15th Sunday Reflection: The Trap Of Justification
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage – The Trap Of Justification – 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time – (Luke 10:25-37)
Wanting to justify himself… mia culpa! Goodness becomes an accusation, an abhorrence, an interdict against our way of life that must be refuted, rejected, and defaced. This is the horror of communal violence and institutional structures of segregation and merit.
This is my body, broken for you… The abused who becomes the abuser in a spiral of retaliation and anger that continues as we are robbed, beaten, and left naked and bleeding on the road; here is Christ’s body.
The priest and the Levite called to represent the people before God, without any physical defects, young (less than 50 years of age), touching nothing ‘unclean’ and pure through ritual cleansing rites, dressed in white linen. These purity codes divided everything into either clean or unclean, to be included or excluded. Sounds so very familiar.
Sexual acts made one unclean. Bodily discharges, blood for women, and semen for men represented a temporary loss of strength and life and movement toward death. Because decaying corpses discharged, so natural bodily discharges were reminders of sin and death. Physical imperfections representing a movement from ‘life’ toward ‘death’ moved a person ritually away from God who was associated with life. We can see where this leads.
Jesus did not allow these laws of purity to keep him from touching lepers, the sick, the lame, the dead, or the ritually and morally unclean woman considered sinful. Jesus condemned those who placed ritual above love.
He rebuked those who, for ceremonial purity, cleanse the outside of the cup but do not practice inward moral purity or love. Yet Jesus would not condemn the woman caught in adultery. As Jesus was about to leave his disciples, he promises them the Helper who will show people how incorrect they are about sin, about being right with God, and about judgement.
For some sin and purification have become a commercial commodity based on the Babylonian understanding of recompense for debts incurred. For some biblical ethnic separation has become an ideology. For some, the old law of purification and separation becomes a safety net for the trap of pathological fear, insecurity, and doubt.
It is in the experiences of the great mystics that we see another way of understanding sin, justification, and judgement. For Julian of Norwich, we are the indwelling city of God as we are also incarnations of God. The phenomenon of sin is seen as pain and isolation, as having no essence, as delusion and ignorance. The cause of suffering is the lack of knowledge, lack of proper perception, missing of one’s own identity and essence, and the inability to recognise and enjoy the presence of goodness as the key to our being.
For Thomas Merton sin has its roots in the false self as the illusion of freedom in refusing to be what we are created to be as images of God. For him the secret of our identity is hidden in the Love and Mercy of God; finding God, we find our true self in God. Sin robs us of the truth of who we are and robs us of our humanity. To regain the truth of our existence and our being which is submerged in the Trinity of love, compassion, and boundless mercy, we are called to turn away from the lie of sin.
The sin of classification is not observing basic differences or the preference of one ideology over another. The problem comes when I use someone’s classification as my reason for loving them (or not), rather than their humanity. This is convenient for me since using their humanity as a reason to love them would mean I had to love everyone.
If one has to be pleasing to me, comforting, reassuring, before I can love them, then I cannot truly love them . . . If a person has to be a Jew or a Christian before I can love them, then I cannot love them. If they have to be black or white before I can love them, then I cannot love them. If they have to belong to my political party or social group before I can love them, if they have to wear my kind of uniform, then my love is no longer love because it is not free: it is dictated by something outside myself. It is dominated by an appetite other than love. I love not the person but their classification, and in that event I love them not as a person, but as a thing. I love their label which confirms me in attachment to my own label. But in this case, I do not even love myself. I value myself not for what I am, but for my label, my classification. In this way I remain at the mercy of forces outside myself, and those who seem to me to be neighbours are indeed strangers for I am first of all a stranger to myself. – Merton’s discussion of ‘The Good Samaritan’
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