relentless call to
change our past ways, we took Jesus as our companion on
the road to renewal on the First Sunday of Lent, Jesus
who was tempted but who said NO to temptation, and who
set his face like flint in saying YES to his Father’s
will in all the circumstances of his life. Then, on the
Second Sunday of Lent we took a closer look at the goal
of our journey – the glory that awaits us, but which is
not reached expect by the path of suffering. The secret
to reach the goal of renewal is obedience or listening
to Jesus and walking in his footsteps despite the cross.
Only in dying to self can we rise and grow in the life
of God. Today we move a step further. We hear the call
again – it is clear: “unless you repent you will
likewise perish” (Gospel). We must change; we must
produce the fruits of repentance. God is patient. He
gives us time. He has given us one more season of Lent
in which to change; in which to die that we may rise
again to new life with Christ at Easter.
For this change to become real we need to come before
the mystery of God plainly and reverently, letting our
masks fall. We need to turn aside (leave our past
behind) and come before the burning bush and see the
sight the mystery of God who is al holy (First Reading).
Then and then only will God cleanse and heal us and
re-commission us to go out to set others free. Then and
then only will God tell us who he really is – he will
tell us his name.
God is faithful – he is the Rock of safety for us. We
need to die to our infidelities and look to the Rock
from which we were hewn. This means shunning immorality
(sin) and following the Lord faithfully (Second
Reading).
So
let us ask the Lord to help us to re-double our efforts
to die to our selfish past, surrender more fully to him
and rise with Jesus to walk in the way of the Lord. |
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1.
Today’s Gospel is chosen because of its emphasis on the
need for repentance and its obvious connection with
Lent, which is a time when we are all invited to repent
and to turn again to God. It began with some people
telling Jesus about a group of Galileans who had been
slaughtered by Pilate. Luke does not give us any
clue as to why the question was raised. Maybe it was
because just beforehand Jesus had been speaking to the
people about the final judgment which all must face, and
of the need to be prepared for it. Those who
referred to the story about the Galileans must have
thought it was a good example of a severe judgment being
meted out to sinners. It’s not uncommon even today for
some to see sickness, misfortune and even death as a
judgment of God being imposed because of a sinful life.
For instance there are many who see the terrible
consequences of HIV/AIDS as God’s punishment for immoral
lives.
But Jesus rejects completely the idea of there being a
necessary connection between suffering and sinfulness.
“Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners
than all the other Galileans because they suffered thus?
I tell you, No: …” And to make sure that they get the
point he recalls the story of another disaster – “Or
those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and
killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners
than all others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No;…
And then he adds after each example – “but unless you
repent you will all likewise perish. While he rejects
the notion of there being a necessary connection between
suffering and sin, he is equally emphatic about the need
for all to repent. And the reason is simple; it is
because sin is basically getting so caught up in our own
selfish needs that we do not leave any time for others,
not even for God. And if we turn away from God,
then we have turned away from the only one who can
guarantee our final happiness. “Who denies God, denies
himself. Who affirms God, affirms himself” (Taittiriya
Upanishad, n 26). We are all sinners to some degree or
other, and so we all need to constantly readjust our
lives, to realign them as it were, so that God remains
in the picture.
2.
It is important, then, not to reduce the notion of
repentance to a gloomy sense of moral failure or simply
to thoughts of doing penance for our failures. For then
the observation of the French poet, Boileau would be
correct;
“The Gospel offers nothing to our
thoughts.
But penitence or punishment.”
But that is not true. The Gospel offers
us far more. It offers us the possibility of being
realists, of seeing ourselves as we really are – warts
and all – without being pessimists. To repent – yes, is
to be aware of and sorry for our sins but above all it
is to see the need to turn to God – “who forgives all
your guilt, who heals every one of your ills, who
redeems your life from the grave, who crowns you with
love and compassion.” (Resp. Psalm). To be uptight and
gloomy about sin and to concentrate our attention on it
make no sense if indeed “The Lord is compassion of love,
slow to anger and rich in mercy.” Sin is not the
last word unless, of course, we make it so by dwelling
on it so much that we push God aside. And that would be
the real disaster, to allow sin to dominate our thoughts
and our lives to the extent that we have no time for
God. Sin, for the Christian, is not the terrible
thing it might be if there were no forgiveness for sin.
