Wednesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time

…work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

For God is the one who, for his good purpose,
works in you both to desire and to work.

Like a dutiful parent, Saint Paul usually scolds as he praises, but he has no complaints about his people in Philippi. He only exhorts them to further works of charity and deeper faith in the gospel he has preached.

I am struck by his expression, which reflects his Jewish tradition. They should “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

People often react against that kind of expression. “Why should we fear God? God is only good. We have nothing to fear in God. Look how many times Jesus tells us, ‘Do not be afraid!”

And yet there is that foundational teaching from the Book of Proverbs, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

A debate of scripture passages is a healthy argument.

I think some of today’s reaction against “the fear of the Lord” reflects the war zone in which many of us grew up. If World War II was over in Europe and the Pacific, it lingered in many American homes of the 1950’s with the stench of beer and the haze of cigarette smoke. Emotional, physical and sexual violence hid beneath the veneer of religious piety, whose god was terrible. He kept a record of both transgressions and good deeds; and, because simple obedience and attention to duty didn’t count, the black always out-weighed the gold. There was no getting ahead with that god.

Some dread still lingers around the Sacrament of Penance. In the 1970’s Cardinal Ratzinger issued a statement reminding bishops and pastors that second graders should receive the Sacrament of Penance before First Communion. He insisted the two mysteries are closely related.

But many catechists and parents feared the dark box with its sliding panels and hardened knee pads. They asked, “Can’t we put off that trauma until the fourth grade?”

They recalled the spiritual warfare that had lingered in the confessionals of the 1950’s. Former soldiers had fled a brutal world by entering the seminary. Now they endured the murmured confusion of small children. Some, no doubt, converted their personal, endless war into “spiritual warfare” for their young penitents. Other priests, who had heard battlefield confessions, suffering unrecognized post-traumatic stress disorder, sitting in the airless confessional without a drink or a smoke, must have gritted their teeth through the endless line of Catholic grade school children.

Every month without fail, on the day before First Friday, we marched through "the box." In those days work was the only salvation and children, parents, teachers and priests worked through it with fear and trembling. And God help the child who actually spoke of a sexual thought, word or deed!

Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians is a message of joy. He knows nothing of darkened confessionals and priests with PTSD. His God is not a bearded old man with a perpetual scowl and a book of black and gold marks.

He writes his letter from a prison someplace, to friends who are also suffering for their faith in his gospel. He has discovered in an apparently hopeless situation irrepressible joy. There is nothing they can do to him to take his joy away. He is free to laugh and sing and praise God as never before and he shares that privilege with his faithful co-sufferers.

For Saint Paul, working out your salvation with fear and trembling means being grateful for every hardship and being pleasant through every disappointment. It means take up your cross daily and follow in my steps.

Only a man in prison can tell us how important it is to

work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
For God is the one who, for his good purpose,
works in you both to desire and to work.