Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 465

Consequently, those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham who had faith.
For all who depend on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, Cursed be everyone who does not persevere in doing all the things written in the book of the law. And that no one is justified before God by the law is clear, for the one who is righteous by faith will live.

With the insights of Karl Marx the modern world has begun to recognize how powerful persons, ideologies and institutions can get into one's mind and shape how one sees, thinks and feels. "Context is consciousness." Even an institution like the Church, which may not have much financial or military power, comprised mostly of people with little influence beyond its walls, can persuade millions of people to live not by faith but by the law. 

As a child, I was assured with absolute confidence that eating meat on Friday and missing Mass on Sunday were mortal sins. Were I to commit these infractions of the law and die before going to confession, I would most certainly spend all eternity in the ferocious fires of hell. 

Not only did I believe that; so did my parents and three of my grandparents. (The fourth,  a Methodist, was apparently exempt from those particular laws.) 

Only after many years of education and counter-indoctrination did I realize how my well-meaning but misinformed instructors had enforced the man-made disciplines of the Church with the threat of endless doom. Leaders of the Catholic Church, threatened by competition in the religious marketplace of the United States, insisted upon consumer loyalty among Catholics with excessive and ultimately absurd threats. When Protestant churches appealed to spiritual consumers with the same promises of eternal bliss, Catholic pastors could only scale up their threats of unending misery to anyone who might attend a "non-Catholic" wedding or funeral. But even in this enlightened 21st century I know of a pastor who threatened hellfire on parishioners who did not buy a lot in the parish cemetery. (He lost some good members when he made that statement.) 

Many people finally shook off those threats like old clothes. In the springtime of freedom they could not even remember why they had worn such wintry, stifling jackets.  

However, it's one thing to learn to live without the threats; it's another to live without the promises the same laws bestowed upon us. Going to confession doesn't necessarily wipe the slate clean, I am as much a sinner leaving the confessional as I was entering it. I may feel good about going to Church but I am not relieved of the responsibility to announce the good news to every creature. 

Saint Paul saw that clearly. Living by faith means living in freedom from the law. But freedom is always accompanied by anxiety. Freedom means I am responsible not only for everything I do, I am also responsible for what I don't do, even those things I forgot to do. Nor can we, in Christ, find solace in old customs and habits. 

Rather, righteousness by faith is confidence in the benevolent, friendly gaze of Jesus. He has looked upon you and me from the manger where he was born. He delighted in our company as a boy, admiring our strength, cleverness and skills. He watched us coming from John the Baptist's riverside school to join him on the road and welcomed us. He healed our eyes that we might see more clearly, love more dearly and follow more nearly his footprints in the road. He watched us from Calvary as we stood at a bewildered distance; and still he loved us. 

The Lord has seen us take our eyes off of him and even yet watched us closely, reaching out to us and pulling us with an an outstretched hand from turbulent waters. 

Always we are tempted to run back to the Pharisaic fortress of laws, habits, customs, threats and promises; to cash in our freedom for security. Continually he tells us to set out for the deep for a catch.