Readings:
• Ez 18:25-28
• Psa 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9
• Phil 2:1-11
• MT 21:28-32
Many years ago, I exchanged letters with an atheist. In the course of our discussion, he made two statements about how the God of Christians was “unfair.”
It isn’t fair, he insisted, that God limits human freedom by imposing rules against various actions and desires. And it also isn’t fair, he wrote, that God has allowed pain, suffering, and evil in this world. A good God, he argued, wouldn’t allow such things.
It was an example of having one’s cake and eating it, too. Or of having one’s sin and also ignoring the consequences. Yes, the existence of evil is indeed perplexing, “as painful as it is mysterious,” says the Catechism. But the Christian faith, understood correctly, “constitutes the answer to this question” (CCC, par 309). It is part of the “drama of sin” in which which free creatures can either accept or reject the Creator’s gift of love and life.
Of course, skeptics aren’t alone in complaints about divine fairness. I have sometimes thought, with sincere frustration, “This isn’t fair! Why did that happen to me? What is God doing?” On such occasions, the words of God to the prophet Ezekiel are worth contemplating: “Is it my way that is unfair, or rather, are not your ways unfair?” That question was put forth in the context of a virtuous man who “turns away from virtue to commit iniquity, and dies…” If that man, God told the people, had turned away from wickedness and done what was “right and just,” he would have lived.
We know this is true and right, but we sometimes convince ourselves that we are the exception to the rule. Doesn’t God realize how fortunate he is to have us on his side? Sure, we don’t put it that way—but that’s basically what happens when we question, in one way or another, the very nature of what is good and evil. It can be tempting to think we have complete autonomy, somehow separate and distinct from God himself.
That temptation was embraced by Adam and Eve when they committed the first sin: “In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good” (CCC, par 398).
Thus, conversion is necessary; repentance is required.
And that is the heart of the parable of the two sons, uttered by Jesus to the chief priests and elders. Working in the vineyard—that is, the Kingdom—is to pursue the will of God, to seek holiness, and to strive after justice. The parable is simple enough: one son says he will not work, but then changes his mind; the other son gives lip service—“Yes, sir”—but fails to enter the vineyard. The first son, said Jesus, said, “I will not,” but “afterwards changed his mind and went.”
The Greek term used is closely related to the well-known word metanoia, which Saint John Paul II explained is a reference to “ a radical change of mind and heart. It is necessary to turn away from evil and to enter the kingdom of justice, love and truth which is being established.” The first son, in other words, listened to his conscience, and then chose to enter into the vineyard, to work with his father. This indicates the desire to accept the Father’s gift of divine sonship, to “obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom 8:21).
The second son, in the immediate context, represents the Pharisees, who said the right things but failed to do them. Words alone are not enough: “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt 7:21).
God created man with free will, and man freely rejected God’s fellowship. But God, through the humility of the Son, offers fellowship again. Will we gladly enter into the vineyard today?
(This “Opening the Word” column originally appeared in a slightly different form in the September 17, 2014 edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
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Don’t talk of stars, burning above If you’re in love, show me! Tell me no dreams, filled with desire If you’re on fire show me! Love never really changes does it. That line from My Fair Lady sums up what we tend toward, talking a good game. Empty words. Jesus Christ knows our perfidious nature and teaches us who “did the Father’s will”. It illustrates complacency and lip service of many Christians v the sinner who eventually responds to the Word by doing His will. It speaks to the current crisis of empty acclamations of love v the need to repent of, relinquish a sinful life keeping His commandments. Christ is literally saying to us If you love me show me!
These are scary times. Psychologists are trying to have the mainstream acceptance of “neuro-exisitentialism” which claims that free-will is only a matter of different brain chemistry within individuals and how it affects neurons. I think that for all thinking humans who believe that there exists a mind and soul regardless of whether you are in the Pascal camp or Sartre camp the prospect of denying freewill in favor of different modes of behavioral science is indeed dehumanizing.
The only thing in existence worth allowing free-willed hatred, sin, death and damnation for, is free-willed love. One cannot love God and fellow man without the free-willed option to choose not to love. To obey God is to love God.
Matthew 7:21 The True Disciple.
Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. When that day comes, many will plead with me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ have we not prophesied in your name? have we not exorcized demons by its power? Did we not do many miracles in your name as well? Then I will declare to them solemnly, I never knew you. Out of my sight, you evildoers!
John 14:15
If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 Excellence of the gift of love.
Now I will show you the way which surpasses all the others. If I speak with human tongues and angelic as well, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and, with full knowledge, comprehend all mysteries, if I have faith great enough to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
John 15:22
If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin; but as it is they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me also hates my Father. If I had not done works among them that no one else ever did, they would not have sin; but as it is, they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But in order that the word written in their law might be fulfilled, ‘They hated me without cause.’
John 5:27
“The Father has given over to him power to pass judgment because he is Son of Man; no need for you to be surprised at this, for an hour is coming in which all those in their tombs shall hear his voice and come forth. Those who have done right shall rise to live; the evildoers shall rise to be damned.”
1 John 5:3
For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,
Catechism 2068 The Council of Trent teaches that the Ten Commandments are obligatory for Christians and that the justified man is still bound to keep them; The Second Vatican Council confirms: “The bishops, successors of the apostles, receive from the Lord . . . the mission of teaching all peoples, and of preaching the Gospel to every creature, so that all men may attain salvation through faith, Baptism and the observance of the Commandments.”
Perhaps the question could be asked, “Is it fair that God created us with free will?” God could have created us without free will I suppose. And, if we didn’t have free will, we would always do the good chosen for us by God. And then the consequence would be eternal happiness with God since we always did the good. We would not need the Church; we would not need to be saved; there would be no need for a Redeemer.
I agree. And there would be no true love of God for us, since we would be mere robots, doing what were programmed to do. In fact, the deterministic view of the universe is that of many unbelievers — they need to see that such a view rejects any sort of real love, purpose, insight, and glory.
Bulleseye…X 1,000! Without free will, it’s impossible to love. Since the very nature of God is love, He would desire nothing less from us and for us.
Referring to Deacon Peitler’s philosophical muse of life absent of free will, for the benevolent cause that we might all live in this world and the next happily ever after, sort of a blue pill world, while we might be unaware of our drone like existence and quite pleased with things, God would not be.
Our Creator is just too just to create life free of justice. Meaning, that he wouldn’t wish to cheat us of the adventure of struggle and possible defeat. That to be creatures in his image, rather than marionettes, He with the tiresome task of pulling our strings – we must demonstrate our willingness. But Aquinas says that’s what he does, since he follows Aristotle’s epiphany in the Eudemian Ethics that it’s God who ultimately moves the will [if we think deeply about it, it emerges as the reason we call him God] and we, despite the anomaly, have freedom of will. Why all the bother? Well, the trouble is God’s very essence is love, and He will not be satisfied with anything less than our love. Love is always and forever a free gift of the lover to the beloved.
About free will, the wisdom of the great American theologian Yogi Berra surely applies: “When you come to a Y in the road, take it!”
That is, about the Y, to ACCEPT OR NOT TO ACCEPT the fact and profundity of radical human and personal free will….On the global scale, to deny free will is the path to fatalistic Islam, with its totally inscrutable and arbitrary Allah, and therefore subordination to the straitjacket of Shari’a Law under the tutelage of a fused Mosque-state…
Instead, what is the NATURE of man—made in the “image and likeness” of a God and Logos who creates freely—AND not out of any necessity such as is imposed by either fideistic Islam or by rationalist Evolutionism?
Personal FREE WILL, and accountability, and conversion, and Redemption: very unlike the evolutionary doctrine which holds, for example, that the Church with her dogmas and morals was not instituted by the incarnate (!) Christ, but was the result of gradual evolution of social Christianity or embryonic gospel “values,” and dependent on the circumstances of history on the move.
A premise now found woven into parts of SYNODALITY?
Applicable to the politicized and stextualized (!) abuse of today’s “synods,” the political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal had this to say:
“We humans are not . . . equal to the task of evolving a bubbling stream of ever new verities. Ideas are, truly, like infrequent oases in the barren wastes of human thought; once discovered [or even divinely revealed!], they are forever precious, even though they are left to be silted up by the sands of stupidity and ignorance” (“On Power: Its Nature and the History of its Growth,” 1962).