Sin and death no longer hold us in bondage when they are
placed against the background of the presence and the
power of God. “Life surmounts all contradictions, not by
destroying them, but by weaving them into a larger, more
inclusive pattern.” (S. Radhakrishan, The Present
Crisis of Faith, p 101).
You can see, then, why Jesus refused to consider the
question of the slaughtered Galileans or the 18 who were
killed in the tragedy at Siloam in purely moral terms.
He is emphatic in stating that what happened to them had
nothing to do with them being sinners, or that you could
judge how sinful they were by the disaster which befell
them. You see – if the outcome of my life, or
anybody’s life, depends on how good or bad we might be,
then what need have we of God. What Jesus is
insisting on is that no one can save oneself; that we
all have need of God’s mercy and love. It is not a
question of being a great or a small sinner; we all need
to repent – “unless you repent you will
all likewise perish.” That means that being a
Christian is much more radical than following a moral
code, than trying to be good. It is a recognition that
ultimately goodness and holiness can come only from God
and that trying to make myself good by myself is not
only impossible but worse still it is also a denial of
our dependence on God, and is equivalent to telling Him
that we don’t need his help. Being a Christian depends
far more on a living faith in a God who saves than on
good conduct, no matter how good it might be. It is not
possible to be truly Christian, a follower of Christ,
just by following a way of living and behaving that has
been handed down to us. We have to believe, to turn our
minds and hearts to God. That was the lesson that Jesus
wanted to impress on those who brought up the question
of the Galileans murdered by Pilate – they seemed to
think that it might have been in retribution for their
sins. Jesus insists that what happens to one is not just
the result of good or bad conduct; it depends ultimately
on one’s faith in God.
3.
For a long time now in the Church, in the Christian
community, great emphasis has been put on the need to
come to grips with personal sinfulness and to need to
build up a life of virtue to combat our moral faults and
failings. We do need to strive to be good and to avoid
evil but if we put too much stress on what we do then we
tend to marginalize God and He no longer has a
significant part in our lives. As a result we have
lived with a morality based more on fear of failure and
the threat of the dire consequences of sin rather than
allowing our lives to be permeated with the presence of
God. In the second half of today’s Gospel Jesus pointed
out that God is like the owner of the vineyard who was
prepared to wait for the fig tree to bear fruit rather
than cut it down immediately. Why then should we be so
anxious and upset about not yet being as good as we
ought to be if God is prepared to wait? The reason why
we are afraid, anxious and upset is because we give too
much importance to what we have to do and play down what
God is doing as if that were not at all important.
In every Mass, just before we receive
Communion, we pray – Lord, look not on our sins, but on
the faith of your Church.” That is a very ancient prayer
of the Christian community and it reflects a much more
healthy and profound way of seeing the Christian life
that we have become accustomed to in more recent times.
And we should live by that prayer – not being
over-anxious about our sins and shortcomings; not being
over concerned with what we have to do but rather
allowing God to shape our lives. We might also listen
with profit to a Christian writer of a time other than
our own. “People do not need to think so much what they
should do, but rather how they should be. If we are
good, then our words are radiant. If we are just, then
our works are also just. We should not think to found
sanctity on doing things but rather on a way of being,
for works do not sanctify us, rather we sanctify works.”
(Meister Eckhart, quoted by Paul Murray in
Spirituality, Volume 4, March/April 1998, p 103).
How a Christian should be is to live in the presence of
God and be aware that all goodness and holiness comes
from Him. God is present not because we are good; it is
rather we are good because God is with us. And
that is the importance of repentance. It is our turning
again to God and allowing him to take hold of our lives.
QUOTATIONS
1.
“Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our
whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our
heart, an end to sin, a turning away from evil, with
repugnance for the evil actions we have committed. At
the same time it entails the desire and resolution to
change one’s life, with hope in God’s mercy and trust in
his grace. This conversion of heart is accompanied by a
salutary pain and sadness which the fathers called
‘animi cruciatus’ (affliction of spirit) and ‘compunctio
cordis’ (repentance of heart)” (Cf Council of Trent
[1551]: DS 1676-1678) (Catechism of the Catholic Church,
Theological Publications in India, n 1431) |
