“Make a serpent and mount it on a pole,” God told his people after they repented. He offers us the same, writes Father Hawkswell. (Wikimedia Commons image)
Fourth
Sunday of Lent, Year B
First
Reading: 2 Chr
36:14-17a, 19-23
Second
Reading: Eph
2:4-10
Gospel
Reading: Jn
3:14-21
When God’s people were unfaithful to Him, God had compassion on them and persistently tried to reclaim them. However, they mocked his messengers and despised his words. Eventually, God’s wrath became “so great that there was no remedy,” we hear in this week's First Reading, and he punished them with destruction and exile.
Can God’s patience, then, be exhausted? Does his compassion have limits? Will he refuse to forgive us if our sin is too great?
No. God’s mercy is “infinite,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “boundless,” “endless,” “unlimited.” God is “infinite and merciful Love”; the “Amen of infinite love and perfect faithfulness.”
“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,” Jesus said. St. Paul speaks of the “immeasurable riches” of God’s “kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
God described himself to Moses as “a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity, ... yet not declaring the guilty guiltless,” but punishing “wickedness.” How can we explain this apparent contradiction?
The “end” for which we were created is “to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life,” says the Catechism. Now love, by its nature, must be given freely; it cannot be compelled. Accordingly, God has given us free will.
“Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love,” the Catechism explains. “They can therefore go astray.” In fact, they have sinned, thus introducing “moral evil” into the world.
“God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil,” the Catechism insists. “He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures.”
If God excused, ignored, overlooked, or simply erased our sins and their consequences, he would not be showing us compassion or mercy; he would be revoking our freedom and abandoning the “end” for which he created us.
Analogously, a mathematics teacher I know gives his students chance after chance to rewrite tests (different tests, but similar). However, he will not give them marks they do not deserve; he will not “pass” them when they fail. To do so, he explains, would be dishonest, for both a teacher and a mathematician. It would imply that his students were not worth teaching and mathematics not worth learning. It would be not kindness, but a total lack of respect and concern for his students.
When God’s people complained against him in the desert, God punished them with venomous serpents. When they repented, he did not ignore, overlook, or erase their sin; rather he sent them a remedy. “Make a serpent and mount it on a pole,” he told Moses, “and if anyone who has been bitten looks at it, he will recover.”
It is in justice to us, then, that God lets the world suffer the consequences of sin (also called “punishments” or “judgments”), the chief of which is death. However, in his infinite love, he also gives us the remedy.
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” Jesus said, “that whoever believes in him ... may not perish, but may have eternal life.”
“God’s passionate love for his people – for humanity – is at the same time a forgiving love,” Pope Benedict explains. “It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice ... so great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.”
“I do not fail students,” my teacher friend claims; “rather, they themselves fail by refusing to accept the chances I offer them.” God sent his son not to condemn the world, but to save it. It is not God who condemns sinners; rather, those who refuse to believe condemn themselves. “This is the judgment,” Jesus said: “the light has come into the world,” but they prefer darkness.