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
This Sunday’s readings seem to contrast God’s love and mercy with his justice.
“God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ,” St. Paul says.
Jesus describes the ultimate sign of this mercy: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Centuries before, this same merciful God had “persistently sent his messengers” to the Israelites, “because he had compassion on his people and his dwelling place.”
However, the people “kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words, and scoffing at his prophets.” Eventually, in his “wrath,” God allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed and its inhabitants to be carried off into exile for 70 years.
Is this the action of a merciful God?
God wants to adopt us as his children so that, like the one son he has begotten, we may share his divine nature and live forever. However, we have all inherited a bias toward evil from Adam and Eve. We find it difficult to hear God and easy to ignore him when we do hear him. To such fallen creatures, God’s goodness must contain an element of correction or remediation.
“Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us,” says C.S. Lewis. “We find God an interruption.”
God, who has made us, knows what we are. He knows that our happiness lies in him. However, he also sees that we will not look to him for happiness as long as there is anywhere else we can plausibly look for it.
As long as our own life remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to God, Lewis notes. What, then, can God do, in our own interests, “but make our own life less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness?”
Indeed, it is not only on evildoers that suffering and misfortune fall; “good” and “deserving” people are afflicted as well, Lewis points out.
“We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people,” Lewis says. However, God, who made us, knows that our happiness and prosperity in this world are not enough. All this will pass away, and if we have not learned to know him, we will be wretched forever. In his mercy, therefore, God troubles us, warning us in advance of an “insufficiency” that one day we will have to discover.
“My sons, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord, nor lose heart when he reproves you,” says the author of the Letter to the Hebrews; “for [he] whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he receives.”
Our earthly fathers discipline us “to prepare us for the short span of mortal life,” he says, “but God does so for our true profit, that we may share his holiness.”
If we are contented with the goods of this world, like physical health, God in his mercy removes the sources of that content. Thus he reveals his mercy’s infinite depths, by accepting us even when we have shown that we prefer almost everything else to him and come to him at last because we think there is nothing better to be had.
God’s love for humanity is so great “that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice,” says Pope Benedict: so great “that by becoming Man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.”
If we are ultimately condemned, it will be because we refuse to graduate from earthly pleasures to heavenly. “This is the judgment,” Jesus says: “that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English.”All the materials (video and print) are available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 26, “Sin and Forgiveness,” will be available March 14.