The preaching of John the Baptist
Stop a moment, and think about what it means to you to be a Christian, and what it means to live a Christian life. How do you understand these things, and how would you describe them to others?
Too easily we can slip into the mistake of moralism – that is, understanding Christianity primarily as a moral code, a set of rules to be followed, and of evaluating our lives by how well we follow the code and keep the rules. Corresponding to this, we understand our status before God as a kind of account with positive and negative columns, with the hope that all the good we do will outweigh the sins we commit. If this is our perspective, we may find our selves in the company of those in today’s First Reading who hurl the accusation “Not fair!” against the Lord, or of the chief priests and the elders in today’s Gospel who resisted the invitation of John the Baptist to a change of heart, or of the Philippians whom St. Pauls exhorts to set aside division, selfishness, self-interest and rivalry. In place of moralism, the Scripture readings for today’s Mass offer us a different way of understanding our lives as Christians: a direction, integrity – the quality of adhering to the truth, and above all a relationship.
If we think of our lives as a kind of balance sheet, the Lord’s ways described through the prophet Ezekiel in the First Reading will certainly seem unfair. How could it be that a person who has lived uprightly would be condemned simply by having made a few mistakes? Shouldn’t the whole of his or her life, and all the good he or she may have done, be taken into consideration? The problem here is reducing our lives to a kind of calculation, or a set of scales. Beginning with Abraham in the Old Testament, the response that God asked of His people was obedience: to walk in the way He pointed out to them, to follow an itinerary, a pilgrimage of faith. The language of this imagery is repeated throughout the Responsorial Psalm. What matters then is the direction in which one’s life is heading. In the First Reading the mistake is one of “turning away” and heading in the wrong direction, away from the Lord and not toward Him, against the current of His will and not according to its flow, toward darkness and not toward light. The destination is determined by the direction: walking away from life leads to death. Walking consistently toward light and life, on the other hand, gradually produces a specific quality in us: virtue, integrity – what the first reading calls righteousness or justice. This is not the “accumulation” of good deeds as much as it is the growing tendency to adhere to what is true, what is good, what will bring me to my destiny.
The Gospel and the Second Reading bring an amazing new dimension to this question, however. Jesus puts the whole matter in the context of a relationship between a father and his child. The father in the parable approaches his child and makes a personal request of him. This is a totally different way of approaching the way we live our lives! And, of course, the response of the child will affect positively or negatively his relationship with his father. This is what is at stake: not a rule, but a relationship! And not any relationship, either, but one of the best of fathers with the child whom He loves and wants to have the fullness of life! This understanding is reinforced by the Second Reading in which St. Paul proposes to the Philippians the example of the Son and His obedience unto death, imploring them to live not as self-centered rivals, but as brothers, sons of the same Father.
The Word of God in today’s liturgy offers us the possibility of experiencing the joy the tax-collectors and prostitutes discovered in becoming children of the Father, and brothers and sisters of one another, in Christ the Son.
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