9th Sunday after
Pentecost – 17th July
2005
The Church places before us today the extraordinary figure of the
weeping Christ, the Man of Sorrows Who is overcome by His foresight of
Jerusalem’s destruction, as a consequence of Israel’s rejection of Him:
“ and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone, because thosu
hast not known the time of thy visitation.”
The tears of Christ
command awe – because they show us that God has chosen to experience
suffering; and they are beautiful – because they assure us that God is
not the sadistic and vengeful despot to whom some would have us pay
frightened homage. Those blessed tears well up from the love of God,
which is present – mysteriously – even in suffering and
punishment.
It is true that sin has consequences. The sin of our
first parents brought about a cosmic fall, which introduced death and
suffering into the world. Sometimes, through His prophets, God gives us
a glimpse of specific consequences following on from certain sins. St
Paul enumerates some of these in today’s epistle, as he recalls
Israel’s troubled journey to the Promised Land. Our Lord does the same
in prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem. But it is only – on these
rare and exceptional occasions when God reveals such connections – that
we can claim any certitude linking cause and effect. Generally, the
Lord is – as Isaiah reminds us – a Hidden God; and as St Paul adds, “
who has known the mind of God, or who has been His
counsellor?”
When the scriptures speak of God’s anger, we must
remember that the Lord is using very human language to explain to us
something of His mysterious dealings with man. Anger is a passion,
something only flesh and blood can feel. God is a pure spirit, and
changeless. He cannot be angry in the way we understand it. He does not
change in His attitude to us. It is we who change (for better or worse)
in relation to Him. We are made for one purpose only: union with God.
But we are also made free, and God respects absolutely this freedom.
Should we abuse this by sin, God still so respects our liberty that He
will not usually intervene to avert the consequences of our folly. This
is the meaning of the so-called anger of God. And this “anger” is also
operative as mercy: prising open the heart with the lever of suffering,
that grace might enter in.
When God
becomes man in Jesus Christ, the ways of God finally are translated
into human terms: Christ weeps over Jerusalem, and cleanses the Temple
in anger. But see how the tears precede the anger. Love is in first
place: and it is only Divine love that is able to summon righteous
anger for its own purposes.
St James warns us that the anger of
man does not work the Justice of God. Only the Righteous One Himself,
Jesus Christ, can safely employ righteous anger. We have seen some
terrible examples, in recent times – even among those calling
themselves Christian – of those of who do not heed this truth: one
thinks, for instance, of some attempts to portray the Asian tsunami as
God’s punishment on sinners. Well, for a start, the sinners appear to
be still here. But more profoundly, we must understand that in a fallen
world there is a great deal of innocent suffering – and in a mysterious
way, all of this expresses and somehow participates in the ultimate
Innocent Suffering: that of Christ upon the Cross. Anyone who presumes
to know when suffering is deserved, would undoubtedly have been placed
among those who taunted Our Lord upon His Cross.
In the terrorist
attacks in recent days on London, we have seen the most appalling
example of men claiming to wield Divine knowledge and judgement. In
December last year, our Holy Father pope Benedict, then Cardinal
Ratzinger, gave a speech on the occasion of the anniversary of the
Normandy landings. Its contents are even more relevant in the light of
the London bombings:
“God, or divinity [he said] can turn into
the means to make absolute one’s own power and one’s own interests. An
image of God that has turned thus into an instrument of partisan
interests, that identifies God’s absoluteness with one’s own community
or its set of interests, destroys law and morality, by elevating what
is relative into the absolute. The good then becomes whatever serves
one’s own power. The actual difference collapses between good and evil.
This gets even worse when religious fanaticism, the fanaticism of the
absolute, informs the will to put everything in the service of one’s
own interests, and thus turns completely blind and brutal. God
[Himself] has become an idol by which man worships His own will.” The
Cardinal concluded: “This is what we see in the martyr ideology of the
terrorists.”
Don’t imagine however, that such dangers are
restricted to Muslims. In the Pope’s account, the failings of Islam as
practised by certain Muslims are a mirror in which the West can see its
own failings. Secular ideology, which in its extreme forms produced
fascism and communism, worships the brute will with the same idolatrous
fervour that drives the Islamist suicide bomber.
Recalling St
Paul’s warning to the Corinthians from Israel’s past, our part is to
avoid falling into any subtle snare of idolatory; neither must we
languish in empty and disordered pleasures, nor murmur against or tempt
Christ. Rather, we must desire to know the day of Visitation, and seek
the things that are to our peace. In the same speech quoted earlier,
Pope Benedict warned that the West must above all recover and
strengthen its truest values in order to achieve peace:
“The
graves of World War II present us with a mandate. It is to strengthen
the forces of the good, to support, work, live and suffer for
those values and truths which God has established to hold the world
together. God promised Abraham that he would not destroy the city of
Sodom if ten just men were to be found there. We must make every effort
to ensure that the ten just men are not lacking who might save a
city!”
Rev Glen Tattersall
FSSP
|
