Homily for the Monday of the Second Week of Lent

March 2, 2026
St. Mary’s Catholic Church
College Station, Texas

Deuteronomy 9:4b-10
Psalm 79:8, 9, 11, and 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 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 own behavior and even more for the disposition of their souls. 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 predation 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.”

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 indifference to the need of our neighbor to receive mercy and to hear the truth in love?

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.”

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 through the gift of His Son who shed His Blood for us. This total and trusting gift of self to Christ is the essence of a religious and priestly vocation. The examination of our conscience must proceed towards a firm purpose of amendment to be converted to Christ. 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.”