The Second Reading at Mass today is one of those better known Scripture passages, St. Paul’s praise of the virtue of love, found in his First Letter to the Corinthians.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, …“. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to quote the rest of this passage as you will have certainly heard it at…every…single…wedding…you have ever attended 😉
It is my guess that St. Paul’s great hymn of love was the inspiration for a section of an epistle written by St. Clement of Rome at the end of the First Century. A few decades after St. Paul’s death, St. Clement wrote a letter to that same troublesome Corinthian congregation to address that community’s latest round of problems. Some young whipper-snappers had usurped control of the church and deposed their clergy. The Bishop of Rome wrote to them, urging the members of the church to obedience and to brotherly love.
This wasn’t a good year, was it? I mean, the very fact that my last resolution update was in February really speaks volumes. Honestly, I don’t know what happened. “Wait!”, I hear you cry, “Nobody ever keeps their resolutions!” Well, I do…well, normally I do. I’ll typically make about ten resolutions and I’ll usually keep 70% of them and at least make some headway on the others.
Earlier this week I shared the pilot episode of the video series which Matt and I recorded. Today I’d like to share the first main episode, which asks the question, “Is Faith blind?”
The other day, I received a question via Facebook from a friend asking about a passage she had read in the Old Testament. Her query related to a turn of phrase used in the Book of Exodus where God describes Himself as a “jealous God” (Exodus 20:4-6). What did it mean? Why would God ever be “jealous”? Surely jealousy is always a bad thing?
In recent months I’ve noticed an increasing number of voices on the Internet criticizing Matthew’s work and organization. After seeing some of these blog entries and Facebook discussions, I’ve been left a little uneasy by some of the unbridled criticism I’ve read…
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. “Be ye perfect” does not mean that God isn’t going to help us until we get our act together
“Some people seem to think this means ‘Unless you are perfect, I will not help you’; and as we cannot be perfect…our position is hopeless. But I do not think He did mean that. I think He meant ‘The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less'”
(a) Jack wouldn’t go to his mother with a toothache because he knew he’d get something else in addition to the relief from immediate pain…
(i) He’d wait until the pain got really bad
“When I was a child I often had toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother – at least, not till the pain became very bad…”
(ii) …because he knew he’d also get a trip to the dentist…
“I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want…”
(iii) …and the dentist wouldn’t restrict himself just to that tooth…
And I knew those dentists; I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache… if you gave them an inch they took an ell”
(b) God is like a dentist
“Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of (like masturbation or physical cowardice) or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment”
I just had a very strange interaction on Facebook… A friend of mine posted the following video of the Protestant evangelist Todd Friel:
One of his friends, a man called Simon, responded with the following curious assertions:
His response struck me as a strange for several reasons, but first and foremost because it demonstrated very clearly that Simon was rather unfamiliar with the New Testament! I responded by pointing out that Jesus would absolutely call other people wrong. In fact, at times He could be quite mean, even to the point of calling people names:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites… You fools and blind men… For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness… you brood of vipers”
Matthew 23:15, 17, 27-28, 33
He was even known on occasion to flip tables!
And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables – John 2:15
John 2:15
Naturally, there are many other Scripture passages which I could have quoted, not least Jesus’ exclusive claims about Himself:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
John 14:6
With wearying predictability, rather than adjusting his statement, Simon immediately accused me of “judging” him. Some folks really love to jump to play the victim card even at the mildest of challenges. I wonder if he would have said exactly the same thing if I had pointed out an error in his arithmetic…
Amusingly, he then tried to quote Romans 2 to me:
You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?
Romans 2:1-3
At this point I suggested to him that, while I’d be happy to discuss that passage with him, it probably isn’t a good idea to quote the Bible at a Christian right on the heels of making a demonstrably false statement about Jesus. He then said that he didn’t want to discuss his beliefs with me any more, so I closed by saying that hopefully I had at least disabused you of the notion that “Jesus would never call other people wrong”. I concluded with a passage which denies this explicitly:
“[Jesus said] ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God'”
Matthew 22:29
…and, for good measure, I also included a passage where Jesus teaches His followers about judgement:
“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly”
John 7:24
Needless to say, he wrote with the following:
…and then thirty seconds later deleted the thread.
The Second Reading at Mass today is one of those better known Scripture passages, St. Paul’s praise of the virtue of love, found in his First Letter to the Corinthians.
