My purpose in these posts is to bring a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.
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“If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
This statement has been used in varying forms for a century or so and
has become a modern idiom. We can imagine the Scribes and Pharisees
employing it to criticize Jesus for showing compassion to people who had
a reputation as public sinners. The tension between standing for the
truth and treating with compassion and understanding those in the wrong
is not a new one.
There is no doubt that we human beings need to know, respect, and be
guided by the truth as it is to be found throughout creation – truth
about the way things are designed by the Creator – and the truth about
ourselves as creatures among others who enjoy the distinction of being
endowed with intellect, conscience, a capacity for compassion, and free
will. It is only logical that we live in harmony with all truth, but the
human condition shows plainly that from the beginning humanity wandered
away from the truth as well as from God in an attempt to take to
oneself the highest authority and the prerogative of absolute or final
judgement and decision making.
The dilemma and struggle of human beings is that we seek to be
self-sufficient when in fact we are contingent beings, dependent on a
higher power that coincides with both our origin and our destiny. The
consequences of alienating ourselves from the truth is nothing less than
devastating. Much if not almost all human suffering is the direct or
indirect result of living in defiance of the truth and of the nature of
things, as well as of our own nature. Despite our pitiable condition,
there is something in us that recoils at the thought of admitting that
we fall short of the idealized image we have of ourselves, which is
simply an expression of our desires for higher meaning and purpose for our lives.
And so it happens that there develops a disconnect between our life
as it truly is – which is generally visible to others if not to
ourselves – and our life as we want it to be. We can congratulate
ourselves on having attained certain measures of order, discipline,
health, success, and any other quality while at the same time
denigrating those who manifest lesser measures of those same qualities.
We can judge others and attribute to them motives and dispositions that would
make them blameworthy and fit for punishment or deserving of the host of
unhappy circumstances that may be theirs.
The alternative to such attitudes and treatment of others is to
consider instead not so much the other’s circumstances, faults, failures, or
sin, as rather their value as a person, their dignity in God’s eyes,
and their potential for excellence and perfection. This is the approach
Jesus of Nazareth took towards all others from the poorest to the richest, from those in authority to those of no status or consequence, and He formed his disciples to treat everyone equally, in the same way, in accord with instructions given by God in the Old Testament to Moses to judge without partiality of any kind.
It
is true that in his teaching, Jesus was firmly in harmony with his
Jewish Tradition and with the Jewish Scriptures. In fact, his enemies
could never fault Him and when they wanted to put Him to death they
needed to produce false witnesses to mount a fictitious and malicious case against
Him.
It
is also true that Jesus seemed to put aside concern for debating the
truth when He was faced with a sinner, public or private. With real
people before Him, Jesus shifted his focus away from defense of the Law to the value of the person
and treated them in a way coherent with their
dignity in God’s eyes. Jesus respected each person's responsibility to direct their own life and to allow God to form their conscience, and He evidently respected the time frame that is unique to each person.
He did not belabor the person’s faults even when
these were blatantly apparent, but rather took into consideration the
humiliation the person may have already suffered. He gave people the
benefit of the doubt that they hoped to stop sinning and reform
themselves and did not make any demands of them, nor do we have much
evidence that Jesus followed sinners up to assure that they were holding
up their end of the bargain after having been forgiven, with perhaps the exception of the man He healed whom He met again in the Temple and whom He warned not to sin again lest something worse befall him. So Jesus took
seriously public declarations and teaching about the truth, but then He
manifested God’s own respect for human freedom and patience with our
behavior.
There are two primacies at work here: the primacy of the truth and
the primacy of the freedom of conscience and free will. Truth and free
will are not in opposition, nor do they trump each other in any way.
Conscience and will are on a journey to enter into perfect coherence
with truth, and that is the work of a lifetime. Human beings do not have
the absolute power of divine will to once and for all make themselves
perfect by a sheer act of will.
Instead, we must carry the cross of our
weakened will and disturbed conscience, and come to grips with the
reality that God clearly intends to allow our suffering and sin to drive
us back into his loving arms. Divine Mercy is the only lasting solution
to our agony.That God forgives does not give us license to do anything without
regard for value or consequences, for that would be folly, and it would
be self destructive and offensive to God, and therefore injurious to our
relationship with our Creator. Each person must accept to carry their
own cross, their own burden of responsibility for the freedom and
dignity bestowed upon them by God, and no one can or should meddle with
that freedom and responsibility.
