Saturday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
(This reflection was written and composed before the death of 5 police officers in Dallas. Spencer is on vacation and did not get the chance to edit this reflection to include the latest tragedy in his reflection. His thoughts on the death of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile is applicable to the every person that is killed in any kind of violence).
Tragically, there have been two more recent shootings involving the police and black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. They have exploded my facebook and I’ve followed what some of my friends have posted and shared. The scenes are heartbreaking. When I sat down to read today’s readings they came back into my mind and are going to shape today’s reflection.
These are the words that brought those two men to mind, “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.” These have always been chilling words to me. I can recall reading them early in my journey when I wanted to be a Christian around Christians and worldly around the world. Today these words pierced me in a different way.
These words pierced me because these men were sacraments. Their lives were in the image and likeness of God and thus were meant to communicate the invisible reality of God to our visible reality.
They were desecrated.
This sacramental dignity was cut short. It was especially robbed from the children in their lives who were to see the love of the Father reflected in them. As I sat with today’s readings I felt convicted that to not take time to acknowledge God’s image in these men would be to not acknowledge Christ in them, and thus find myself denied by Him.
This first seemed a bit extreme to me at first. I expected to shake this thought and write on something a little more ‘churchy’. When that didn’t happen I thought about how this was all still too political, too fresh, too whatever excuse you want to insert here for a reflection, but the conviction would not leave me. Those words kept coming back to me, “Everyone who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.” I began to feel ashamed of my desire to remain silent and my concern with others estimation of me for just now wanting to speak up.
But this is connected with who we acknowledge Christ to be. The Lord is justice and peace, He is where charity and love prevail (ubi caritas, deus ibi est). If I am called to acknowledge the Lord, and He is justice, peace, and love, then I need to call out where there is injustice, turmoil, and hate. I’ve never been one to do that well, especially not in this forum, so yes, I’ve been silent on countless other issues, but that does not discredit that these incidents were unjust, divisive, and that an evil was done. I don’t presume to judge whether or not the shooters acted out of fear, hate, recklessness, callousness, pride, or a host of other motivations. But I do not believe these men were treated as their human dignity demands. I do believe that some deep-seated issues of division, ignorance, and misunderstanding were at work here. And I stand by the conviction that Christ desired the hearts of these men, and I pray that He has them now.
None of this can be said without the affirmation that God is also abundantly merciful. I stand in hope of that mercy, for the souls of Alton and Philando, for the sake of these police officers, and even for myself as I see my own hesitancy and wonder “Where does this come from?” Christ who preached the God Samaritan left out the details of the victim for the reality that this was a man to whom wrong had been done. This is not that different. We are too quick, myself included, to wait for circumstances and details before we respond with charity and a “hunger and thirst for righteousness”. For that we need God’s mercy. And I pray that somehow out of this, mercy can build bridges. See, we think of mercy as merely a removal of guilt, just a force of subtraction, but mercy is primarily a constructive force. Mercy removes sin to make room for the grace of God. Mercy removes the plug so that the breath of God can fill and inflate.
I pray that as we seek forgiveness for our own callousness, forgiveness for the rage directed at the men responsible, and forgiveness for the wrongs committed out of a tarnished view of one another that we can see both our universal need for mercy and our universal human dignity as the great equalizers that neither allow us to subjugate one group below others or raise another above the rest.
I pray, that acknowledging Christ in these men and condemning the injustice that taught me the names Alton and Philando while calling upon our merciful God can open the door to the Lord’s constructive and transformative mercy and peace.
- Spencer Hargadon