A Quick Look At God And Man

I don’t know if any of you happened to read last Sunday’s Gospel while I was away on my travels?  If you did, you’ll remember it described our Lord pausing as he made his way to the Holy City of Jerusalem, and, from a vantage point overlooking the city he wept over it, lamenting the sins of the people and the horrors that would soon befall them.  These were his chosen people, the people who had, over and over again, betrayed him and offended him with their iniquity.  No sooner had his first creations eaten of the forbidden fruit in Eden than their offspring Cain murdered his brother Abel, and it just went downhill from there.  At a certain point, God taught them a terrible lesson, wiping out the whole of humanity with a Great Flood, and preserving only one family to restart the process of replenishing the world.  Even after this, even after seeing the terrible Ten Plagues of Egypt, the Jews would never cease complaining in the desert, descending to the point of worshipping a false god in the form of a molten calf.  Almighty God was all too familiar with the treacherous iniquity of his chosen people.

Our attitude towards all this behavior in the Old Testament can so easily be one of detached scorn and complacency.  But in reality we’re no better than the Jews, and any feelings of superiority we may feel are misplaced.  The whole focus of the Old Testament, indeed of the entire history of man’s relationship with God, is on the Jewish people, simply because they were the people chosen by God to keep faith in him.  When they committed the ultimate betrayal by rejecting their Messiah and nailing him to a cross, God extended his chosen people, his elect, to the Gentiles—to us.  Do you want to go through the list of sins we’ve committed as Catholics since our Lord’s Ascension into heaven?  The warfare, the cruel tortures, the enforced poverty, persecutions—man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man seems to know no bounds.

We, like the Jews of old, are made of the same dust of the earth, we all have the same fallen nature, and every single one of us at some time or another have betrayed God with our offences against him.  So when we look around at the terrible plight of today’s world, our reaction to it should not be one of anger.  Everyone I talk to today seems to be angry for some reason or another.  It’s mostly justifiable anger, because, heaven knows, the sins around us seem to cry out to heaven for vengeance.  Nevertheless, we should pause, like Christ did as he approached Jerusalem, and take stock of the state of the new Jerusalem, which of course is Rome—and indeed of  the whole world.  And we should set aside our anger for a short time, and do what Christ did as he looked down on his world.  We should weep.  We should look at the sins of our fellow man, and indeed at our own sins, and we should shed tears of anguish for what we’ve done to hurt God.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be angry, only that we shouldn’t be in a permanent state of anger.  Our true emotive response to sin should be one of deep sadness and a desire to make reparation to our blessed Saviour for all he endured because of these sins.  We should feel profound compassion for those who wallow in the depths of their wickedness, because they are in a place without grace, without God.  And that’s a terrible place to be.

But after our moments of recollection on these thoughts, then by all means be angry too!  Once our Lord had wept over Jerusalem, he wasted no time marching into the temple and whipping the moneylenders who sinned there, overturning their tables and driving them out.  Our anger should likewise be spent whipping the clergy of the new Temple, overturning the tables they’ve set up in our sanctuaries and driving them out of Rome and out of our churches.  These churches were built for the glory of God, not man.  They are God’s houses, and as our Lord told them, “My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves.”  Yes, there’s a time for anger too!

It’s worthy of note how our Lord reacted to sin, with this mix of anger and compassion.  Bearing in mind that he is our Lord and Master, our great Teacher whom we should emulate, we now know how we too should behave.  We can do no better than follow his example.

But what does any of this have to do with today’s great feast of the Transfiguration?  Actually, there’s an essential correlation between the two Gospels of last Sunday and today.  Last week we have seen how our Lord views us, and, in turn, how we should view our fellow man and all his wrongdoings.  Today, we turn things around as our Lord is transfigured before us.  It is now our turn, man’s turn, to view God in all the glory of his perfection.  And while we can follow the example of Christ, who in his human nature experienced the emotions of love, compassion, and even anger, today we see him not as an example to follow—we can never be as glorious and perfect as he is—but as the ultimate end of all the joys, sorrows and vicissitudes of this sorry life of ours.  Our reaction today is not so much to copy what he does as to stand in awe before what he is.

And did I say we should not try to emulate him in his perfection?  Actually, it is this very glory of perfection that causes us to aspire to perfection ourselves.  Christ calls us to be perfect, knowing very well we can never reach true perfection, and yet pleased with our efforts in striving for it.  May our reading of today’s holy Gospel thus re-inspire us to make those efforts.

Two Sundays: on the first we are witnesses to Christ’s reaction to man.  We learn how God truly sees man, as someone to be wept over.  Our response is to evoke similar compassion for our fellow travelers.  And now, this Sunday, it’s not our Lord’s concern with man but our reaction to him as he truly is.  Today, we act upon what he taught us last week, we show compassion and mercy for our neighbor, we make reparation for their sins and ours, we plead with God to have mercy upon us and on the whole world.  And by doing so, we take one step closer to God, one step up the ladder of perfection, ever, ever nearer to the arms of our most loving, perfect and glorious Creator.