The one major exception to this is the case of public wrong or
scandal or of the abuse or harm of others, especially minors, the
handicapped, or other persons in conditions of vulnerability. We as a
whole community are responsible, and those in authority all the more
responsible, to intervene in cases of sin where one is injuring others,
scandalizing the innocent, or abusing those unable to come to their own
defense.
A quick stop must be immediately put to violence and abuse of
any kind that exploits the vulnerable and innocent among us, especially
children and those in a position to expect respect from those having
authority over them at their service. Relations involving fiduciary
trust, such as the trust given to clergy, medical professionals,
teachers, coaches, parents, and others who because of their role must
acknowledge that those putting trust in them are put in a vulnerable
stance by virtue of that trust, that fiduciary trust, the trust of one
accepting to serve another.
At all times, like Jesus, we have responsibility to care for others, to do our part
in upholding the truth, accept to journey with one another, to give and
to receive formation and mentoring, and to do it all with an attitude
of charity and compassion, which, as the Apostles taught, truly
considers others to be better than oneself. I am the sinner that I know
the best; so it stands to reason that I am the worst sinner that I know.
As for other sinners, I don’t really know what is inside them and what
manner of struggles or efforts are theirs; so only God is competent to
judge.
For this reason no one is entitled to “jump on another” on the basis
of observable behavior, with the exception of cases of abuse or exploitation of vulnerable persons as mentioned above. For all other cases not involving the obligation of public intervention for the protection of the vulnerable, Jesus gave us a
protocol in Matthew 18:15-20 for fraternal
correction.
We are to speak to the other privately first so that we can
try to reach some understanding in complete mutual respect. If the
person refuses to listen, we can return with a few witnesses and try
again to reach some understanding about the apparent fault. If they
still refuse to listen, then we can approach them with and through the
community leadership, and try again to achieve reconciliation for the
good of all. If the parties still refuses to listen, Jesus says, we are
to treat them as Gentiles or tax collectors. This doesn’t mean to treat
them like dirt, but rather, to treat them like potential seekers that
are temporarily lost.
The Jewish Temple had a Court of the Gentiles
so that Gentile seekers could come in and chat with devout Jews and
find their way to God. This is why Jesus cleansed the Temple, to restore
the Court of the Gentiles to its original purpose in God’s plan. Tax
collectors too were simply lost children of Israel, as shown by Jesus’
treatment of Zacchaeus when this man gave a little sign of interest in
Jesus.
Pope
Francis calls us to adopt and practice the same attitudes as Jesus and
consider strangers and sinners simply as children of God who are
temporarily lost, who are potential seekers of God. This is why he
constantly calls us to go to the “peripheries” of life, where such
people live, and make ourselves a neighbor to them and open ourselves to
friendship with them. In telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the
question Jesus put to the lawyer who was trying to entrap Him was,
“Which of these men made himself a neighbor to the man beaten by
thieves?”
When
our interlocutors agree that our discussion is a debate about the
truth, then we can give ourselves wholeheartedly to vigorous debate and
highlight all that we can muster from creation to the Sacred Scriptures
to persuade those who in our view may be in ignorance of certain
elements of the truth.
However, when the people we meet or are chatting with have no
intention or desire of debating the truth but are merely struggling with
the truth in the circumstances of their life, they are not at that
point in need of debate or eloquent defenses of the truth, but like the
people Jesus met, they are in need of someone willing to make himself or
herself a good neighbor, a friend, someone who can put aside obsession
with ideal truths and activate human compassion for the truth embedded
in a suffering fellow human being.
People all have an innate capacity to
discern the light shining from the Holy Trinity, and a willingness to
follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When the troubles of life and
the confusion caused by sin, suffering, and human frailty impede a
person’s progress in seeking God, the Holy Trinity are counting on our
compassion to touch people in pain and trouble.
Our willingness to accept them as they are and to love them as they
are – as God constantly does for us – is the instrumentation that God
needs to continue doing his work in souls. The Holy Trinity are
constantly at work, 24 / 7, and we are merely workers of the last hour.
When we touch other people’s lives, we are merely arriving at the last
moment after God has already been working in their lives for years,
decades….
For
this reason in approaching others we need to tread lightly, with great
humility and consideration, and the faith that holds and respects that
the primary work in other souls is being done by God. If God has needed
forty years to bring a certain truth to my attention, who am I to
attempt to shove such a truth down another person’s throat NOW, just
because I decide they should adhere to it now?
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My purpose in these posts is to help spread the contributions of a variety of Christian and other writers in a desire to share significant writings that in my estimation contribute to the common good and directly or indirectly give glory to God and extend the Lord's work of salvation to all of humanity. G.S.
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© 2004-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2004-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC
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