24th Sunday of Ordinary
Time
Sept. 13, 2020
Rom 14: 7-9
Holy Name of Jesus,
Valhalla, N.Y.
“If we live, we live for the Lord” (Rom 14:
8).
Can you believe we’re still reading from St.
Paul’s Letter to the Romans? And we’ve
been reading only small excerpts from its 16 chapters? Well, today we’ve come to the last of the 13
Sundays in this Roman sequence.
For
most of these 13 weeks, Paul has given us doctrinal lessons, e.g., about our
participation in the death and resurrection of Christ. In the last couple of weeks, he got to the
practice, about how we are to live as followers of Jesus. That’s what underlies today’s 3 verses from
ch. 14 of the letter.
This
chapter concerns some disputes among the Christians in Rome about how closely
they should follow Jewish practices—some of the believers were Jews, some
Gentiles. So they argued about diet,
festal observances, and practices that might be linked at least conceptually
with idolatry.
Paul
pulls them up short: none of us lives
for himself. In life or in death, we
belong to the Lord, to Jesus Christ (v. 8).
So whatever we may eat, however we might celebrate (or not) the
traditional Jewish Sabbath and feasts, we do everything for the Lord and not
for ourselves. We don’t insist on our
own way for the entire community: “My
way or the highway!”
This
applies very much to the Church today.
On the political front, Catholics and other Christians argue hotly about
presidential candidates, and some are ready to excommunicate people on the
other side. Our bishops, those
commissioned by our Lord Jesus to speak in his name, lay out principles that we
must consider as good citizens before we vote or otherwise engage in electoral
politics—at any level. (And we have a
moral obligation at least to vote; lay Catholics are encouraged to be actively
engaged politically, whereas the clergy are forbidden to do so in any partisan
way.) We all ought to read what the
bishops have published. It’s a pamphlet
called “Faithful
Citizenship,” and you can find it easily online.
Pope
Francis, likewise, is ready to engage in dialog with anyone: socialist, capitalist, atheist, head of
state, common folk, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, saint, or
sinner—and treat everyone respectfully as a child of our one Creator, as
someone whose soul he wishes to touch.
 |
| Fall of the Rebel Angels (Pieter Bruegel the Elder) |
It’s
really arrogant, an act of the deadly sin of pride, to think that I am the font
of all truth, goodness, and righteousness.
That’s a temptation we all have at times, isn’t it? When theologians speculate about how angels
became demons, how Lucifer became Satan, they usually ascribe it to pride, to
their thinking they were wiser than God himself, and their rebelling against
God’s intentions. That’s not in the
Bible as such, but it is consistent with St. Paul’s words today: “None of us lives for himself.”
In
the Church today, we see many divisions.
Many people have gone into schism—a word that means “division”—because
they reject the 2d Vatican Council.
Battles are fought all over social media—self-righteous, angry,
un-Christlike battles—over the teachings and actions of Pope Francis, even over
whether he’s really a legitimate Pope; over individual bishops and individual
priests; over liturgy, the sacraments, and other church practices. America Media’s podcast this week is called “Pope
Francis’ critics are dividing the Church.”
A recent book put it this way:
“Being like Christ is not about making people think like
you, but loving people as they are, wherever they may be.”[1]
“If
we live, we live for the Lord,” Paul says.
Do we listen to the words of Jesus and the words of the rest of our
Scriptures? Do we focus on our
relationship with Jesus Christ and not on any other messiah, whether that be a
church leader or a political one or some entertainer or economist or business
guru?
If
we do live for Christ, we may indeed discern whether someone’s words or actions
are good, bad, or indifferent. The
Scriptures do urge us to discriminate in that sense. But we may not pass judgment on the person,
may not condemn. That belongs only to
the Lord. We may judge only ourselves,
whether we truly live for Christ and are being faithful to him. For everyone else, we pray, and we show
mercy, patience, and forgiveness, as Jesus teaches in today’s parable (Matt
18:21-35).
[1] Marie Mutsuki Mochett, American
Harvest (Graywolf Press, 2020), emphases in the original, cited in America,
June 8, 2020, p. 43.
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