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I’m pretty sure that
every one of us has experienced being caught in a lie. It may have been
a small “white” lie, uttered with what we pretended were the best of
intentions. But, we all knew very well what we were really trying to do
was to protect ourselves. Or, we may have been caught in one whopper of
a “complex” lie, an intricate web of deceit we had cleverly woven with
the clear intention of hiding the awful truth about the evil we
perpetrated. We didn’t want that made known, for any reason whatsoever.
Whether it was a
small or a complex lie, being caught lying—or,
for that matter, any evil act—can
prove to be quite an embarrassing thing.
When we are caught,
our first thought oftentimes focuses immediately upon ourselves. We
wonder: “What does the person think about me?” We may tell ourselves
that we’re really not evil, but our minds turn almost immediately to how
we might explain away the evil. Then, another question dogs us: “Will
that person will ever trust me again?” Desperately, we hope that person
won’t conclude that in the deepest core of our souls we are irredeemable
just because we have done something evil. While we desperately want to
hear them to say, “I forgive you,” we know all too well from personal
experience how very hard it is to say to another person who has hurt us,
“I forgive you.”
Earlier this week, I
heard a radio commercial for the Dr. Phil Show alluding to this
concept. This topic of this particular commercial caught my attention,
advertising as it did a Dr. Phil Show entitled “Husbands who
cheat on their wives.” I personally don’t believe that marital fidelity
is as big a problem in the real world as the media may make it out to
be, but Heidi Fleiss—the
famed “Hollywood Madam”—did
say recently that 95% of husbands cheat on their wives. For my part, I
still don’t believe it. But, what drew my attention to this commercial
was hearing Dr. Phil tell one of the adulterers in a rather stern tone:
“You’re not sorry for cheating on your wife. You’re just embarrassed
because you got caught.”
Dr. Phil was making
an excellent point. Spiritually speaking, there is a huge world of
difference between feeling embarrassment for getting caught in
sin and experiencing contrition for one’s sin. Embarrassment is
a self-protective responsive feeling while contrition involves deep
spiritual change as a result of true self-knowledge.
Sad to say, but not
unsurprisingly, most of what sinners fear is not so much the
consequences of perpetrating evil. No, what sinners really fear is
feeling embarrassed if and when they are caught in their evildoing.
Now, while it is
true that feeling embarrassed does demonstrate that the individual
possesses a degree of moral sensibility—after
all, the individual did know that the evil being perpetrated was wrong—feeling
embarrassed actually reveals a malignancy present in the soul because
the feeling of embarrassment is motivated by selfishness. We don’t oftentimes
think about embarrassment this way but “being embarrassed” really means
that the sinner is more concerned about what others may think about the
sinner. The sinner is less concerned—if
he is concerned at all—about
the evil he has perpetrated against another person and how that
threatens to destroy his soul as well as his relationships with others.
As Dr. Phil so rightly
noted, feeling embarrassed has very little to do with admitting the
truth that what one has done wrong. Why? Because feeling embarrassed
has nothing at all to do with coming to the painful realization and
self-knowledge that one has sold his soul to the power of Evil for the
equivalent of thirty shekels.
And so it is.
Rather than feeling embarrassed, sinners sew fig leaves together and
sport about in them in a vain effort to cover up their guilt, just like
Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. It’s all a pretense because,
after all, sinners know that the content of their character is so much
less than they feign it to be.
This is the
malignancy that ultimately threatens to destroy the divine life that God
has breathed into our souls. The fear of being embarrassed can prove so
debilitating that one becomes spiritually paralyzed and, even if one
should want to walk the pathway of virtue, this malignancy and its
resulting paralysis renders his soul utterly incapable of walking it.
The Prophet Isaiah
addressed today’s first reading to these very people. Addressing God’s
word to sinners not to saints, the prophet said:
“Remember not the
events of the past,
the things of long
ago consider not;
see, I am doing
something new….
you did not call
upon me…
for you grew weary
of me….
You burdened me with
your sins,
and wearied me with
your crimes.”
Whenever we sin, we may well dupe ourselves into believing that we won’t
get caught and, ultimately, won’t be embarrassed. But, Isaiah reminds us, God
already knows that we’ve sinned.
“How is that?” we
may wonder. “Is God watching over us and taking note of our every act?”
To these questions,
Isaiah responds an unequivocal, “No.”
God becomes aware of
sin not because people do something evil but because, when people do
evil, they change the way the relate to God. Sinners no longer call
upon God in prayer. Sinners grow weary of God and distances themselves
from those things that remind people of God, things like Church and its sacraments and, in particular, the Sacrament of Penance. In short,
sinners demonstrate little interest in and give little time to building
and maintaining a close and intimate relationship with God. Thus,
sinners are known to God not by their sin but by their distance and
absence in much the same way that parents know when a child has done
something wrong and tries in vain to hide from his parents.
