In today’s 2nd reading from St. Paul to Ephesians he
exhorts us to, “not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed
for the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and
reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving
one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.
So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ
loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a
fragrant aroma.”
Often times we are bitter, furious, and angry with
one another and in some circumstances even malicious. Why are we like this sometimes? As I have said before, all sin begins with a
lie. We lie to ourselves. This goes for all sin, not just bitterness,
fury or malice, but greed, drunkenness, lust, gluttony, jealousy, envy,
laziness, pride . . . did I get all 7 deadly sins, anyway you get the point, it
does not matter the sin, they all begin with a lie.
Let’s take for example the very first sin, the sin
of Adam and Eve. We know that God had
only asked Adam and Eve to follow one rule, one command, besides that they were
entirely free. In the story, which is a
marvelous one, the serpent approaches Eve and says, “Did God really say, ‘You
shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?” The woman answered the snake: “We may eat of
the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of
the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or
even touch it, or else you will die.’” But the snake said to the woman: “You
certainly will not die!
God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you
will be like gods, who know good and evil.” Eve then takes from the tree and so too does
Adam, they believed they could be like God, yes, one could argue they were
tricked, but they allowed the lie to develop inside of them. The first lie was when Eve said, “or even
touch it,” God never said they could not touch the tree, they just could not
eat of it, the next lie was that they would become like gods, they were already
like God, yet they wanted to be their own gods.
They fell to the sin of pride, which began with a lie.
We do this as well.
We can take malice or gossip for example. When we speak ill of another we do not
realize that we are sinning, far from it, we actually think we are doing
something good, we justify ourselves by believing that we are speaking
truth. The person whom we are gossiping
about or even destroying their character we have come to believe a lie in our
hearts, the lie is that I am justified in doing so because the other person is
a, b, or c. Therefore I can speak ill of
them. This is a lie, since Jesus always
asks that we look for the good in a person first, and that we also look at the
log in our own eye before we look at the splinter in the eye of another.
Another reason why we sometimes overly criticize or
gossip is because we are actually deflecting our own weaknesses. In order to deflect my responsibility by examining my conscience I
focus on the faults of others and place impossible expectations on them in
order not to deal with my own faults which we sometimes suppress and only
concentrate on everyone else’s faults.
This is not the way of the Christian; we are always to judge ourselves
first and to offer compassion to others.
I think all of us have been guilty of this at least once.
Good, holy or virtuous acts are the opposite, they
all begin with truth. Every time I
humble myself, offer forgiveness, kindness, generosity, patience, perseverance,
discipline, it begins with truth, the truth which points away from self and
points towards God and neighbor, and their good and happiness. The truth contains outward movements and is
connected to goodness, unity, happiness, selflessness, where as lies are
connected to evil, darkness, fear, selfishness, sadness, anger.
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