Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent
In his series Catholicism, Fr. Robert Barron tells a story of Bishop Desmond Tutu living in Apartheid South Africa. During the episode he says: “Bishop Desmond Tutu was walking down a narrow sidewalk in South Africa. He came to a portion of the sidewalk that was more like a narrow bridge over a muddy area. Approaching him was a white man, a known racist, who said to Tutu, ‘Step aside, I don’t make way for gorillas’. Bishop Tutu stepped off the sidewalk, gestured broadly, and said, ‘I do’.” Now, I’m not trying to justify insulting one another, but you have to appreciate the poise that Bishop Tutu retained during that interaction. I comment on this, because while overt racism was his specific experience, we all experience being wronged, and those wrongs can often be labeled as sin.
Sin is a terrible thing. It goes against God and neighbor and in doing so it: wounds the virtues that God is developing in us, it wounds our ability to be a properly ordered person with a well formed conscience, and it harms our relationships with our brothers and sisters. In addition to these, it also breeds more sin. One of the reasons it breeds more sin is because we have a self-centered tendency to want to vindicate the unjust experience ourselves, but that is not the message of Jeremiah today. Jeremiah instead says, “But, you, O Lord of hosts, O just Judge, searcher of mind and heart, let me witness the vengeance you take on them, for to you I have entrusted my cause!” (Jeremiah 11:20). So what is the lesson here in this short passage?
I think we have to start with Jeremiah’s admission that God is Just. To accept this in our heart and mind allows us to trust in Him. Better expressed, it allows us to rely on Him. In turn it enables us to “entrust our cause to him.” To entrust our cause to Him is more than praying about it seriously. Entrusting it to Him means to recognize the Great Exchange in all we do.
The Great Exchange is the mystery that the Son of God became the Son of Man so that the Children of Men could become the Children of God. That exchange should enter into every portion of our lives. This is why we gather at Mass and first offer bread and wine that we praise God for giving us. Then as the Mass proceeds and the bread and wine becomes the Eucharist, we offer the Eucharist back to God. Finally, through our communion in the Eucharist we offer our entire selves to God with Christ. In this way we can entrust our lives and all its causes to God.
Finally, Jeremiah's emphasis on revenge does not preclude God's mercy. Rather, it is a handing over self-centered vindication. It is choosing the greater good, God's Justice, over the lesser good, man's justice. In doing so it is a reversal of sin. For sin always chooses the lesser over the greater, and in doing so, it wrongs others, and in that wrong it will, “reproduce itself and reinforce itself” (CCC 1865) and can create, “'Structures of sin' [which] are the expression and effect of personal sins. They, [Structures of sin] lead their victims to do evil in their turn” (CCC 1869) I believe Jeremiah is calling us to get in the way of that.
I believe that Jeremiah is calling us to entrust our cause and our lives to God and to rely on the Justice that He will fulfill. Not in a passively, apathetic, doormat kind of way, but rather a style that models the Christ-like interruption of sin. When we allow our trust in the Lord to interrupt the cycle of selfish sinful retribution, we become the Salt of the Earth, the Light of the World, and we open the door to allow people not to each return “to his own home” (John 7:53), but rather to return to our home in the friendship and company of the Lord.
- Spencer Hargadon