As soon as I read those readings last Sunday, I became aware of a tension between what Paul says in the second reading and what Jesus says in the Gospel. But it was only as the week went on that the full implications of that tension – by which I mean that the two passages are, in some sense, contradictory – began to dawn on me and I was able to see how much people have been affected by it down through the ages and still are today. So what do I mean? Well, let’s examine each reading in turn.
In the letter to the Romans, St Paul tells us that, if we love, then we have kept all the commandments. Several centuries later, St Augustine was to say something very similar in his famous, and often misunderstood phrase, ‘Love, and then do what you will.’ I say ‘often misunderstood’ because to those who see the Christian life in terms of keeping rules and regulations, both Paul’s words and Augustine’s after him, are often seen as a recipe for licence, an excuse for doing whatever we want in the name of love. But, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing more demanding than love. Keeping rules – religion without faith – is nothing compared to it. Love asks of us everything we have to give, the great example of this in the early Church being in chapter two of the Acts of the Apostles where we read how the members of the Christian community in Jerusalem sold everything they had, shared out the proceeds and held everything in common. It was a wonderful ideal, one others have attempted to live over the centuries, representing as it does everything that is most beautiful and attractive about the Christian faith.
But there is always conflict at some level between the ideal and what happens on a day to day basis, a conflict we see reflected in chapter six of Acts. There, St Luke describes how a dispute broke out in Jerusalem between the Jewish and Greek sections of the community. The Greeks, rightly or wrongly, believed that their widows were being discriminated against when it came to the distribution of food. And so, as human nature kicked in, the idealism of chapter two went out the window and a dispute broke out not unlike the disputes that happen from time to time in any parish up and down the country. And it’s against this background that we have to read Matthew’s account of how the early Church dealt with such things. Go and see the people concerned; if that doesn’t work, take a couple of witnesses; if there is still no progress, take it to the community; and if that doesn’t work, treat them like a pagan or a tax collector. In other words, excommunicate them. It’s a long way from the ideals in chapter two, but the need to hold those small vulnerable communities together, meant that it was the best they could do in the circumstances. And herein lies a hugely important truth that I invite you to reflect on now.
Essentially, it’s about the profound long-term effects of unrealistic expectations on people both inside and outside the Church, the basic point being that such expectations breed the twin evils of guilt and disillusionment. Guilt is something often associated in the popular mind with Catholicism, although my own experience is that protestants and people of no faith suffer from it at least as much as we do. Some guilt, of course, is justified. We do something wrong and we feel guilty: a perfectly healthy response to what has happened. But the really harmful feeling of guilt is the kind that has no link with reality. In other words, we feel guilty when there is nothing to feel guilty about. Freud, of course, explains this with his theory about the super-ego, a set of unconscious ideals in our heads – what we should be or ought to be – which, because they are not actually achievable, leave the ego – the conscious part of ourselves – feeling permanently guilty, that we have somehow failed or are not good enough. And while the ideals of the Gospel, with their very high demands, belong more to the conscious part of ourselves than the unconscious, they often contribute to that unhealthy, super-ego sense of guilt and failure; what are often referred to in Catholic circles as the ‘hardening of the oughteries.’ And, of course, it’s this that lies at the heart of religion without faith: the constant need to please God and keep him happy; the deep-rooted fear which latches on to religious actions to make ourselves feel better and keep those neurotic fears at bay.
And the second very harmful effect of unrealistic expectations is disillusionment or disappointment. It happens when, in a whole variety of ways, we have unrealistic expectations of the Church itself or of those who hold positions of leadership in it. The weaknesses of both can be disguised or turned a blind eye to for a while, but sooner or later the reality forces itself on us and, as has happened a lot in recent years, many are shocked and lose faith. And, of course, for those outside the Church, these same weaknesses, coupled with the same unrealistic idea of what the Church is or ought to be, provide all the justification they need to write it off and God with it.
And so the challenge is to live with the truths contained in both the second reading and the Gospel. It’s to seek after the ideal but be able to live with the daily reality. It is to know that the world is a vast community of loved sinners. It is to have the patience to live with the struggle without losing faith in the ultimate triumph of God’s grace over human sinfulness. It is to live with our own personal failures, mistakes and weaknesses as well as those of others. It is to stop setting ourselves and others up for failure by demanding or expecting of them things they are never going to be able to do. I remember how clear this became to me more than twenty years ago, when I was heavily involved in schools. The head-teachers in those days were not perfect. They had their faults. But it soon became clear to me from listening to teachers that the person with all the qualities they were looking for in a head-teacher didn’t actually exist except in their heads. And we do it with all kinds of people; politicians, bosses, football managers and even, sometimes, priests.
The worst thing of all is cynicism, seeing only the negative in everything. It blinds us to God and to goodness. But we should never forget that a cynic is no more than a disappointed idealist.
BIDDING PRAYERS
To understand the words of St Paul in today’s second reading, or the words of St Augustine 350 years later, requires moral maturity. Neither of these two great figures in history can be understood if we see humanity’s relationship with God as one of keeping rules or simply avoiding sin. To love in the sense each of them uses the word demands everything of us. It is to become like Jesus, and we pray for the grace to understand this...................Lord hear us
To become like Jesus is not, of course, something we can do ourselves. It is only possible through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us. One of the symptoms of religion without faith is the belief that we have to do this by our own efforts and often our ultimately futile attempts to do so result in deep feelings of failure or not being good enough. In more extreme cases it can lead to scruples and other mental health problems. And so we pray for all who suffer in this way.......................Lord hear us
In the Incarnation, God, in Jesus, entered fully into the human condition and lived in the midst of human weakness. He associated with sinners, spoke to them of the Father’s love and encouraged them to believe in themselves. When faced with the woman caught committing adultery he refused to condemn her, telling her to go and sin no more. In a word, he loved people as they were while offering them something new and better. And so we ask for the grace to do the same.......................Lord hear us
The temptation to set others up for failure by placing on them impossible burdens of expectation is deep in us. We do it first as children when we expect our parents to know everything. Then, in adolescence, we discover they don’t and blame them for it. But we do the same with all kinds of people. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to recognize who they are so that we can stop doing it and allow them to be as human and flawed as we ourselves are........................ Lord hear us
To become a cynic is one of the worst things that can happen to us as human beings. The cynic can see no good in anybody or anything. He or she will always put the worst interpretation on everything that happens and on the basis of no evidence whatsoever attribute the lowest motives to everything other people do. And so we ask God to lead us beyond any such tendencies in ourselves...........................Lord hear us
Jesus tells us today that where two or three are gathered together in his name he will be there with them. But it is also true that where two or three human beings are gathered together, sooner or later there will be a row of some kind. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to deal in a Christ-like way with such situations whenever they arise, especially within our own families or within the parishes which make up our diocese here in Galloway.................Lord hear us
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment