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I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies
a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. (Rom 12:1-2) |
There it is. In two sentences we have the entire program of human salvation. This blueprint is first revealed in Eden in which all things are possible, the highest of which is to attain to the full stature of our role model, Who is God. We are mistaken to think of Eden as some kind of terrestrial Heaven. As St. Irenaeus pointed out, Eden is the prototype of the human journey towards God. The sin of Adam and of Eve, he wrote, was impatience. They would have attained to a profound knowledge of good and evil in due course through their maturity, through their theosis. But they could not wait. They rashly seized what they could not hold.
Eden is the proto-Church: two people in communion with each other and both in communion with God, Who is present among them. The rule of life is given. All things are possible in this most fertile and creative place. No prohibitions are anywhere to be seen except one: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That is, humans are granted every freedom, every possibility, ever dominion except one. They must not arrogate to themselves the authority to decide what is right and what is wrong. It is given to humans only to meditate upon morality, but not to revise it. Only in attaining to Divinity, can we truly grasp the depths of morality.
As we consider our own tumultuous era, can we not say that rashly seizing morality, proposing a new rule of life, lies at the heart of all our woes? Of the top ten diseases reported in the U.S., 87% are Sexually Transmitted Infections. Can you imagine? Our age is the age of sexual disease.
More generally, the coherence of life, our stability, our wholesomeness, our peace are threatened by an obsession with sex whether it be homo-sex, bi-sex, trans-sex, or variations of hetero-sex. Our audacious act to invent a morality, which in its early stages had led to widespread depression, has now developed into a kind of mass delusion, if not psychosis. We have come to the point in Western Europe and North America where whole populations are coerced to affirm that what is patently not true is true and what is patently not right is right. We live in an age when the author of the Harry Potter book, J.K. Rowling, has to face book burnings because she has said that a girl is a girl, and a boy is a boy.
Through this colossal display of immature arrogance and childish folly, we learn a hard lesson: you cannot revise the blueprint of life without tearing a lifeworld apart at the seams. Everywhere we see traumatized children who now have become angry adults. Rage is apparent nearly everywhere. Absent fathers have become the rule both as toxic cause and effect as young men without fathers become absent fathers themselves. Promiscuity has become rampant across all age groups. Gone is the saintly figure of the sanctified grandmother! In patent self-destructiveness, young people routinely disfigure their bodies and "unwind" with all manner of drugs, destroying their minds and crippling society. How many workers can do mental math or remember instructions just recited for them? Our deliveries arrive having the wrong contents or damaged or don't arrive at all. Invoices too often are not correct.
More important, the attempt to invent a make-believe world destroys the soul. And the Lord of Life will not have it .... as we read in our Gospel lesson this morning:
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Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every
good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. (Mt 7:16-18) |
Only a couple a generations ago, this would have been an unremarkable Gospel passage. Today, it is received as urgent news.
Yet hucksters stand before their newfangled offerings declaring them to be best .... even newly improved! .... though manifestly poisonous. If anyone dare challenge the swindle, woe to that man .... and to his family who must be canceled.
Still, God will not be overruled, not finally. The bill must come due. And the U.S. Congress cannot annul it:
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"Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire ....
"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in Heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'" (Mt 7:19-23) |
Did you notice the curious detail: Lawless men and women have prophesied truly; they have cast out demons; they have done wonders! But how could this be?
Here we discover an essence of the human person: humans are changeable. At one moment they are true; they are faithful; they embrace goodness. Yet, inexplicably, they drift back into evil thoughts and are apt to lapse into evil life.
It turns out that what we really believe, what we really want, what we really are is a thing always in flux. A single snapshot of the soul will not tell the story. Even a feature-length movie ends up recording a constantly changing scene.
To embrace goodness truly, to remain on course, we must pray ceaselessly. We must examine our lives with candor and courage. This is a primary reason angels have charge over us. Even knowing of our angel's presence changes everything. Conversing with this friend of our soul constitutes a powerful form of prayer. We are never alone. No secret could ever be hid. But lacking this blessing, we drift into delusion — the lies we propose about ourselves and then eagerly approve.
When I was a parish priest, I would hear the question, "Why should I pray, Father, when God already knows my mind?" But God would reply, "Which mind? Which thoughts? Which fantasies? The ones yesterday or the day before? Or the ones this morning? For you are constantly changing your mind."
First of all, prayer is a love letter from our sincerest heart. We adore God for the marvel of His Creation. We dwell upon the beauty of His graciousness. We profess our love from smitten hearts as we would to any beloved. We give thanks to God for His mercy, patience, and understanding. Prayer is Divine intimacy through which we become known to God, and God becomes known to us. Knowledge — the stable, the clear, the well-understood — is all important.
