To hear the sermon as it was delivered just check out my page at Gloria.tv BrTomFordeOFMCap
It would be a hard-hearted individual who was not moved to pity at
the plight of the people of Amatrice and the other Italian towns and villages
flattened by last Wednesday’s earthquake.
Hundreds are dead, babies, children, parents and grandparents, and many
others have lost homes and livelihoods on top of their bereavements. Yet we so easily forget that many more
have had their homes flattened, have lost their lives or the lives of their
loved ones in the dreadful insanity of the ongoing war in Syria. Others around the world have lost loved
ones and their homes and livelihoods to floods, mudslides and to forest fires. Why does our Lord permit these
things?
The answer is a little complicated. As for natural events like earthquakes, floods and fires they
are part of a world that is alive and therefore constantly changing. If you live in an area where there are
fault-lines and therefore there are earthquakes one can choose to endure the
risk of death and injury or move away. Likewise if you live on the flood plain of a river you risk being flooded or in a region
where it gets very hot and very dry you risk runaway fires.
When it comes to war
and other moral evils, though, the case is very different and we must deal with
the issue of human freedom and the consequences of human choices. All our choices have consequences in
little things as in big. We can
choose to listen to reason and to God or we can choose to listen to
irrationality and the evil one.
War is the product of humans listening to irrationality, of choosing to
put their will before God’s will.
Our Lord permits this because He respects our freedom. God is not and does not want ever to be
a puppet-master managing everything.
He respects our freedom even if it means we end up separated from Him in
Hell, forever. God loves us enough
to let us go where we choose but He will still offer us every help to go the
right way, to do the right thing.
He wants us to freely believe and trust in Him and to freely choose
eternal life with Him.
There, then, is another reason why our Lord permits evil whether
natural or moral. He permits it so
that we do not forget that this is not whole of our existence but only the
beginning. Our souls are immortal
– we will never cease to exist.
Therefore where we will spend eternity is vitally important. If we become engrossed in this life we
risk losing eternal life with God.
We must get our priorities right if we are to avail of what the Father
has offered us in Christ.
That is why our Lord tries to reach the Pharisees with whom he had a
constant battle. The Pharisee
movement was largely composed of lay people, wealthy and devout. They devoted themselves to living the
Law of the Jewish religion in every aspect of their lives. Many devout Jews still do. But the Pharisees fell pray to
externalism, the belief that how you appear to others is what is important, a
kind of religious version of ‘keeping up with the Jones’. Externalism is always a danger for
us so that our Faith is lived only on the surface and not from our heart, the
core of our being. It so
easy to confuse the values of our society, in which the Church has lived for so
long, with the values of our Faith, especially when we do not know our Faith
well. The Pharisees, like many
people of that time and our own, thought of illness and poverty as curses from
God, sure signs that the individual or his forebears had sinned and were being
punished. Therefore they despised
the poor, the sick and the disabled.
Our Lord rejects this as false.
The greatest honour is that which is stored up in heaven for those who
have cared for those in need. They
should emulate God in His loving mercy and reach out to the poor and the lame.
Our Lord therefore uses their thinking to try and reach them with
the Gospel. He points out to them
through the parable that searching for public honour and respect leads only to
embarrassment, shame and humiliation.
In contrast being humble can lead to honour and personal satisfaction.
Our Lord is inverting their value system. He, the Son of the Father, is God’s ambassador to us. Indeed He is God’s greatest gift to
us. He brings us the Father’s
invitation to Great Wedding Feast of Heaven. He wants us to seek the highest possible honour and glory
there. How? By seeking the lowest
place here. In seeking the
lowest place in this world we are seeking to be with our God is always humbler
yet. We do this by reaching out to
those around us who are lame and find it hard to walk in our Lord’s footsteps,
who are deaf to the Gospel, blind to His merciful love, who cannot cry out for
help. He wants us to reach out and
find Him in those around us who are in need: lonely, in need, or lost. It is up to keep our eyes and ears open
and bring Christ to them. We are
to be ambassadors for Him and extend to them the love and mercy we have found
in Christ.
The great English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton said of St Francis
that he stood on his head and saw the world the right way up. He was only following our Lord’s
example. The world exalts the
beautiful, the young, the healthy and the talented. It weighs our value by our usefulness. In contrast our God looks to the
heart. He sees us in Christ and
knows our true value, that value which He has given us in Christ. Let us reject the false valuation that
the world offers and see ourselves as God does in Christ. As Catholic Christians we are not to be
concerned to keep up with Jones but to keep up with Christ and His saints. We are to be concerned not with our
position and place in this world but in the next.
Here at Mass we have a foretaste of Heaven’s Feast – let us take
some of that beauty and good out to others to let them taste Heaven through
us. Let us be real ambassadors for
Christ. Let us seek to be truly
converted to Christ, to change direction, and return to God’s way. Let us replace in our lives the values
of the world with God’s values: sincere repentance for our wrong-doing,
forgiveness for those who hurt or offend us, prayer to God from the heart,
compassion for the suffering and generosity to those in need, humility before
God and neighbour and commitment to virtue and to the Truth. By this path we be His
ambassadors, we can travel in Christ’s footsteps and though we may lack
prestige and honour in this world we will not lack them in the next.
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