2nd Sunday of Lent, B February 25, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
A story. A true one, as far as I know. At a church elsewhere in Louisiana, there was a young pastor who once opened the door to find a gun pointed straight at him. Holding that gun was a nervous looking man who rather shakily said, “Father, I’m sorry but God told me I have to kill you.” Inspired, he quipped, “oh, God just told me to tell you that you don’t have to kill me anymore.” The man lowered the gun, breathed a heavy sigh of relief, and said “thank God! I didn’t really want to do it.” The priest was then able to direct the man to some psychiatric help.
There’s a lot to unpack in that story, but what’s most interesting to me is how quickly the would-be gunman accepted the priest’s interpretation of God’s will. He thought he had a direct order from God, but the priest’s authority was so powerful that he believed him over his own inspiration. Of course, the truth is that his inspiration never came from God in the first place. It was a demonic delusion.
In our first reading, Abraham is told by God to kill someone: his own innocent son – the same son God himself gave him in fulfillment of a promise. Like the gunman in the story, Abraham sets out to do what he is told but is stopped at the last minute by a messenger from God, much to his own relief. Still, unlike the gunman, Abraham is praised by God himself for being willing to kill his own son on God’s orders.
What’s the difference? Both men were told to kill someone. Both were willing to do it. Both were stopped by someone at the last moment. Why is one holy and the other crazy? In the Gospel we just heard, God the Father’s voice booms from heaven: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” Listen as in obey him. Okay, sure, but what if Jesus appears to me, telling me to kill someone? Should I do it? Abraham obeyed, right?
This is why some non-Christians are afraid of us! It’s part of the reason the FBI put Catholics on a watchlist. It’s why one famous atheist refuses to even debate Christians. They think we believe it’s okay to kill innocent people if God tells us to. Are they wrong? I mean, look at what our readings just said. How can we argue with that?
Because of Jesus Christ and his body, the Church. The priest in that story really did have the authority to tell the gunman God’s will. Abraham came before Jesus Christ. We come after. Jesus Christ makes a difference. The Incarnation matters. His passion, death, and resurrection matter. His establishment of the Church really matters. You can’t just blindly copy Old Testament stories because Jesus Christ changed everything. Moses and Elijah are with Jesus on the mountain, but then they see Jesus alone. The Old Testament is fulfilled and transfigured in Jesus Christ. If we forget that, we will misinterpret the Old Testament. That can be very dangerous. It certainly costs us a lot of credibility.
Prior to Jesus Christ and the Church, God’s communication was both simpler and less complete. Abraham didn’t have some psychotic compulsion to kill his son. God spoke to him as clearly as I’m speaking now, but he also held back important details. He did this repeatedly throughout Abraham’s life. Still, Abraham wasn’t wrong about what God told him to do, God really did tell him to sacrifice Isaac.
But God did not tell him the full plan. God set up this dramatic moment to make his point in a memorable way. He always planned to stop the sacrifice. By doing it at the last moment, he both tested Abraham’s trust and used history itself to show the whole world that human sacrifice is not what he wants. More importantly, it serves as a prophetic foreshadowing of his own son’s sacrifice on the Cross: Isaac carries the wood – Jesus carries the cross; the ram’s horn are caught in thorns – Jesus is crowned with thorns; Isaac is saved from death – Jesus is raised from death. All this because Abraham trusted and obeyed.
That brings us back to the command in the gospel: Listen to him. Well, how do we know what Jesus says? Can I be sure that he won’t tell me to kill an innocent person? Yes. He already said not to. After Abraham, God gave the Ten Commandments: thou shall not murder. Jesus repeated the Ten and intensified them with commands to love even our enemies. Knowing our human tendency to get confused, he also established a Church to authoritatively interpret his words, telling the apostles that “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.”
Both Scripture and the Church warn us that our personal thoughts, opinions, and experiences in prayer cannot override the public, authoritative teaching of God given to us through Scripture and the Church. Why shouldn’t unbelievers be afraid of us? Because our faith has both ancient teaching and current, living authority that definitively forbid us from willfully doing evil to another person. You and I should know that if a vision of God tells us to murder, it’s not really God.
Not that I’m worried about any of you doing that. No, the real point is this: you and I need the Church. Lent is all about drawing closer to God, getting better at recognizing Jesus Christ as His Divine Son, and listening to him, obeying him. Going it alone, interpreting scripture for yourself, being spiritual but not religious, defining “religion” for yourself – these kinds of things might help you grow as a person and deepen your connection to a “higher power,” but they are also dangerous. Technically, Satan is a “higher power” than we are, a powerful and intelligent spiritual being. If he cannot get you to reject God outright, he will get you to misinterpret God’s will, convincing you to do evil in God’s name. Murder is obvious, but there are many, many things just as bad or even worse that aren’t so obvious.
Many, many non-Catholics are great people who get a lot of things right, but there’s only one visible institution in the world that can truly protect us from mixing those right things with wrong things: the Catholic Church. Despite the mess, the confusion, the complexity, and despite the awful hypocrisy and sins of her leaders, the Church still has the authority to look at mad world in the eye and say “no, this is not of God. You do not have to do this.” She was right about slavery, right about racism, right about fascism, right about communism, right about contraception. In every case the world – and far too many Catholic clergy and laity – ignored those warnings. As a result, people died physically and spiritually. They still are dying.
Every sin of ours, every attitude and habit of pride, vanity, lust, and greed is us pointing a gun at the innocent, even if we don’t usually see how. When the Church looks you in the eye, points to your sin, and says “you do not have to do this,” will you lower the gun, relieved that someone has the authority to free you from the lies of the world and devil? Will you seize on the commands to do penance, to pray, fast, and give alms, to confess your sins, attend Mass, to learn and practice your religion so as to escape sin and delusion? Or will you pull the trigger anyway, thinking yourself exempt from the body of Christ, exempt outside the authority of the only visible institution to survive 2000 years of both external persecution and internal sin and incompetence?
And if you do pull the trigger, if you’ve already pulled that trigger, do not despair! Jesus Christ has taken the part of every innocent victim. Even when our sins do kill – physically or spiritually – that eternal victim rises from the dead to reveal fully the glory he previewed in his transfiguration, the glory that conquers sin. He rises from the dead precisely so he can look at us… at us who killed him with our sins, love us anyway, and then offer us another chance. Will you take it?