31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
First reading: Wis 11:22-12:2
Second reading: 2 Thes 1:11-2:2
Gospel reading: Lk 19:1-10

God created Adam and Eve in friendship and familiarity with himself, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. From the very beginning, he planned to divinize them: to let them share his own divine life by knowledge and love.

However, “seduced by the devil,” they tried to become divine by themselves, “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God.”

Now God is all-knowing and all-powerful. Why did he not make Adam and Eve so perfect that they would not fall for the devil’s lie?

The answer is that God loves us and, like any other lover, wants us to love him in return.

However, love, by its nature, must be free. We could not be said to love God if, in fact, we had no power to do otherwise. Accordingly, God gave Adam and Eve free will, which entailed complete self-mastery.

In complete freedom, then, Adam and Eve chose themselves over and against God, against their nature as created beings, and against their own good.

How could God respond?

He could not give up his plan to divinize them, for his love is constant and permanent.

He could not ignore their rebellion, for that would mean overriding the freedom he himself had given them. “Confronted with our human freedom, God decided to make himself ‘impotent,’” or “powerless,” said St. John Paul II.

So what did God do?

Right after Adam and Eve’s fall, God promised a victory over evil and the restoration of what they had lost. It was the first hint of a Saviour, a Redeemer, who would make amends for their disobedience and lack of trust.

To “redeem” is to “free” by “buying back” or “paying a ransom.” We had to be freed from the things that have enslaved us ever since the fall: the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and the desire for self-assertion. We had to be ransomed or bought back from Satan, who, by his success with Adam and Eve, had acquired a certain domination over us, including the power of death.

Finally, someone had to mend, repair, and restore what Adam and Eve had broken: make amends, reparation, and restitution for the damage they had done.

If a child smashes a window, he may repent, and be forgiven, but the window remains broken, and he can neither repair it himself nor pay for its repair. Similarly, we needed someone to take on the consequences of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, chiefly death.

God solved these problems by himself becoming our Redeemer. His love for humanity “is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice,” Pope Benedict XVI said: so great “that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.”

God corrects “little by little those who trespass,” so that “they may be freed from wickedness.” God the Son came not to condemn, but to save, the world: “to seek out and to save the lost.” he gives us all the help we will accept, all the wake-up calls we can hear, and all the time we need. “The day of the Lord,” when Christ will return as our Judge, is not yet here. We still have time to become “worthy of his call,” to “fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith.”

As long as there is hope that we will be converted, God will give us another chance. However, once our minds are made up (and he, who knows everything, knows when that is), he respects our decision, for him or against him.

If we choose him, he completes our purification and welcomes us into the love and life of the Holy Trinity.

If we reject him, we choose hell, “the state of those who definitively reject the Father’s mercy, even at the last moment of their life.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights. The whole course is available in written form and, one session per week, in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Father is also teaching the course in person: on Sundays at 2 p.m. in the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, Vancouver (33rd and Willow); and on Mondays at 10 a.m. in St. Anthony’s Church hall, 2347 Inglewood Ave., West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is “Liturgy: Public Worship.”

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