So, while sinners
may feel the heavy weight of their sins burdening them and become
wearied by their crimes, Isaiah says that it is actually God who is
burdened and wearied by these sins and crimes. Why? Because when human
beings sin, God experiences the pain of their distance and absence in
much the same way human beings experience pain when their beloved is
distant or absent.
Think about it this
way: God has set a place for us at His table and has invited us to
partake of a great feast. God is joyfully awaiting our arrival so that
we can celebrate with Him. But, when we sin, we choose to absent
ourselves from His feast. Ever hopeful that we will be arriving soon,
God reserves our place at His table. But, it remains empty and, taking
note of our absence, there is only one explanation: by choosing to sin,
we’ve turned our backs on God. That’s how God knows that we’ve sinned.
The particulars really don’t matter.
It’s just like the
adulterers on The Dr. Phil Show.
Each adulterer has
introduced something very evil into his marriage and family life and, in
many if not most cases, his wife already knew it. And, as the adulterer
increasingly distanced and absented himself from the daily events of
life at home, as the adulterer increasingly invented excuses to distance
and absent himself from important events in the lives of family members,
and as the adulterer increasingly introduced strain to his marital
relationship because the adulterer was spending all of his energy
engaging in sin and then attempting covering it up, all the while the
adulterer was giving clear evidence of his sin. He has turned his back
on his solemn word, his wife, and his family for the equivalent of
thirty shekels.
In today’s first
reading, Isaiah reminds sinners that sin contorts our ability to
consider things from God’s perspective. The sinner—not
the saint—deludes
himself into falsely believing that God is upset with him and no longer
wants anything to do with him. And, as if to prove this is the case,
the sinner may even try to turn the tables on God by blaming God for
disinviting him from the feast. But, in reality, it is the sinner who
has chosen to distance himself from God and to absent himself from God’s
feast because the sinner fears feeling embarrassed in the clear
knowledge that God already knows everything about the sinner. And, sadly, when
sinners find themselves caught in this selfish, spiritually paralyzing
spiral, they close their ears and grow deaf to the words of hope that
Isaiah uttered:
“It is I, I, who
wipe out…your offenses;
your sins I remember
no more.”
Thinking solely
about themselves, the evil that they’ve perpetrated, and feeling
embarrassed for what they’ve done, sinners may find themselves obsessing
upon the events of the past and considering only their misdeeds of long
ago. Instead of returning to God who is awaiting sinners at His feast,
they grow weary of Him. Indeed, sinners may be physically alive but,
the sad truth is, their souls are paralyzed. When it comes to moral
character, sinners cannot even stand up on their own two feet to walk
the pathway of virtue, even if sinners wanted to.
All of us have
sinned and all of us fear being embarrassed if and when our sin is
exposed. That’s a natural reaction, St. Augustine says, showing that we
really know what the good is. By sinning, we have caused our souls to
become paralyzed and, spiritually speaking, we are—like
the child in today’s gospel—incapable
of standing up on our own two legs. We’ve become so spiritually
crippled by the evil choices that we’ve made that we may believe
sincerely that God has disinvited us from His feast and no longer wants
anything to do with us.
But, to sinners like
these, Jesus said:
“Why are you
thinking such things in your hearts?
Which is easier, to say to the paralytic,
‘Your sins are
forgiven,’
or to say, ‘Rise,
pick up your mat and walk?’ ”
To all those who fear feeling embarrassed by their sin, Jesus says: “But
that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins on
earth’—he said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, rise, pick up your mat, and go
home.’ ”
Our true home is
found in God. God has already reserved and set a place for us at His
table. All we have to do is, Jesus says, is to rise, pick up our mat,
and go home.
But, if we are do
that, we must first develop the self-knowledge associated with
contrition and not allow our fear of feeling embarrassed to debilitate
us.
What, then, is
contrition?
Contrition
is the action of God’s Holy Spirit rubbing against our weak and
paralyzed souls. It is an action similar to that of an expert Swedish
masseuse, but here, it’s our souls being exercised and healed of the
atrophy caused by years of living in sin and fear. Contrition awakens
within us the self-knowledge of the depths to which we’ve fallen and
quickens within us the strength to aspire to the heights for which God
has created us. With proper contrition, where there once was paralysis
of will to walk the pathway of virtue in order to return to God, the
power of will is strengthened so that, once again, we can walk that
pathway and return to God. Looking to the future, we do not dwell in
the past.
One who experienced
deep contrition and wrote about it was St. Paul. In today’s epistle, he
expressed his experience of contrition this way: “…the one who gives us
security with you in Christ and who anointed us is God; he has also put
his seal upon us and gives us the Spirit in our hearts as first
installment.” Contrition, then, enables us, as Isaiah said, to
“remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider
not” but instead to “see, I am doing something new!”
To spiritual
paralytics, Jesus says, “Rise,
pick up your mat, and go home.” It is the self-knowledge provided by
contrition that strengthens us to walk the pathway of virtue and to
return to God. Contrition for sin, then, is our acceptance as
disciples of what St. Paul called that “first installment.” |
HOMILY
