26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Ez 18:25-28
Second Reading: Phil 2:1-11
Gospel Reading: Mt 21:28-32

“When the righteous person turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall die for it,” God says in this Sunday’s liturgy. “When the wicked person turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is lawful and right, he shall save his life.”

Like the Israelites, we find this “unfair.” We imagine we have a contract with God: if we are, say, 80 per cent good, God will overlook our sins and admit us to heaven; if we are 75 per cent bad, he will refuse to forgive us and condemn us to hell.

But as St. Thomas More warned, the only signature on a contract like that will be ours; God will not sign it.

To begin with, everything we call ours is God’s gift, even our freedom to act and make decisions. If we think we can use our gifts to bargain with God, we are like children who think they can use their allowance to bargain with their parents.

Nevertheless, confronted with the freedom he himself has given us, God has decided to make himself powerless, as Pope St. John Paul II said in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. God loves us and wants us to love him; but love, by its nature, cannot be compelled; God can woo us, but he cannot make us love him. Our love, then, is all we have that is not already his.

Now love does not bargain. No lover says, “I’ll love you this much if you’ll love me that much,” or “I’ll be 80 per cent faithful to you if you’ll do the same.” Love proposes not a contract or a bargain, but a covenant: not an exchange of goods, but an exchange of persons in their integral totality.

In our love affair with God, we cannot cling to even one sin, no matter how minor. If we refuse to obey even one of God’s commandments, we reject his love, no matter how many of the others we keep. Every mortal sin makes us “guilty with regard to the entire law,” Pope John Paul said in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

Now we weak and fallen creatures find it difficult to maintain the total gift of ourselves to God. Like the second son in this Sunday’s liturgy, we say, “I am going, sir,” but do not go. Like the first son, we even say, “I will not go.”

However, if we repent, if we change our minds and go, no matter how late, God forgives us and accepts us back. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal: the permitted, regularized presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our own.”

We are tempted to put off our repentance, presuming on God’s inexhaustible mercy. We never reject God outright, and we intend to submit to him before we die, but, in the meantime, we think there is no harm in breaking his commandments now and then. We act like a spouse who never walks out on their partner but who allows himself or herself the occasional adultery.

A real golfer always aims for the cup, I have been told, not just somewhere on the green. Every single stroke counts, for it reinforces or weakens his habit of holing out.

Similarly, every single moral choice counts. In every decision and every action, we either acquire bit by bit by God’s grace the habits of heavenly creatures who will be at home in heaven with God and the saints, or we become hellish creatures who will spend eternity isolated in hatred.

We do not know when God will come for us; we must always be ready to welcome him in love. As St. Paul says, we must have the same mind “that was in Christ Jesus,” obeying God wholeheartedly and looking not to our own interests, but to those of others.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge.  All the materials (video and print) are available online at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 4, “The History of Our Salvation,” will be available as of Sept. 27.