What can the readings teach us?
Central to these readings is the Gospel of the Gospel, according to Martin Luther. “For God so loved the world that He gave us His Son so that anyone who believes in Him may not be lost but have eternal life”. John 3:16 is the Gospel in miniature. The principal message to humanity is God’s love which is cause of our rejoicing.
How should we rejoice when the Readings are taken from the Book of Chronicles and Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians?
In the Book of the Chronicles, sin upon sin was the experience of the Israelites which resulted in suffering. The people had abandoned God and the consequence was exile and subjugation by the Chaldeans. Only when they recognised their sins were they brought back. When we abandon God, He does not forsake us. Rather He allows the consequences of our actions to take their course. However, when we turn back to Him, He shows His mercy as He did through the pagan ruler Cyrus who allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland.
The recognition of sin is the key to God’s merciful love for us. Two things to be noted here. Firstly, exile is a powerful symbol of sin’s consequence because sin destroys relationship. God does not cut us off because we have sinned. Rather our sin cuts us off from God.
Secondly, why is recognition so important? Without acknowledging sin, how can we appreciate God’s saving mercy? St Paul in the 2nd Reading clearly states that nothing of ours can ever merit salvation. We are saved through grace and not through our own merits. Yes, the Catholic position is that grace saves through our cooperation. Without our cooperation, even God cannot do anything for us. That makes the recognition of sin so important.
Nicodemus’ conversation gives us a clue about how God saves. Through Jesus Christ the Son. In fact, the name of Jesus saves. The ancient symbol of the serpent lifted up will now be replaced by the Son of God Himself on the Cross. As St. Augustine puts it: “God loves each one of us as if there were only one of us to love”.
With God desiring to save each of us, our challenge is therefore to deepen the knowledge of our own need for God. The inability to recognise sin makes us all less of a sinner which makes our rejoicing rather superfluous. What does it mean?
Imagine food, good food. We are at a dinner and the food is to die for. The only problem is we are not hungry. When the stomach is so full, pleasure derived from eating will instead be anti-climactic. Instead of joy, it becomes a chore because we are full and not hungry. Better still. Can you visualise taking a shower when you are already clean or be admitted into hospital even though not sick.
Perhaps this is the curse of living in a therapeutic society that is controlled by the urge and the need to feel good. Our therapeutic mentality believes that as human civilisation progresses and that living conditions have improved dramatically all these correspond to the idea that we are actually a better people. We do not need salvation as much as we need to feel healthy. Interestingly, the words “salvation” and “health” are related because true healing is found in salvation.
Soon our beloved Elect will be going for their baptism. It is the bath of regeneration. The question to ask is this: Do they need to be washed clean? If so, their baptism begs a further question: So how can we be more acute in knowing that we are sinners? How to grow in the awareness of our sinfulness so that our joy of being loved and saved by God can be manifold?
We need to wean ourselves from a therapeutic God, the idea that God’s love is to make us feel good. God’s mercy is reassuring as today’s Gospel tells us. But that love for us must be based on an acute awareness of the need for redemption and forgiveness. The role of religion is not merely therapeutic. Its objective is salvific leading us to recognise the dark corners of our hearts that need the light of Christ. We easily hide in our sins rather than let the Light shine upon them.
For Christ’s light to shine, we have a duty to reclaim our moral conscience. It is not a clarion call to self-righteousness as if one were holier than the rest. But so far, we have abdicated our responsibilities and have outsourced our morality to social media—television, radio, journals, books, computer games etc. All these media freely dictate how we should think, see, hear and enjoy. They offer a worldview that is at best neutral or at worst, they are downright evil. Daily we are presented with evil as good and good regarded as out of touch with what is “acceptable” morally.
This is the darkness that has obscured our relationship with God. Without God, there is no foundation for our moral sense or compass. Also, we sort sins into categorie big and small. Ordinarily, we equate big as bad and small as “excusable”. Everybody does it, so what is the problem? But the burden of sin is not big or small. Rather, the crush is that anyone who sins does so because he or she is unable to stop the behaviour. The meaning of sin is to be caught in a trap in which one is powerless to flee. It is this inability to save ourselves that we must embrace and know. Our impotence in escaping makes our reaching out to God all the more urgent. God mercy may be infinite but the sobering truth is that we have a greater chance going hell than to heaven if we are dead in sin.
Few people believe this truth but instead choose to remain with the comforting notion that Laetare Sunday celebrates the joy of God’s love. However, we cannot just desire God’s love without first acknowledging that we are utter sinners who need His redemption. According to St John, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us". What is there to save if we were sinless which means we would have no need of Jesus and His salvation. Therefore, what are we doing here? Without the admission of our guilt, the constant stress on God’s immense love becomes an empty gesture. This is not unhealthy Catholic guilt. Salvation is free but it is not cheap. If we desire to saved, acknowledging our sinfulness is necessary. The price paid for our salvation is none other than the Son of God who laid down His life for us sinners.
