12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Jer 20:7, 10-13
Second Reading: Rom 5:12-15
Gospel Reading: Mt 10:26-33
“Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, so death spread to all because all have sinned,” St. Paul says. “Death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam.”
The transmission to the whole human race of the original sin and its consequences is a mystery we cannot fully understand, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
However, we know that in Adam, human nature itself had been endowed with holiness and justice. By their sin, our first parents altered that nature, perverting the human spirit and disturbing its relation to the psyche and the body.
Their sin was not like the formation of a bad habit or the loss of an organ, which would vanish with the individual; it was more like a genetic variation, which would be inherited. Adam and Eve could no longer transmit human nature to their descendants in its original innocence, but only in a fallen state.
Adam and Eve committed the original sin, but we contract it; for us, it is a state and not an act. In this state, our nature is wounded in its human powers, inclined to sin, and subject to ignorance, suffering, and death.
However, God did not abandon us. “Just as a single offence brought condemnation to all men, a single righteous act brought all men acquittal and life,” St. Paul says. “Just as through one man’s disobedience all became sinners, so through one man’s obedience shall all become just.”
It seems to be a principle of nature that little things shall have great consequences. I recall the title of a lecture by a meteorologist: “Predictability: does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”
Physicists study this principle in what they call Chaos Theory. St. Bernard must have had it in mind when he wrote his homily entitled, “The whole world awaits Mary’s reply.”
How appalling, we think, that the fall of an entire race should depend on Adam and Eve’s decision! How wonderful that our salvation should depend on Mary’s reply to the angel!
Do we ever stop to think how much can depend on our own decisions, no matter how trivial they seem to us?
A match can start a forest fire. A microbe can start an epidemic. A whisper can break up a marriage or a friendship. A moment’s unkindness by a Catholic can turn someone away from the Church for life.
On the other hand, a moment’s kindness can bring someone to Christ, for as long as we do it to even the least of his brethren, we do it to him.
Once, many years ago, I lost my temper with an old friend, stormed out of his house, and refused to answer the phone for a few hours. Eventually, he drove over to my place at 2:00 am, rang my doorbell, and apologized for his part in the quarrel.
Besides our reconciliation, who knows what good may have come of that loving gesture? Who knows what evil may have been prevented?
No moral decision, however private, is too small to affect the very history of the world. “Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known,” Jesus said.
“We firmly believe that God is master of the world and of its history,” the Catechism says. Evil will not triumph, for the Lord is with us “like a dread warrior,” and “the Lord hears the needy.”
“But the ways of his providence are often unknown to us.” Only at the end, “when we see God face to face, will we fully know the ways by which—even through the dramas of evil and sin—God has guided his creation to that definitive sabbath rest for which he created heaven and earth.”
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available on YouTube in both written and audio form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, and will remain available until the end of August. Father will teach the whole course again, with new insights, starting August 30.
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