If you have ever tried to get someone to change their mind about a particular subject, if you have ever tried to persuade someone to take a different position on an issue, you know how difficult that can be. Truth is, all of us are certain that our way of looking at an issue is the right way. It is the rare individual who can say that they were wrong in their thinking. I remember in the 1970’s when President Nixon was forced to resign, most people would not admit that they had voted for him in the first place. Yet we all know that he won a second term with an overwhelming majority. Rather than admit that we had made a bad choice, we simply lied about whom we had voted for. (For the record, 1972 was the first time I voted in a national election; I voted for Nixon.)
Today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles features Peter making a startling statement. The Gospel reading backs him up by putting the almost identical words in the mouth of Jesus: “You denied the Holy and Righteous One. . . but God has thus brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer.” (Act 3:14a, 18) “And he said to them, ‘Thus it is written that the Messiah would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day.’” (Luke 24:46)
Both Peter and Jesus make the claim that God had, in fact, planned that Jesus, the Son of God, the Holy and Righteous One, would suffer the ignominious death of crucifixion. I doubt that we can appreciate the tremendous change in thinking that coming to this conclusion would involve. The fact of the matter is that this statement completely shatters the way that the Jewish people thought and believed. The entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, was based upon the Theology of Reciprocity. Simply stated, it means if you are good, God will reward you. If you are bad, God will punish you. Consequently, Jews believed that if you were poor or if you had contracted some disease or if you had suffered some terrible fate, you must have sinned. Only sinners would be treated in this way by God.
Then along comes Jesus whom Luke refers to here as the “Holy and Righteous One.” No one had been as worthy of God’s favor. No one before him had ever lived such a righteous and holy life. However, God asked him to suffer and die nonetheless.
Unfortunately, some people think this way today. When Katrina hit New Orleans, some evangelists said it was because of all the sin that went on in that city. When the Mississippi flooded the farms that bordered it, we heard people say that it was God’s retribution for the sin of abortion. When fires destroyed people’s homes in California, there were those who proclaimed that this natural disaster was God’s vengeance on people who had turned away from the commandments. The list goes on and on and on. For some people, the Theology of Reciprocity still undergirds their thinking and their preaching.
What complete foolishness! If the death of Jesus did not put this ridiculous kind of thinking to rest, nothing ever will. God is not capricious. God is not vengeful. God is not merciless, visiting disasters on innocent people in order to punish the guilty. We are capricious. We are vengeful. We are merciless. The Scripture proclaim over and over again that the pattern of God’s justice is MERCY. God is Love. What more do we need to hear in order to change our minds?
Just as Peter’s proclamation was ignored by the people of his day, just as the message of Jesus has been silenced and has not been heard in some pulpits for eons, we simply refuse to change our minds. We are right. No one can tell us differently. As we read in another story from the Gospel, even if someone were to come back from the dead, we would still refuse to heed the message of the Gospel. God desires mercy, not vengeance. We have been given a new commandment. We are to love as we have been loved. We are to forgive as we have been forgiven. We have been made in the image and likeness of God. When we will start acting like it?
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator