The Misery of Man and the Riches of God’s Mercy – 4th Sunday of Lent – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church and Missions, Burns, Oregon; March 10, 2024

Today’s readings give us two great and famous lines from the New Testament, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son and God who is rich in mercy. The love of God reaches us as mercy, which by definition we do not deserve.

These powerful and moving truths, however, are in danger of becoming vague and empty of content. Whenever we hear of the love and mercy of God, we must not just remain with the words, but remember that God’s love and mercy are made concrete in Jesus Christ crucified, in Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist, and in Jesus Christ forgiving sins in the baptismal font and the confessional.

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish. Without him we were perishing, more surely and more completely than the Israelites in the desert, who were dying from the serpent bites, which was their punishment for complaining against God. They repented and asked Moses to intercede. God commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole, a prophetic image of Christ crucified. Everyone who looked upon the bronze serpent, lifted up by Moses, was healed of the serpent’s venom and lived.

God who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life in Christ. Without Christ, without the gift of his Son, we would have remained dead in our transgressions, a death much more severe than the death of the body, because it is a death that continues in hell after the death of the body.

We can further consider the love and mercy of God through a comparison of today’s 1^st and 2^nd readings. What was visible in the public history of the people of Israel was a prophetic image of what the love and mercy of Christ accomplishes in the Church and in the depths of the soul that believes in him.

We start, then, with the 1^st reading. It begins with the infidelity of the people of God; it sounds almost like a rerun of Adam and Eve in the garden. Indeed, the fall of Adam and Eve has been repeated in a 1,000 variations throughout human history until the coming of Christ and is repeated ever anew when men refuse to believe in Christ or turn away from him.

In this case, the infidelity is very specific, the princes and people of Judah practiced the abominations of the nations, thereby polluting the temple of God in Jerusalem.

Abomination is a strong word and we need to take heed to the strong words used by the word of God. The nations of the earth did not know God; they were not innocent, but as St. Paul tells us they suppressed the truth on account of their wickedness. (Rm 1:18) This is confirmed by the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel, when Jesus says, Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.

St. Paul gives a detailed description of the descent into wickedness, the abominations of the nations; this started from turning away from God and refusing to honor him or give him thanks, which led to the darkening of their minds. (Rm 1:21) Then they fall into idolatry exchanging the glory of God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. (Rm 1:23) From there they fall into all manner of lust, including unnatural homosexual deeds. (Rm 1:26-27) Finally, they become filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to their parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Rm 1:29-31) Note well, that St. Paul adds that not only do they merit condemnation who do these things, but also those who approve them. (Rm 1:32) Yet, none of these things are beyond the reach of God’s mercy.

St. Paul has described the downward path of the nations before the time of Christ; he has also described the infidelity of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, which followed the abominations of the nations. False worship and all manner of evil doing go hand in hand.

St. Paul has also described beforehand the history of the modern world in its departure from God. There has not been so much crass idolatry of worshipping of statues, but the various humanisms that put man in the place of God. Our civic monuments even seem to manifest this pagan humanistic spirit. This humanism has in turn degenerated into “transhumanism”, which is practically an idolatry of the machine; at the same time, the humanisms that exalted humanity over God, have ended with a denial of the dignity of human nature in comparison with the animals, leading to a new pagan idolatry of animal nature. Of course, over the past decades we have witnessed the increasing open and public display of a new paganism, occult practices, witchcraft, and outright Satanism. Further, we can easily recognize around us all the debased immorality of which St. Paul speaks.

Returning to the kingdom of Judah, we have considered how they followed the nations in the practices of abomination; now we need to consider the riches of God’s mercy.

The first mercy that he shows to them is by sending them prophets to warn them of impending destruction unless they convert. That warning is mercy.

The greatest example of such a prophetic warning in our own era is the message of Our Lady of Fatima, confirmed by the great miracle of the sun and approved by the highest authority in the Church. Appearing during the horrific destruction of the First World War, she called men to conversion to God, daily prayer of the rosary, devotion to her Immaculate Heart, acts of penance, offering of sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, warning that unless men heeded her message, there would be continued wars, persecution of the Church, and spreading of the errors of communism. Her final words were for men to stop offending God.

The people of Judah did not heed the prophetic warning and so God’s next mercy, a severe mercy indeed, but truly a mercy, was to deliver them over to the hands of their enemies, leading to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and the punishment of exile in a foreign land. Yet, he did not make an end of the people; he left them with a promise of hope and return until the land has retrieved the lost sabbaths.

