Several years ago I heard a woman giving her testimony of how God had healed her from terrible sexual abuse she had suffered from her father, from an early age. She said that her family knew nothing but abuse, incest, pornography. She was even sold to other men by her father and yet they went to mass every Sunday as a family. To outsiders, they looked like a perfectly normal family. Obviously the practicing of their faith didn’t mean an awful lot.
Another time I met a man in a hospital in Ireland who told me angrily that it was alright for the Archbishop of Armagh (the head of the Church in Ireland), to pray for priests who had done wrong and to spend the whole day praying for them if he wanted, but that he shouldn’t expect him or anyone else to have to pray for them. In fact how dare he even suggest that anyone else should have to pray for such people.
‘If your virtue goes no deeper than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ In modern English we would say, ‘If your faith is only outward signs, like going to mass, and saying religious things, you will never go to heaven.’ You will never get to heaven! That seems pretty strong coming from a God whom we say loves us so much. God takes us seriously, but He expects us to take him seriously as well. In fact He insists that we do.
Understandably this man I mentioned was very angry and felt let down by priests who had done wrong. I don’t blame him for feeling angry, but the point is that he seemed to think that it was ok for him to go on practicing his faith, on the outside, so long as he didn’t have to do anything like forgiving, or praying for others who have done wrong, the very things that our faith is all about. This is exactly what Jesus is talking about and it applies to every one of us, priests, Religious, all of us. The Lord is saying, ‘Go deeper than what you can just see. Live from your heart. Pray from the heart. Let your outward practice of faith, like praying at mass and doing novenas etc., be a sign of what is already happening on the inside.’
Jesus also says something quite shocking. He says that if part of you causes you to sin, cut it off! It is better to enter heaven missing one of your limbs, than to go to hell with all your limbs. What is He talking about? He is talking about the seriousness of sin. Today we have lost a sense of the seriousness of sin. Sin is the one thing that can prevent us from reaching the happiness we long for. Sin is the one thing that can prevent us from going to heaven when we die. If we do not repent of what we have done wrong, we may not enter heaven. If sin is not serious, then Jesus dying on the cross was a waste of time. If sin is not serious, then the mass means nothing, because the mass, which is a re-presentation of the sacrifice of Jesus, is all about the forgiveness of sins. That means that sin must be very serious.
Much of our world has lost an understanding of what sin is. You would be amazed at how many people come to confession and tell me they have no sins, or hardly any sins, even after several years. Sex outside marriage is considered normal and yet the Bible calls it the sin of fornication. Abortion breaks the Commandment, ‘You shall not kill,’ and yet now it is called healthcare.
The first words of the first reading say, ‘If you choose, you can keep the Commandments; they will save you.’ If you choose. They will save you.’ All day every day, we are being given choices for good or for evil and we must choose. ‘Before man are life and death, good and evil. Whichever he chooses, he will have.’
Sometimes the Ten Commandments are considered irrelevant in our world. But if we don’t ultimately take the standard of what is right and wrong from God, then where will we take it from? If you exclude the Ten Commandments then we have to make the laws of good and evil ourselves. That was the sin of Adam and Eve. Satan said to them, ‘God knows that as soon as you eat [the fruit], you will become like Gods yourselves, knowing good from evil (Gen 3:5).’ It is interesting that Adolf Hitler saw the Ten Commandments as one of the biggest obstacles to the success of his new world order. He believed that we needed to be liberated from them in order to progress and yet look what happened when that’s what they tried to do. Over 60 million people died in WWII. The same thing happened under Stalin and Lenin in Russia. We need God's Commandments, because they are what keep us on the right path.
Anything that offends God, is sin and we sin all the time. Sin is not just the big things, committing adultery, abortion, murder, stealing; it is also the everyday things that we do without even thinking about. We judge people: I mean we judge their heart. We see someone do something wrong, even minor things and we condemn them in our mind. That offends God. We speak badly of people—gossip—and that offends God. We lie and think it doesn’t matter and yet that is one of the commandments: ‘You shall not bear false witness.’ We get jealous, we lust, we refuse to forgive, we harbor bitterness and resentment, we use sharp words with people we have never even met. We neglect the people around us who need our help. We may think that we are only obliged to look after our families. If God gave you enough money to be comfortable, be thankful, but don’t forget you have an obligation to use it properly, not just for yourself and the same goes for me.
Recently I read of several cases where people experienced an illumination of conscience, that is, they were shown their own soul before God and how they would be judged at that moment if they had died. More and more people seem to be experiencing it. The testimonies of those who have experienced it are quite shocking. Many of them were well educated professionals and many of them Catholics too. They were shown everything they did in their whole life that offends God. Many of them were shown that if they had died at that time, they would have gone to hell, because they had pushed God so far away by the way they lived and in our world many of them would not be considered particularly sinful. Why did God allow them to experience this shocking illumination of conscience? to help them to change, because He loves us and doesn’t want any of us to be lost. Their lives changed drastically after this experience. Several accounts are written in a book called The Warning, by Christine Watkins. I would highly recommend it.
Maybe the language of being ‘lost’ and being ‘saved’ seems outdated, but it is what Jesus taught. It is real and the Lord constantly warns us to be careful of how we live, because our actions have eternal consequences.
The reason God keeps reminding us of what is sinful, is because He loves us. Sin damages us and God wants to protect us. So He guides us and shows us exactly what is right and what will damage us. If something is offensive to God, it will also hurt us.
‘Before man are life and death, good and evil. Whichever he chooses, he will have.’
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