Homily for Monday of the Second Week of Lent

March 6, 2023
St. Joseph Seminary College
Covington, Louisiana

Deuteronomy 9:4b-10
Psalm 79:8, 9, 11, 13
Romans 8:31b-34
Luke 6:36-38

Even people who have never held the Bible in their hands are familiar with this verse from sacred Scripture. “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.” These profoundly serious words of Jesus are invoked frequently by some people as a justification for their own sinful habits. Of course, in recent years we frequently hear some individuals do this by citing these words of Jesus in connection with the airplane quote of Pope Francis from several years ago taken out of context regarding homosexual acts: “Who am I to judge?”

While the point of the Holy Father as a pastor was to counsel Christians against self-righteousness, his point, just as Jesus’ point, is misapplied and misrepresented as a warrant for people not to be held accountable for their behavior and even more for the disposition of their souls.

            Yet, the Word of God, and particularly the words of Jesus, are the graced summons to human accountability to our relationship with God, with each other, and with ourselves. This is because of the grace of our ultimate end — “to love God and our neighbor” — that is the Good News of Jesus Christ as the fullness of revelation. Jesus is warning us as His disciples to avoid the type of judgment of the Pharisees that reduces moral discernment to justification for our own sinfulness by excusing our behavior as “at least I am not as bad as these other people.”

            Yet, Jesus is clear about what He means as He continues by saying, “Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” Moral discernment always begins with our own examination of conscience, our own need for forgiveness, our own need for change that we might love God as He has loved us with the gift of His Son. The examination of our conscience must proceed towards a firm purpose of amendment and not simply an approach to confession whereby I simply misuse the sacrament of penance as a way for me to ritualistically expunge my record and not receive it gratefully as a moment of God’s love and grace.  

“Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.” These words of Jesus culminate in the need for each of us to recognize our own sinfulness with authentic contrition and not simply remorse. They are not intended to justify our discouraging resignation to the inevitability of sin and an indifference to the harm that sin causes in our relationship with God, with each other, and with ourselves. God holds us accountable for our behavior and He expects us to hold each other and ourselves accountable in that same spirit of unconditional love because our sins really offend God and they really do hurt other people and ourselves.

The initiative of our accountability always begins with God and not with ourselves. He is always intimately involved with every moment of our conversion and transformation in grace that we might genuinely love Him and each other as He loves us — unconditionally. To refuse to exercise our moral judgment about what is good and evil, about what is meritorious and what is sinful is a rejection of Divine Love. So, we must humbly ask God for the willingness to change and to be converted for we cannot change ourselves. It is only in such grace that we can pray honestly the words of today’s responsorial psalm: “Lord, do not deal with us according to our sins.”

The Spiritual Works of Mercy that are part of the fruitful grace of the Holy Spirit by which our lives are transformed in freedom include for us the responsibility to admonish humbly the sinner and to instruct the ignorant with the Truth of the Good News of the Gospel. This responsibility applies always and everywhere, even when others are indifferent to hearing it and when we are afraid being rejected for speaking the Truth. Both admonishing the sinner and instructing the ignorant are blessings of good judgment offered us only in the authentic freedom of God’s grace.

To exercise these spiritual works of mercy in good faith means for me to reject the moral pretense that my own sins really do not matter so neither should yours. The result of this faulty moral reasoning is an implied collusion that each of us will be complicit in silence with each other’s sin and indifferent to our need for honest conversion to God’s justice and mercy. Even more so, this reasoning manifests indifference to those people most in need of God’s mercy and who have been unjustly wounded by our sins and by the sins of others, victimized by other people with whom we have been silently complicit in the commission or omission of deliberate and grave evil.

This really is the heart of the apathetic and faulty moral reasoning that permitted sins of priests and others entrusted with authority in the Church to be perpetrated against the vulnerable through seduction and abuse of power. It is this faulty reasoning that distorts the meaning of “Who am I to judge?” to become “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Sadly, it seems that there are too many voices in Catholic media, in theology, and even among members of the Church’s hierarchy who currently invoke only the first part of Jesus’ teaching, “Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned,” without remembering the culmination of Christ’s words of accountability in unconditional love: “Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.”

Yet, God offers us this Lenten season to set the scale for that measurement in our own lives of discipleship. Will that measurement be a humble and contrite heart for our sins with the grateful acceptance of the love of God and the fullness of His Truth, or will the measurement be our passive rejection of God’s love with our own selfish indifference to the need of our neighbor to receive mercy and to hear the truth in love?