Facing The Challenge Of A Warped Society

Saturday of the 21st Week in Course 2023

Ordinarily we tend to associate St. Paul’s teachings on chastity and lust with the letters to the Corinthians. But that’s shortsighted. Remember that even as far back as Plato and Aristotle, the virtuous life was associated with men and women who would employ their minds, their reason, to control their passions like lust and anger and greed. That was just a kind of natural law morality. But we can find even philosophers like Cicero, many decades earlier than Paul, decrying the widespread abuse of marriage, including disrespect for women and homosexual conduct, that injured the family, and very directly warped and harmed society. It was a feature of much pagan worship, like that of Pan and Dionysus. So Paul expected all of his congregations to listen to their minds and order their hearts in the right way. He told the folks at Thessalonika that they had no need for anyone to write them about loving their neighbor. The Ten Commandments already did that, and they could get that not just from the Hebrew Bible, but from any society. The challenge for them would be to do more and more, to actively help out of love, way beyond what the commandments prescribe. In Christ, God had already won the victory over sin and death, and has given them and us the Holy Spirit to judge right and wrong, and energize us for the good.

Why should they, and we, focus so much on the love of neighbor? It’s at least because since God loves all of us, if we are to imitate and become like God–to in some sense be divinized–we must treat other humans as He does. In the end, at our last day, this is what we can expect to be judged by. Yes, our faith compels us to do it, but we will need to stand or fall based on what we worked to do with the talents we have been given. If, out of fear to make a mistake, we do nothing with the gift of God, we can expect to end up in the darkness where all we will hear is weeping and the rats grinding their teeth. Not an eternity anyone can wish for. But if, in Christ, with faith, we take up the challenge and use our talents for the growth of God’s domain, then we will have all that we might want–namely eternal union with our Lord in the company of all the saints.