Our readings this Sunday come together rather sequentially to really illustrate for us what our path to salvation through Jesus really is.
In our first reading, we can see the necessity of baptism and accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior, as the beginning of the path to our salvation. For those of us with the opportunity to know Jesus, this is crucial and is the beginning of our journey in faith. We must be as accepting of Him as those who were gathered that day before Peter, asking what they must do to be saved. You see, each of us with our sins contributed to His crucifixion as surely as any of those gathered there, and we must just as humbly accept Peter’s admonition and guidance. This includes the acceptance of our responsibility for all those transgressions that Jesus took our punishment for and saved each of us. Think about that for a moment – every transgression we have ever committed, those that we still commit, and any we will ever do, He accepted on our behalf, and took our place to be punished. Our humility and gratitude should be profound, and our resolve to stay as far from sin as best we can should be equally profound.
In our second reading, as part of the acceptance of the baptism and belief in our Lord, there is a unique and difficult challenge placed before each of us: Our Lord’s example of “When he was insulted, he returned no insult; when he suffered, he did not threaten; instead, he handed himself over to the one who judges justly.” Imagine for a moment two things. First, how difficult this example can be in practice for us – our instinct often is to lash out when we are injured or wronged – and second, how different things would be in our world if we could get past our own feelings of hurt when things happen, and have enough trust in God’s justice that there would be no need for any kind of retaliation in seeking our own flawed form of “justice”. We would know that the scales will be balanced no matter what, and we could save ourselves from the sin and pain of all the anger and hurt that generate so many cycles of hatred that can be ongoing. Our world, I suspect, would look vastly different if all our energies were put toward God’s purposes instead. The key to this in practice is surrendering our wills to God’s guidance on a consistent basis. This is not always easy and requires vigilance and practice on a continual basis for it to become entrenched in our minds and hearts, and so becomes our default behavior. When it does, and with practice, it will, we will know a peace here in our earthly life that we have never before experienced. The stuff that causes us so much angst, will cease to matter, and we will treat it as the triviality that it is. We will be drawn closer to God in a whole new way, in trust, and in love.
Lastly, in today’s gospel, there is a clear line drawn between what we are to recognize as the voice of our Shepherd, rather than the many voices of all those who would lead us toward the destruction of our souls. These voices come in many forms; there are leaders and politicians, there are famous personalities in the media, there are books and lyrics from songs, there are social media postings, there are people we consider friends, and there are sometimes even those who may be family. In short, anything we perceive from others that does not pass the litmus test of conforming to Jesus’ message of justice and peace, is from those other voices. We need to be careful to only listen to the voice of our Shepherd. Those other voices can sound sweetly familiar and persuasive, but they are alien to us if we stay focused on our Lord’s message. When we hear something, we have to ask ourselves, “Does this appeal to my baser human instincts, or would this align with the message of love, peace, and justice that our Lord never wavered from? Do these words lift others up toward a better understanding and relationship with our Lord or are they just noise coming from secular society designed to subtly erode our attention and focus from His teachings?” Subtlety is one of the enemy’s best tools. It lulls us into complacence and makes us question our own sense of what we know to be right by suggesting that we are being “overly sensitive” or perhaps intolerant to use the popular term. True tolerance is one thing and is a virtue; pandering to corrupt teachings because we are afraid of being labeled is completely another. People have weaponized terms that many of people are very sensitive to these days, in order to browbeat them into their way of thinking. If you look back through history, there is no shortage of the corrupted usage of terms like tolerance preceding many of our greatest tragedies, and mankind’s proliferation of sin. It’s used as a label of shame to browbeat those who stand for something into submission to popular ideology, that serves the purposes of others. To be truly tolerant means to be confident enough in what and who we believe in to accept disagreement (or even abuse) from others as we disagree, but never to be won over by a falsehood or compromise of what we know to be right. We strive instead toward peaceful change through our example and patient response to what comes from those around us who do not yet have a true belief in our Lord or his word. This is the hardest of paths; it requires careful thought in our interactions, prayer for the grace to stay the course, and most importantly the personal humility, and faith in our God to take refuge in His wisdom and words when we are in difficult circumstances. If we practice this, the reward is at the end – the gate that so few enter, the one that leads to the Shepherd whose voice calls all to Him. The question is, do we recognize it and follow?
The Deacons Bench 