Are We Necessary Or Not? And What Does That Mean For Human Dignity?

Trinity Sunday 2023

If you walked in a little late for our service today, you may have arrived after all the Scripture was proclaimed. Except for the psalm, we are given only eleven verses in the OT and NT to consider. But they are very dense in meaning. God is not a big muscle-guy waiting to pounce on us if we do something morally wrong. That’s clear from all the Scriptures, not just the Christian ones.

Our reading from Exodus tells us that God is slow to anger, merciful and gracious, overflowing in loving kindness and fidelity. The Church even takes out verse 7 from that reading, the part that focuses on His forgiveness, but tells us that God punishes the children and grandchildren of those who persist in evildoing. Why the omission? I think it’s because the bad example of parents, if they seem to be stuck in their evildoing but not punished in this life, often sets their offspring on lives of evil. Children and grandchildren learn a lot about what is right and wrong from the first generation of a family. And if the young ones adopt habits of selfishness, that itself is a punishment for all generations.

Today St. Paul is writing to Corinth, a church that he loved a great deal, but because of its culture was quick to fall into moral fault. The Epistle tells us the God we all serve is a God of love and peace. Dissension between factions in the church must give way to discussion, prayer and lots of listening. That’s the way to show the love of Christ to others, and to witness to the world the joy that can be ours in following Our Lord.

And the Gospel is one most football fans memorized three decades ago. How much did God love the world He created? This much, as His Son stretched out His hands on the cross to be nailed while He forgave His executioners all the way to His death. Just remember, every Sunday we come here to celebrate the rest of that story–Christ’s Resurrection.

My favorite theologian is Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict of happy memory. In a recently published book, transcription from talks he gave in 1985, he answers a question from a young man who said he was not thankful for his own existence. Ratzinger replied, “It is only when we know that there is One who did not cast lots blindly, when we know that our existence is not an accident, but is rather born of freedom and love, only then can we, whose existence is not necessary, be thankful for this freedom and know, with gratitude, that it is indeed a gift to be human.” That is another way of saying (with the philosophers) that each of us is a contingent being. And we are each the offspring of a union between to other contingent beings, our parents. None of us are necessary beings, but all of us are reliant for our existence on the one Necessary Being, our God and Father. He continually wills us into existence; He loves us into being, and sustains us with His care. What can we learn from this reality?

“This insight, that man is not some accidental product of the earth, but that each is a divine project, that he is in a direct relationship with God, is, in the final analysis, the sole supporting reason for the inviolability of human dignity, and thus it is upon this fact that every civilization ultimately rests. Wherever this idea is abandoned, wherever man is no longer understood to be under the protection of God, no longer seen as having God’s breath inside of him, then over time it becomes quite natural to begin classifying him according to his utility, according to whatever standards lend themselves to the society in question.”

Recently we saw a proposition–clearly illegal–put before local voters that would deny the police the ability to enforce the law against notorious abortionists like Kermit Gosnell. It also would have denied them the right to lock up people who would deface churches, synagogues and businesses. Pope Benedict was right to ask the question, “Is it right to do something merely because we have the technology to do it?” That’s a question all of us, particularly young folk just starting on careers, need to keep in front of our minds. There is no good way to do something that is evil.