Juneteenth Homily

Juneteenth 2022

It was in 1865 that Union General Granger read and enforced the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves. The thirteenth amendment banning slavery in the United States had not been passed and ratified yet, but Lincoln’s executive order was enforceable and Galveston Texas was the site of Granger’s action. It is thought that a quarter million Texas blacks were freed in the following days. It’s now a federal holiday, whereas Texans have had a holiday then since 1979.

So what is the deeper meaning of the event? Let’s take a look at our first reading. Why were the people of Israel, the larger and more populous northern part of the Israelite settlement in Palestine, dragged off into slavery by the Assyrians. They weren’t made slaves when the Assyrians conquered their army and king. No, they had abandoned right worship many generations earlier when they erected statues of bulls in Dan and Samaria and started calling them their gods, when they went back to the fertility cults that had been forbidden by Torah, and began to treat the ten commandments as suggestions instead of clear and enforceable laws. That was slavery of the worst kind, the slavery that they imposed on themselves and wilfully lost their dignity as followers of the true God.

The writers of the psalms and the books of Kings saw this terrible catastrophe, and the later one when Babylon dragged the Judahites off to captivity, in the proper light. They accused their ancestors of treason, of abandoning the true God and His way of life for a hedonistic, pagan lifestyle. God is not mocked. If a people allows their culture to ignore and disobey the natural moral law, the law written on every heart, they are already slaves, slaves to sin, and can only escape if they return to right living, right worship. Such a culture will be internally weak, comprised of individuals who only care about their own perversions, and unable to resist any external pressure or aggression. That’s why Israel fell, Rome fell, and so many other civilizations have dropped into the dustbin of history.

The words of Jesus in today’s Gospel are frequently misspoken by the culturally decadent. They hear true words such as “God hates divorce” or “sodomy is an evil act” or “pay your workers a living wage” and wag their fingers saying “Jesus told you not to judge.” Jesus doesn’t want me, a sinner, judging you, a sinner, usurping the clear Biblical teaching that Christ will judge us from our behavior on our last day. But we can stand with Scripture and the Church declaring that certain actions, like abortion, are always evil, and encouraging others to recognize and stay away from such evils. We can judge evil actions and stand against them in the public square, and indeed, in these evil times, we would be failing Christ if we do not.