Friday of the First Week in Lent

Today's Mass Readings

In graduate school, I taught catechesis classes for six-to-nine year olds every Wednesday afternoon. I quickly discovered that children that age have a very deep-seated sense of what is “fair” and what is not “fair”. In fact, where adults might see shades of grey in a situation, the children had a precise sense of when justice was being done and when it wasn’t, and each week I usually heard at least one refrain of, “That’s not fair!” Adults tell their children, “Life is not fair. Adults have to learn to deal with that.” Today’s readings remind me, though, that we adults often DO think things are not fair. The adult Christian response, however, should be to repent of one’s own sins rather than simply to exclaim, “That’s not fair!”

Ezekiel says that God will remember a wicked man who converts to God and does acts of righteousness, but will not remember the virtuous acts of a virtuous man who turns to evil doing (Ezekiel 18:21-28), but he proclaims that there are very likely many readers who proclaim that God is not being “fair”. Is the passage suggesting that we (and God) ultimately forget about injustices and unfairness, and just “let things be”? If my neighbor took my money , but was now a self-proclaimed virtuous man who fed the hungry, would God really see that as fair?

To ignore injustice is indeed unfair, and if that is what Ezekiel is proclaiming, I think we would be right to cry out, “That’s not fair!” Yet notice that Ezekiel is not quite saying that. He names former wrongdoers as now being virtuous – which suggests that they have made a more deep conversion than simply saying the words and covering up past injustice. True virtue wants to set things right and repay wrongs done. True virtue is not a set of empty promises. But by the same token, true forgiveness is not cheaply or simply given. God is not rewarding those who merely SAY “I am virtuous” without there being some kind of substance in that saying.

Today’s psalm (Psalm 130) calls me to reflect on the fact that in the face of God, I too, do things that are unjust and unfair, and so Ezekiel’s statement hopefully relates to me, too. There are many ways in which I am one of the non-virtuous people in need of converting to God. And I hope, just as Ezekiel promises, that God might have such mercy on me.

Moreover, the Gospel suggests an even richer reading of Ezekiel (Matthew 5:20-26). This reading is near the beginning of the long section in Matthew’s gospel known as the Sermon on the Mount (found in Matthew, chapters 5 -7).

Throughout the sermon, Jesus highlights all the ways in which his followers should practice justice, and it very often looks QUITE different from the ways commonly practice justice. Jesus calls us to radical new ways of witness. For example, in today’s gospel, Jesus compares the law about killing with being angry, and suggests that the two are pretty much the same. We might say, “That’s not fair!” because killing, to us, seems like a worse sin than anger. But Jesus is proclaiming here that seemingly “small” things like anger against a neighbor are just as troublesome to God’s own sense of justice and fairness as murder. The problem is in the way that WE see the world, not in the way God’s justice works.

Let our Lenten journey today be about focus on the ways that we break relationships with God and neighbor, large and small. And let us figure out ways to restore those situations along the lines of God’s justice and not our own.

- Jana M. Bennett