Playing No Favorites--Like God Does Series

Saturday of the First Week of Lent 2023

One of the worst heresies of the past two thousand years, an opinion that keeps coming back with almost predictable regularity, is the error first heard in early times from Marcion. The idea is that the God of the OT was a harsh, vindictive judge, almost bloodthirsty in His determination to exterminate evil. Therefore He did things like tell the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites. Get rid of sin by getting rid of the sinners. Then, of course, the God of the NT is a God of love, who does not do such things. Such an opinion is actually imposing on the true God, the Blessed Trinity, the template of the gods of Olympus, who entertained themselves by playing around with human beings. That’s thoroughly unbiblical and ignorant of all of the Church’s authoritative tradition.

From the author of Deuteronomy we hear today the determination of God to honor the covenant made years earlier between Himself and His people, Israel. It’s a pretty simple “agreement” in the words of this translation. The people would listen to God, walk in His ways (or act as God does) and keep His statutes and ordinances. In return, God would make them a kind of light to the nations, set them up as particularly blessed so the nations would come to them and learn to walk in the ways of the true God, with right worship and right living.

Of course, Scripture does point out that over and over again that’s exactly what Israel did not do, so that by their sin they were erecting a barrier between themselves and God, preventing His blessings and opening themselves up to a whole mess of curses.

Jesus tells us today not just to forgive our enemies, something we heard earlier in the Gospel, but to wish them well, to do good to them, and, yes, to love them. That’s walking in the ways of God, as commanded in Deuteronomy, because God gives sunlight to the good and wicked alike, rain to the evildoer as well as the just. These two blessings would have been the ones most important to an agricultural society like first-century Galilee and Judea. God plays no favorites, so to walk in His ways means to love both people we like and people we don’t like.

And, yes, that’s very hard for us human beings to do, but He has promised to give us the grace, day by day, to do it all. Blessed be His Name.