9th Sunday after Pentecost
The scene of today’s Gospel takes us back to Palm Sunday. As Our Lord and His disciples approach the city, they reach a promontory today known as the Dominus flevit, where Our Lord halts, takes in, across the valley, the spectacular sight of the holy city, and, unexpectedly, begins to weep. With His divine foresight, He contemplates the awful scenes that will take place there 40 years later when the Roman legions will besiege the city, starve it to death and then utterly destroy it, crushing it to the ground, killing over a million Jews and taking the remainder into an exile which will last to the end of time.
The destruction of Jerusalem was a turning point in history. It sealed the transfer of God’s promises from the Hebrew people to the Church of Jesus Christ, true heir of the promises of God to Abraham and the fathers. It was a divine chastisement of incalculable proportions, inflicted for the countless sins of the nation, and in particular for that gravest of all sins, the rejection and crucifixion of the Messiah. The people had handed Him over to be crucified by the Romans, crying out, “His blood be upon us and upon our children”. Forty years later, God hands over the same people to the same Romans. And the mighty arm of Rome would show no pity.
We might ask ourselves: how can this be? Is not God loving, merciful and full of compassion, one that we can always turn to even when we sin? Yes, He is indeed, there is no limit to His mercy for those who turn to Him with humility and contrition. The problem is not on God’s side, but on the side of the sinner who does not want to convert, who does not want to see. Even though there were some Jews who believed in Christ, Jerusalem, for the most part, refused the light of God, obstinately blinded itself to the truth, and that left God only one course of action: chastisement.
Yes, God does chastise. The idea of a God who never punishes is as foreign to the content of Revelation as that of the very existence of God. It is present on nearly every page of the Bible, and denying it can only be attributed to either a lack of faith or bad faith. God does chastise, and even though most of His punishments are medicinal, they are not always so. The very existence of Hell and its everlasting punishment is divinely revealed evidence that there are punishments that are purely vindictive. Souls that reject God can only be rejected by Him eternally. The repetition of sin can reach a level at which there is nothing more that God can do than punish. It is a bitter thing to abandon the Living God, to turn one’s back on His grace, the time of His visit.
Our Lord Himself tells us the fundamental reason for Jerusalem’s punishment: Because you did not know the time of your visitation. You did not recognise the time that God was visiting you in His mercy, so you must now be visited by His chastisement. The word visitation is often used in Holy Scripture to designate a punishment. God is said to visit the enemies of Israel when He overcomes them. But there are also visits of grace, moments when God sends inspirations, either directly or through an intermediary. The great visit of God to the world was when He came Himself in the Person of His Son. That visit is actually ongoing through the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, present throughout history as the sign of God’s abiding presence. The preaching of God’s word, the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the other sacraments, the presence of a priest or consecrated person, all are visits of God that call the soul to repentance.
In today’s epistle, St Paul gives us to be on the lookout for four ways by which we could fall into the same trap the Hebrews did in the desert. He names idolatry, sexual immorality, putting Christ to the test and murmuring. When we think of idolatry, we imagine the Buddhist prostrating before a statue of Buddha, but idolatry is a much more vast concept, including any value given to a creature that should be reserved for God. From this perspective, many people who say they don’t even believe in God are actually idolaters, because they make themselves the centre of their lives. Putting Christ to the test means essentially refusing to trust in Him. Our Blessed Lord has shown in countless ways that He is truly the Son of God, and therefore, we must trust Him blindly. To fail to do so is to put Him to the test, as if we were the Lord and He the servant, and this is a very grave sin: Christ has no need to prove Himself to us; we are the ones who need to prove ourselves to Him. Murmuring is a sign of a deep-seated lack of satisfaction with the circumstances of our lives, and it too is a form of mistrust in the Lord. This is why St Benedict is very harsh with murmuring and does not allow it in any situation. The person who murmurs, even in his heart, is not able to praise God and serve his neighbour. Everything is wrong because nothing corresponds to his tastes; he, too, is the centre of his own universe.
If Our Lord wept over Jerusalem, seeing its coming chastisement, He weeps over every soul that is obstinate in the rejection of the truth, especially when that soul shuts his/her eyes and will not see. What are the kinds of blindness we see most often nowadays? What are the ways people use to divert their thinking from God’s visit, and thus deflect His grace? For the most part they are the same as in every generation: immersion in sensual gratification, misuse of alcohol and drugs; but our age has a new drug to drown out its conscience, namely the omnipresence of social media which, instead of the peaceful presence of God, places them under the all-seeing Eye of the evil one; for some it will be various brands of workaholism, keeping oneself so busy with what we like to do that we leave no time for God to touch our heart; for them His visits come but like rain falling on an umbrella it cannot bring us the refreshing touch of grace. Today’s Gospel is meant to be a wake-up call, to listen to the voice of the Lord instead of following the Pied Piper of Hamelin to the destruction that awaits all those who follow any but the true God.
To give us courage as we move forward in the path of faith in the Son of God, St Paul tells us that sin is never inevitable, for “God will not suffer you to be tempted above what you are able to bear”. There is always a way to avoid falling into the sin of idolatry, the sin of sexual immorality, the sin of murmuring and putting Christ to the test. If we employ the means we have at our disposal, if we pray frequently, if we receive the sacraments worthily, if we do not put ourselves in occasions of sin, we will stand with the Lord and proclaim, as we shall do so shortly in the offertory verse: The justice of the Lord is right, it gives joy to the heart; His judgments are sweeter than honey, they give delight to the soul. Yes, the soul that takes time with the Lord comes to know and to experience the sweetness of life with Him and the bitterness and boringness of life without Him. We can then go forward with joy to the altar of God to receive the life-giving Body of the Saviour in Holy Communion and take part in His very life, as we shall sing in the Communion verse.
Let us be attentive to the visits of God’s grace. Let us receive Him today into our hearts. Let us, while there is time, turn to Him with humility and penance. While we have reason to fear that, like the Jews of old, because of our sins we deserve to see the destruction of our civilisation and indeed our very lives, we need to recall how Abraham prayed to God for Sodom, and was able to bargain with Him to save the depraved city if only ten good souls could be found. Alas, we know that there were not ten. Let us beseech Almighty God to have mercy on us, and let us strive to be among the little flock that remains faithful, that is attentive to God’s visits, that does not let the grace of God pass in vain. Maybe, just maybe, if God finds ten good souls in Tasmania, maybe we will be spared.
Today, if you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.
