6th Sunday OT, C February 13, 2022
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
This past Friday marks three years I have been your pastor, halfway through my first term. Covid certainly made it more difficult and there are a few things I wish I had done differently… some things that pain me. Attendance is still down by 30%. On most weekends, the collection is still slightly lower than what I remember seeing when I started. We lost the partnership with Head Start and had to sell the school property. Yet, it’s not all bad news.
We fixed some windows and bricks on the Church. Lots of little oversights and irregularities have been addressed. Despite a lower income, streamlining has enabled us to gain some savings. Though 2 years later than I had planned and smaller than I envisioned, our aftercare program is finally launched and going well. The Come Lord Jesus program we started my first summer is still going strong. Other small groups are still finding their way, but even the attempt is a good sign. We have a big retreat coming up and our Director of Discipleship is helping us identify gifts and respond to needs. Perhaps most importantly, at least some people say they are getting closer to God and growing in their faith. And that’s the thing that matters most.
Our first reading and psalm set up a contrast between the “two ways.” These are the two ways to live that lead either to blessing or to being cursed. And they boil down to two opposite choices: to place your hope in God or to place it in human beings. To follow the counsel of the wicked or to follow the law of the Lord. Obedience to God’s law leads to protection and flourishing in wealth and children and joy. Wickedness leads to suffering, poverty, and exile from the promised land.
This is part of the reason that Jesus’ teaching here is so shocking. Like the other readings, he sets up two contrasts – blessing vs. woe – but then he flips around what those look like. Blessing is seen in poverty, hunger, sorrow, and rejection or exile. Woe is found in wealth, satisfaction, laughter, and acceptance. Why the reversal? Which is true?
As with many things in this world and especially in God’s revelation, there is a lot of mixture and paradox. Part of the reason God spent all those thousands of years with the old covenants was to make a point: that human beings aren’t capable of actually being good by their own efforts. With few, short-lived exceptions, Israel was constantly embattled, broken, and afflicted as a direct result of their sinfulness. Eventually they end up in exile just as God promised.
Another reason for the old covenants was to make clear just what this world is like. God spoke of exile as the punishment for sins, but the reality is that human beings are already in exile because of sin. The brutal truth is that the simple formula of “do good and get rewarded” has not worked correctly since Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the garden. The fundamental truth is still there – goodness is rewarded – but the backwardness and brokenness of this world twists is, perverts it, obscures it. There are lots of little examples of being successful through being good, but far more severe examples of failing and being destroyed precisely because you were good. Honest leaders and fair businesses have been and often still are torn down and defeated by those willing to cheat, lie, steal, and kill. Just this past week, Brantley Millegan was fired from an executive position at a cryptocurrency firm over and old tweet supporting Catholic Doctrine.
This is why, when the time was right, Jesus stepped in to confirm these two realities: First, that being truly good isn’t possible for human beings. Second, that the real reward for goodness is not in this life. In fact, being truly good in this world guarantees that you will suffer because it is ruled by sin and the devil who attacks those who do good.
This is what Jesus means by these paradoxes; not that laughter and food and money are intrinsically evil, but that they are unreliable. If we count them to be evidence of our goodness, then we will be deceived and find ourselves on the wrong side of judgment. True goodness starts with admitting that we can’t trust ourselves or the world. It starts with admitting our need for God’s grace. That goodness grows by cooperating with his grace and seeking, above everything else, to love God and neighbor. That goodness grows to maturity when it continues to love even though that causes us to suffer. There is no other way in this world to prove that we are good than to be willing to suffer greatly for the sake of doing the right thing. We might be doing the right thing when everything is easy and comfortable, but there’s a good chance we aren’t.
To put it another way, Jesus’ beatitudes and woes are meant to make us ask this question: am I Catholic because I know God is real and I want to love him or am I Catholic because I think it helps me maintain my own self-image as a good person? As long as things are easy, it’s too easy to deceive ourselves. This is why penance is always part of our faith and why are heroes are, by worldly standards, failures: Martyrs and Confessors who threw away all kinds of “good” things for the sake of staying faithful to God… sometimes in a way that, to worldly eyes, looks like a minor technicality.
In the book of Revelation, God says he will spit out the lukewarm. So, our goal cannot be to maximize the number of lukewarm people who in the end don’t make it anyway. It is rather to prioritize drawing as many people as possible to radical holiness, and this often means choosing worldly failure for the sake of spiritual success.
Whatever the numbers, the bank account, the property we have, they cannot be the measure of our success. In some ways, greater poverty and hunger and rejection can make this parish more effective at it’s true mission by forcing us to dig deeper in our love for God and neighbor. My prayer, my promise is that I will continue to try to serve this mission. Three years behind us… three and possibly more still ahead. As your pastor, I ask you, do you still share this mission? Will you willingly endure poverty, hunger, sorrow, hatred, exclusion, insults, and detraction for the sake of our shared call to love not as the world does, but as God does? If you will, then I can’t promise you success. I can’t even promise you this parish will survive, though I think it just might. But I can promise you that, despite your trials, you will know joy in this life. Even better, I can promise that your reward will be great in heaven. Trust not in me, a man who can fail, but in God who never will.