Third Sunday of Lent, Year C
First Reading: Ex 3:1-8a, 13-15
Second Reading: 1 Cor 10:1-6, 10-12
Gospel Reading: Lk 13:1-9
If you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall,” St. Paul warns.
“Nearly they stood who fall,” C.S. Lewis says in a poem. “Themselves, when they look back, see always ... one torturing spot where all, by a possible quick swerve of will yet unenslaved ... might yet have been saved.”
“Nearly they fell who stand,” he continues. “These, with cold after-fear, look back and note how near they grazed the Siren’s land.”
“The choice of ways so small,” he concludes; “the event so great.”
We make a “perennial” attempt to reconcile heaven and hell, Lewis says, “based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or’”; “that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good” without our having to reject, finally and totally, “anything we should like to retain.”
This is a “disastrous error,” he says. In this world, “every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those two into two again, and at each fork we must make a decision,” moving toward God or away, growing into heavenly creatures or shrinking into hellish. There is no other possibility.
We cannot defend evil by arguing that “everybody does it.” In the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land, God treated all the Israelites alike, St. Paul notes, but he was not pleased with most of them, “and they were struck down.”
We might argue that we are not being “struck down,” but Jesus notes that those who are, are not necessarily any worse than the others.
We may plead that God forgives our iniquity, heals our diseases, redeems our lives from the pit, and crowns us with love and compassion, for he is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, but Jesus says that eventually, if the tree will not bear fruit, he will let it be cut down.
Hell is indeed a real possibility.
Not all who take wrong roads go there, Lewis says, but “their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.” We can correct an arithmetic mistake, but only by going back to the error and starting again. “Evil can be undone, but it cannot develop into good.” Time alone cannot heal it.
God wants to give us everything, even himself. Indeed, there is nothing else. “I am who am,” he said. “The Lord is God ... there is no other.”
God loves us as we are, but he wants to make us capable of enjoying him. That is what heaven is. Accordingly, his love is directed towards raising us up, not reassuring us that our present condition is acceptable.
When God came down to deliver the Israelites from slavery, many of them rejected him. “Why did you bring us out of Egypt?” they cried to Moses. “Did we not tell you ... ‘Leave us alone. Let us serve the Egyptians’?”
All too often, we say the same: “Leave me alone; I don’t need heaven; I’m quite happy with alcohol, sex, money, etc.” We might substitute “my wife,” “my husband,” “my family,” “my job.” However, if we do not choose God, it cannot matter what we choose instead.
“If we insist on keeping hell (or even earth), we shall not see heaven,” Lewis says; “if we accept heaven,” we cannot retain “even the smallest” souvenir of hell.
We all have such souvenirs. The Church frankly calls them sins. Lent is the time to examine our lives, recognize and admit our sins, turn back to the point where we started going wrong, and start again. The Church calls it repenting.
Unless we repent, Jesus says, we shall all perish. He instituted the sacrament of reconciliation to make repentance possible.
Take advantage of it.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1–24 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 25, “The Last Seven Commandments,” will be available in YouTube form starting March 20.