On this next to last Sunday after Pentecost, my text is from
the first chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, verse 18: “Come, let us reason together. Though your
sins be as scarlet, I will make you white as snow.”
Come, let us reason together. Those are the words of God to the people of
Israel. Those are remarkable words
coming from the mouth of God. Those words are astounding if you really think
about them. God, all powerful, all
knowing, above creation, pure Spirit, says to his chosen people, his people
that he chose for himself, his people who betrayed him so many times,: I shall
be your God and you shall be my people. This God says to his people: let’s sit down and discuss the situation in a
reasonable way. And the situation is
precisely the unfaithfulness of Israel, their constant yielding to the
pressures to be assimilate, to be like those surrounding them, declaring their
openness to other gods but telling themselves they are doing so while remaining
faithful to the one true God. A God who is totally other, who has no
relationship with his people except to be inscrutable and to demand obedience
would never say: Come, let us reason
together. This is a God with whom one
can have a conversation, a God who will listen to me no matter how stupid my
conversation is, no matter how shallow my presuppositions. This God does not hide himself behind some
some impenetrable curtain and merely deigns to communicate to mankind by means
of a quasi-angelic intermediary. And
this is because this God’s essence, his definition of his being, his essence,
is love. Let us reason together. God can say this because he loves the people
he has chosen to be his people. His
appeal to reason is founded in love.
Now this sounds odd: to link reason and love. But it sounds
odd to us because we identify reason with a disembodied rationality that
declares itself free from any true subjectivity, or rather, free from any human
relationship, as if reason in the end is like a geometric postulate that has no
relation to a thinking person. It just
is. It is disembodied. And this is the
antithesis to the Christian understanding of reason. For the Christian, reason
is rooted in the God who made himself deeply knowable in the person of Jesus
Christ. When God spoke, it was a reasonable
conversation and the breath of that conversation, the utterance of that
conversation was and is the Word of God, that Word whose reasonableness takes
flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. And
the Word was made flesh.. full of grace and truth…and we beheld Him. St Anselm’s famous question: Cur Deus Homo? Why did God become man? The answer: that man might be saved by the life, death
and resurrection of the person, the real man, Jesus Christ, the embodiment of
the reason of God, the reasonableness of God, that reason that includes at its
heart the cross, with all of its suffering and shame and so confounds what the
world thinks reason is.
Come, let us reason together. That is the knee jerk response of those who
are in charge of things in this world to Friday’s horrific attacks in Paris
that have left so far 129 men and women dead. But this is an understanding of
reason that has nothing to do with God.
This version of reason is powerless in the face of evil, for evil is not
reasonable, is immune to the power of reason.
Secular man is powerless in the face of evil, for secular man places all
his trust in rationality, and so irrationality becomes something to be
eliminated by education, by training, by planning, and of this done by the
elite. This blind faith in man’s ability to solve the deepest and most
intractable problems facing mankind, as if these problems can be solved by
planning and strategy, is a mark of contemporary man. In this line of thinking, all you have to do
to solve the horrific traffic problems caused by exit 13 on route 95 in
Fairfield County is to widen bridges and make one new lane. So after several years of construction, those
of us who use this road every day grind to a halt at the same place on every
day. And this is not only because the
strategems of planning commissions are out of date since it takes so long to
implement so called improvements. It is also because these problems have a life
of their own that defy all efforts to eliminate them by planning. The attempts at a solution assume a
rationality of the problem that simply is not there. Traffic, like sin, is irrational.
When secular man is faced with what happened in Paris on
Friday, he can only issue communiqués that are laced with pseudo-religious
jargon, words whose sentimentality fit the bill but ultimately mean
nothing. For secular man denies the
existence of evil. What does François
Hollande’s declaration of three days of mourning mean in a society that insists
that abortion is a right and a society that insists that euthanasia is a
right? There can be no doubt that
Hollande is genuinely moved by the horrible slaughter of innocent people in
Paris on Friday night. But as the quintessential
secular man, a product of that Enlightenment that irrationally discarded
Christian civilization founded on the reality of the covenant between God and
his people, discarded because of the presence of corruption within that
civilization, secular man cannot confront evil except in a sentimental
way. For once the moral foundation of
society that is based on the radical objectivity of God, and yet the God who
suffered and died for the sins of the world: once this is removed there is
nothing left to combat evil except marches through Paris in solidarity with
Charlie Hebdo or words of empty piety uttered by world leaders like President
Obama about “those who died are in our thoughts and prayers”. What does this mean in the face of evil? When Lucifer said to God; I will not serve,
do we say to Lucifer “I feel your pain”?
The Cardinal of Paris, Cardinal Vingt-Trois, issued a statement deploring the killings and
said that he would offer Mass in Notre Dame today at 6 pm. And this is a good
thing. But most Frenchmen would say: “who
cares if he offers Mass for those who were killed and for peace? This has
nothing to do with us. What does it mean
to offer the Mass for those who have died?
I do not even know what the Mass is.” The Bishop of Rome issued a
statement read by Cardinal Parolin “Once again,
the Holy Father vigorously condemns violence, which cannot solve anything, and
he asks God to inspire thoughts of peace and solidarity in all and to impart on
families in this trial and on all of the French people, the abundance of His
Blessings.” Thoughts of peace and solidarity have no effect on evil. It
is Hollande, the secular man, who is the high priest of secular France, of
secular Europe, of the secular de-Christianized West including this country. And
it is Hollande who correctly identified those who carried out these merciless
and brutal killings as barbarians, those who hate civilization itself, those
who hate freedom. But in the end
everyone knows that so much of the reaction to this slaughter is all smoke and
mirrors and that all of this has little to do with the reasonable faith in the
person and gospel of Jesus Christ that is about salvation and eternal life.
We grieve together with the people of Paris, and we offer
our prayers for those who have died and for those who mourn within the most
powerful prayer of all, the Holy Mass.
And we remember those words
of God again today: “Come let us reason
together. Though your sins be like scarlet, I will make them white snow.” Come, let us reason together. Those words of God are not only an offer of
rational discourse, not only a realistic conversation about what is at stake in
man’s relationship to God. They are an
offer to man of love, of a God who cares for us and who loves us and whose
patience is coterminous with his mercy.
But the time is far spent. The
night is upon us. The
night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of
darkness, and let us put on the armor of light
