| Readings: | Exodus 22: 20-26 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10 Matthew 22:34-40 |
| Date: | October 28-29, 2023, Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A |
I don't know much; but I know I love you. And that may be all I need to know.
I know the Halloween is this week but I wanted to reflect on something with you that is even scarier than Halloween to some of us: the Sacrament of Reconcilition. That's right: confession - there I said it.
Of course it is no surprise to anyone that the practice of celebrating the Sacrament of Reconciliation is significantly less frequent today than it was, say back when many of us were growing up. This is actually not anything new. In a presentation on Confession back probably in the 50's, the Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen said, "We are living in about the first age in the history of the world that has denied guilt and sin. Everyone today believes that he's immaculately conceived. There are no sinners, we're just patients, but we're not penitents."
Later on in that talk, Bishop Sheen says that sin is not the worst thing in the world; the denial of sin is the worst.
In today's Gospel, Jesus frustrates the Pharisees' attempt to trap him by drawing their attention to two passages in Scripture, that as Pharisees deeply schooled in the law, they would be very familiar with. Jesus collapses all 613 commandments in the Torah into those two commandments: love God, and love our neighbor as ourselves. At the last Supper Jesus would further collapse the law into just one commandment: love one another as I love you. With apologies to Aaron Neville, I can sing that line I sang at the beginning to God or to another human, and it would be all I would need to know. That is because loving God and loving another human are just two sides of the same coin. I am capable of loving another human, in fact I am only capable of loving another human, because I am loved by God.
I think I am pretty safe in assuming that most of you usually think about sin the way I was brought up to think about it, and that is: Sin is breaking one of the commandments, either by doing something the commandments clearly say I shouldn't, or by not doing something that the commandments clearly say I should do. My idea of examining my conscience in preparation for celebrating the sacrament of Reconciliation or as part of my nightly prayer was to go down the commandments (both the 10 commandments in the Old Testament and the commandments of the Church) to see if I had broken any of them. That worked for a good portion of my early life. Back then I would have found it really hard to identify with Pope Francis who said, "I am a sinner." when asked who he was. It would have just felt like false humility to say, I am a sinner!
My whole idea of sin started to change about 30 years ago when I learned that the word in Scripture that we hear translated as sin in English, is chata in Hebrew, and harmatia in Greek. Chata is an archery term that means to miss the bullseye, and harmatia is a spearthrowing term that means the same thing in Greek. And what is that bullseye? To love one another as Jesus loves us! With that understanding of sin, I have no qualms about saying that I am a sinner. And I recognize that I will be a sinner for my whole life for I will never love God, myself, or any other human being the way Jesus loves me.
When I think of sin as breaking a commandment, it is easy for me to overlook parts of my behavior or attitude as not needing any forgiveness or reconciliation. But thinking of sin as my failure to love God or anyone as Jesus loves me does not allow me to overlook things. Instead I am moved to re-examine my relationship with God or that other person simply in terms of how am I loving them.
When our kids were young, every once in a while there would be a big ruckus in another room. As a parent I would walk into the middle of that, and find people crying, things thrown around the room, and general chaos. I would try to figure out what was going on, and, silly me, who started it. So I would start asking each one what happened. Of course that rarely helped me to figure out who needed to be punished and how. My favorite response was the time my son Matt said, "She hit me back first!" Long after I could have used this advice, someone suggested that in those situations, all you have to do is ask each one in turn, "Did you act out of love?" If not, then you were wrong.
So I would suggest that the next time we are peparing to celebrate Reconciliation or simply doing a nightly examen, that we focus on our lives not in terms of what commandment or Church law we "broke" but on moments when we fell short of loving the way Jesus loves us. In other words, did I act out of love in that moment? I guarantee you that looking at it this way will help us get a lot closer to the bullseye tomorrow.
Come on, sing it with me:
I don't know much; but I know I love you. And that may be all I need to know.