Monday of 18th week in course
Gospel of Life
Poor Hananiah the prophet. He was completely clueless about the mission of a prophet. He believed–and I think it was a core belief–that prophets are called by God to make people feel better. So when Jeremiah, miming his prophecy of disaster for a nation that turns its back on God, showed up with his neck and hands bound to an oxen-yoke, Hananiah knew what to do. He made people feel better by saying that the Lord would break the yoke, and then he took Jeremiah’s yoke and broke it.
But the ministry of prophets is not to help people feel better, but to help them live better, live according to the natural law. Pope John Paul, in his letter on the Gospel of Life, gave us a catalog of modern errors, and this is one that is particularly relevant today–the threat hanging over the incurably ill, disabled and dying. Terri Schindler Schiavo has been the modern paradigm for the horrible campaign to “put him out of his misery.” In a society in which suffering has lost all meaning, “the temptation becomes all the greater to resolve the problem of suffering by eliminating it at the root, by hastening death so that it occurs” at the most suitable moment.
A sick person may out of desperation, out of feeling overwhelmed by his own frailty, ask for death. Those close to him are moved by misplaced compassion, and sometimes by a desire to eliminate medical bills and the sight of a loved one in pain and fear. The culture around us urges us on because it considers suffering the epitome of evil, something to eliminate at all costs. The costs of caring for the sick and disabled are huge. Because of past contraception and abortion, the number of working people supporting the aged continues to decline. Did I hear that our current year deficit is over two trillion dollars? That’s two thousand billions of newly borrowed money. And now add to that this idea that we can define our own categories of good and evil–something our degenerate civilization has borrowed from Nietzsche–and you have the perfect moral storm that can bring on an enforcement of euthanasia.
Our Gospel recalls the time when the apostles were in their boat–and remember the boat with apostles in it is always a symbol of the Church–and a huge storm came up. Jesus appeared to them, walking on the stormy lake, and their first thought was that they were seeing a ghost. Isn’t that where we are today? We are at least in the boat Jesus built, His Church. We are assailed by a horrible moral storm–abortion, infanticide, people mutilating themselves so they can do the impossible to their sexual identity, and many pretending that sexual abuse of one’s partner is equivalent to marriage. They have the federal government behind them, urging them on to destroy the moral fabric of society. Now that is a storm. But why do we see the signs of Christ’s presence and refuse to believe in Him? He is the Son of God. What does He want to do in us today?
It is our challenge to act as the Jeremiahs of today, to testify to the sanctity of life, and to oppose actively any attempt to devalue, alter or destroy life from conception to natural death. To a world starving for the truth, it is our call by the Holy Spirit to prepare a banquet of truth and break the bread of life to bring about a culture of life, and to teach our offspring to do the same.