The third mercy is the restoration of the people, the return from exile, and the rebuilding of the Temple, but in more humble circumstances. No longer are they a sovereign kingdom, but a lowly nation, tributary to a great empire. Yet, looking forward to Christ, through the prophet Haggai, God announced, The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former. (Hg 2:7) That is the way God works; it is the way Jesus works, as he revealed in his first miracle at Cana, when the steward declared, You have saved the good wine till now. (Jn 2:10)

That is also the characteristic of this joyful Sunday of Lent. It is the message of the traditional entrance antiphon that gives it the name “Laetare Sunday”. “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. Be joyful, all who were in mourning; exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast.”

Now, we can turn to the parallel message found in today’s 2^nd reading. In the 1^st reading we saw the passage from sin to exile to return; the 2^nd reading speaks to us of the return from “spiritual exile” but passed over the description that St. Paul gives of that exile, an exile of death. Before the words, God who is rich in mercy, St. Paul had described the human condition. Before Christ and without Christ, we were dead in our trespasses and sins … following the course of this world. (Eph 2:1,2)

On account of original sin, we entered this world stillborn, as it were, by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind (Eph 2:3). We all entered this world deprived of the life of grace, the supernatural life, the life of God, which is the true life, without which all our life in this world ends in misery and despair.

Someone like myself, who only came to Christ through baptism at age 20, not only inherited the spiritual death that is the common lot of mankind, but also for a time actively walked in that darkness of sin, living in the passions of the flesh, following the impulse of the flesh and its way of thinking. (Eph 2:3) Certainly many, who in their infancy were delivered from sin through baptism, and given the life of grace, have since also shared in the abominations of the nations. Hardly anyone has been unscathed. Hardly anyone has preserved their baptismal innocence. Those who have, like St. Therese of Lisieux, have done so by the grace and mercy of God.

St. Paul, however, indicates an even greater darkness than the deprivation of God’s grace and the state of sin: those living in sin follow the prince of the power of the air (that is the devil), the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.(Eph 2:2) Sin places us in the power of the devil, who is the most cruel and malevolent tyrant.

We have all received mercy in that we have heard the words of the Gospel; some have refused to listen; some have experienced misery in their life that is comparable to the exile of the people who had their city and temple destroyed.

Indeed, the state of mortal sin, after baptism, means the profanation and destruction of the soul, as a temple of the Holy Spirit. The disaster that befell the rebellious people gives us a visible image of the greater, but invisible disaster that befalls the soul in a state of sin.

Imagine if the Chinese Communists were to invade the United States, were to come to Burns, burn the city and our homes to the ground, burn all the churches, and ship us off to labor camps in China. That is something like what was described in today’s 1^st reading, as having happened to the people of Judah. It is a horrific prospect. Yet, the word of God teaches that such a horrific temporal, physical evil cannot be compared with the greater evil of living in a state of sin, a state of living death.

When a person in sin experiences the misery of their life, that also is the mercy of God. Better to sin and experience misery, than to sin and “get away with it” so to speak. The prodigal son began his return to the father’s house only after he experienced the misery of his situation. It is misery that calls upon mercy. Mercy is the love that relieves misery.

It is God’s mercy that we are able to hear the Gospel, even when it is warning us and calling us to conversion; it is God’s mercy that we experience the misery of our sins; all that mercy is preparatory to the great mercy of restoration and life in Christ, which St. Paul describes in words that speak of a greatness we can scarcely grasp.

God who is rich in mercy has not just forgiven our sins but had made us alive together with Christ. Mercy is not deserved, mercy is a gift, a gift to those who indeed deserve the opposite. By grace you have been saved. So also we call the life in Christ, which is the gift of God’s mercy, “grace”, “sanctifying grace”, a merciful gift that makes us to be holy like Christ, sharing in the divine life of the one who has shared in our human life.

Further, he has raised us up with him, and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

We receive this mercy in Christ’s Body, which is the Church, united to her head, Christ, seated at the right hand of the Father; we are now one with him. Through being compacted into the Body of the Church, being nourished by the Holy Eucharist, while yet on earth, while living in this passing world, we are already united to our head, who sits at the right hand of God, far above every principality and power and virtue and dominion, and above every name that is named not only in this age but also in that which is to come, and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all. (Eph 1:21-23)

He is there, the head of the Body of the Church to which we belong, and he prayed that where he is we might also be beholding the glory he has from the Father before the foundation of the world. (cf. John 17:24) Having received his grace and mercy, we need only persevere walking in the good works he has prepared for us.

God so loved that world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.