Some Thoughts For Lent - IV
Need a Savior
One of the many benefits of our annual spiritual journey of Lent should be a
renewed sense of humanity’s need for a Savior, along with our own personal
conviction of that absolute necessity in our life in order to fulfill our
purpose for existing, and so that we might in the end achieve ultimate and
long lasting happiness. Lent can and should bring us back from the peril of
what Archbishop Charles Chaput, the Archbishop of Denver wrote in his recent
outstanding book, “Render unto Caesar”: “By our actions many of us witness a
kind of practical atheism, paying lip service to God, but living as if He
didn’t exist. Many of us don’t really believe we need a Savior. In fact, we
don’t see anything we need to be saved from.”
The good Archbishop then quotes Father John Hugo: “Even in the case of those
who are wholly faithful to the external obligations of religion, there is
often little evidence, apart from their devotions, that they are living
Christian lives. Large areas of their lives are wholly unilluminated by
their faith. Their ideas, their attitudes, their views on current affairs,
their pleasure and recreations, their tastes in reading and entertainment,
their love of luxury, comfort and bodily ease, their devotion to success,
their desire for money, their social snobbishness, racial consciousness,
nationalistic narrowness, and prejudice, their bourgeois complacency and
contempt for the poor...in all these things they are indistinguishable from
the huge sickly mass of paganism that surrounds them.”
Wounded
Our Catholic faith teaches us that, because of Adam’s sin and our own sins,
our fallen human nature is seriously wounded and the entire natural order of
things has become subject to perversion and turbulence. Unlike the original
false doctrine of primitive Protestantism, Catholic truth maintains that our
human nature is wounded by original sin but not completely and hopelessly
corrupt. Nevertheless, the wounds from sin found in every human soul are
spiritually fatal unless we receive desperately and essentially needed
supernatural help from God in order to be saved. Saint Augustine, in this
context, often spoke of the whole human race as a “massa damnata” (a horde
of people destined for damnation) before Christ intervened to save mankind.
And, this salvation from our Lord is an utterly gratuitous and undeserved
gift. God never owes us anything, but we owe Him everything.
In next Sunday’s Gospel passage, Jesus vividly tells us in parable form how
close we all had come to eternal destruction. He speaks of God the Father as
an orchard Owner Who finds no fruit on a fig tree that He planted in His
garden and therefore orders it to be cut down and burned. Our Lord then
depicts Himself as a pleading Gardener Who begs the Owner to permit the tree
to live for at least for another year, promising to cultivate the ground
around it and manure it. If it does not respond to this treatment, this last
chance, and bear fruit, however, the Gardener tells the Owner that then,
after that last try, He could cut down that tree and destroy it (Luke
13:6-9). Our Lord also reminds us about our vital need to cooperate with
that Gardener, taking His advice seriously always, but especially in Lent:
“If you do not repent, you will all perish…”(Luke 13:5).
Angry God
Without that divine Gardener pleading for us and providing us by His saving
death and resurrection a possibility for our eternal happiness, our ultimate
fate would be horribly and everlastingly dismal instead. The possibility of
such a fate is described in what is one of the most famous New England
sermons, preached in the 18th century by the Puritan divine, Jonathan
Edwards, entitled: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”.
“God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some
loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His
wrath towards you burns like fire. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing
else but to cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you
in His sight. You are ten thousand times more abominable in His eyes than
the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended Him
infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is
nothing but His hand that holds you from falling into the fire at any
moment.”
“O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in. It is a great furnace of
wrath that you are held over in the hand of that God, Whose wrath is
provoked and incensed as much against you as against any of the damned in
hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing
about it, and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder And, you
have.....nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the
flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you have ever done,
nothing that you can do to induce God to spare you even one moment.”
Filling In
Jesus, the visibility of God’s unlimited kindness and generosity to our
human family, not only keeps God’s wrath from damning us all eternally by
His pleading, (much as Moses did for the Chosen People of the Old Covenant
in the anthropomorphic description found in the Book of Exodus 32:11-14),
but Christ voluntarily and obediently (Philippians 2:5-11) substitutes
Himself for us in His human nature, accepting, although utterly innocent,
the just punishment sinful humanity deserves: “....Who Himself bore our sins
in His Body upon the tree, that we, having died to sin, might live to
justice, and by His stripes you were healed...”(1 Peter 2:24; Isaiah
53:4-10).
Saint Luke, who tells about that sympathetic divine Gardener, also tells us
about how, when, after our sins had tortured and crucified Him, He still
continued to plead for us in that terrible moment on Golgotha with His first
words from the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they
are doing”(Luke 23:34). Lent is preeminently the season to remember vividly
our need for a Savior. We human beings cannot save ourselves, but we must
cooperate with God’s grace, reaching up and taking and keeping in our souls
the redemption and salvation Jesus provides for us. It is the time to recall
how He thought of us as He died, and how at least we must think of Him with
unfettered gratitude and show this in our Lenten practices of more devout
prayer, self-denial and penance, charity to the poor and to the Church.