If transformation is central (as we have said), then we must reflect on the word St. Paul used in his letter to the Romans. The Greek word underlying transformation is ανακαινώσις / anakainosis meaning renewal (literally, "back to a previous spiritual insight or knowledge"). Do you notice this word gnosis, or knowledge? Transformation is not a change into something completely new but rather a return to a previous state. Something new is called innovation. But the verb St. Paul selects means renovation — restoring things to an earlier, uncorrupted state, suggesting that the restored version is more profound than its original. ("Yet in greater wonder and honor Thou didst renew the same" goes an ancient Western prayer.)
The only stable, the only pure and clear, the only whole and integral is God. He is the way and the truth and the life. He alone knows Himself: I AM Who I AM. We might only attain this to same wholeness by imitating Him.
We recall John the Baptist crying in the wilderness: "Turn around! Return to Eden!" helping us to grasp why the Forerunner was revealed to be the man of Eden.
Our hearts and our minds are restless. Which thoughts constitute the real us? Is this not the purpose of the Aerial Toll-Houses, where God once-and-for-all takes a final sounding of our depths or shallows?
Here we understand how lawless men or women might prophesy, exorcise, or do mighty wonders. For each of us has been filled with Divine light. Each has known intimacy with God. And in this golden moment, are not all things possible?
Surely every goat at the Last Judgment has been a sheep many times, indeed, was born to be a sheep and has known his shepherd's voice (Jn 10:27-28). Every demon has been an angel.
Becoming intoxicated with our freedom, we are bold to declare that a thornbush will bear luscious grapes or a thistle, plump figs.
Why can't I become a man's wife through a process of surgery and hormone replacement?! Why not?!
We may legislate a new rule of life. But finally we lack the power to make evil into good. Goodness belongs to God alone. Our pretended power to make life only reveals our treacherous shallows. We are not able to create new life, but only to deform what God has created: sexual liberation morphs into oozing sores, stench, and sterility; the cult of food morphs into obesity, diabetes, and heart disease; social justice morphs into a hellish scene of burning, looting, and drive-by shootings.
"How could God have let all this happen?!" people will ask.
But this is the world "not of God" .... indeed, a world proposed to supplant God. God is banished from this world. That was its opening premise.
But what of the freedom God granted to do all of this?
Freedom is the essence of the human creature. Anything less would reduce God to the role of puppet master surrounded by mute, wooden figures or of the engineer assembling and programming robots. His highest earthly masterpiece, His living art, is human freedom. He has made us to be godlike creatures who might think any thought, do wonders and marvels, and envision whole realities. He has granted us the power to attain to His full stature: "the right to become children of God" (Jn 1:12). He has sent us to the ends of the earth to be His solicitous feet, His caring hands, His compassionate heart.
To make this point most emphatically, He has sent His Son, fully human and fully God, to teach us all these things.
But now we tread down paths too great for human comprehension. In a mystery that will always elude us, God ordained that all things not be done by Himself alone. Splendid solitude was not the Nature God ordained for Himself. For lying within His essential Nature is love. And love's first act is trust.
God conceived of a Heaven and Earth which would be entrusted to another, His Son. It is through the Son, the Logos, that the Father creates all worlds. It is through the Son, the Visible Image of the Invisible God, that God reveals Himself to mankind. It is the Son who converses with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. It is the Son who stands atop Mount Sinai becoming, by turns, hot in His wrath and merciful in His heart. The Son is the Lawgiver to Moses, and the Son is the Second Lawgiver on the Mount of the Beatitudes. The Son creates the world, redeems the world, and will judge the world. All is entrusted to the freedom of the fully human Son.
Most certainly, the Son is fully able to disappoint, to fall short, even to betray. But He does not. In this He models the highest reaches of human freedom, which is to be true.
His human Mother might also choose for herself, choose to raise a family in a well-ordered household, choose to have honor in her village and family love. But she does not. Instead, she accepts instead a sword, which will pierce her heart. That is, she chooses to evince that most high dignity of the human spirit: to be faithful and to sacrifice herself for others.
Freedom. It is the essence of our Divinity. It is our only path to the Kingdom of Heaven. We freely may follow our best and highest thoughts unto the company of angels. Or we may freely follow our basest urges unto the mania of delusion and demonic life.
We stumble to forgive unrepentant evil or tolerate it. We come to understand that toleration of demons cannot transmute evil unto purity. But rather the opposite will happen as the Master has said only this morning:
| Therefore by their fruits you will know them. (Mt 7:20) |
In any case, these are God's things, not ours. Evil will be judged as the Master has said:
| "'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'" |
But to those who are faithful, to those who are true, to those who persevere to the end, to those who take hold of the Divinity within them, the Lord Jesus holds out a blessing:
And our answer must always be the same:
| Be it unto me according to Thy word. |
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.