Ps 41:2-5, 13-14
2 Cor 1:18-22
Mk 2:1-12
I’ve got good news and bad news. Bad news is Ash Wednesday is this week. Good news is three more days to fatten up.
God is selfish. Isn’t it true? He really is selfish. He created the universe. He created the sun and the moon and the earth. He created the stars in the heavens and the oceans abroad. He created the plants, the animals, the land, the air – all things visible and invisible. He created everything around us, each and every one of us, he created…. and saw that it was very good. It was pleasing to Him! Why? Why did God make man? The old Baltimore Catechism gives us this answer: God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next. It sounds very self-centered that God would create a being just so that He could be known, loved, and served. Doesn’t it? It would be like me going out to make friends just so they can know all about me, love me, and help me whenever I want them to do so. Or maybe like some genius who creates a robot to be his companion for life, waiting on him hand and foot. It sounds pretty selfish doesn’t it? Or at least self serving.
We read today in Isaiah, these words, The people I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise. Yet you did not call up on me… for you grew weary of me…. You burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your crimes. He forms people for himself to praise him and honor him – and they didn’t do what He wanted them to do. Like a failed science experiment He is not happy with the results. Then he goes on to say, It is I, I, who wipe out, for my own sake, your offenses. He speaks to us like He is going to forgive us, but actually He does it for His own sake!! And I’m thinking to myself, “He’s the one who made us!” It was not my fault I was born this way, a sinner. It is not my fault that God created me imperfect and I can’t do everything He created me to do.
It almost seems like one big game: the game of LIFE! He created this Candy Land of a game. He set the rules, and made it impossible for us to win with all these different Chutes and Ladders and hoops we have to jump through. He’s got a Monopoly on everything. He’s the master and we are His Chess pawns. At least that’s what I’m getting from this reading. It is not unnatural to feel a little bit of resentment. It is not unnatural to feel down-trodden and hung out left out to dry. Many atheists, secularists, and those that have fallen away from the faith have taken this sentiment and moved it to its furthest extremes, denying His very existence. They’ve decided that it’s not worth the Risk to live their life in this “Charade”. They’ve crossed every Taboo! and gone so far as to accuse God of rigging the stakes, calling Him selfish, self-centered, or that bully with a magnifying glass and we the ants Scrabbleing about trying not to get burned.
As in every religion it seems like there is some sort of game to appease the gods, but ours is a little bit different. However, our story, our game is the only one where God intervenes, incarnates, lived in His creation, and experienced everything we experience. When you think about it, if this was really just one big game and it was God versus us, God actually “cheats” at His own game so that we could win! If we were to only read Isaiah like I just did, we would have taken Jesus Christ completely out of the picture. How does God the Father wipe away our offenses, how does He make the way in the desert and turn wasteland into rivers? He sends His Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer and die on the cross for us. Is this really selfishness? Is this really for His sake? He could have just said, Forgetaboutit. You’re Forgiven!! But He doesn’t, does He? No, He puts Himself on the line for us, to show how to live, how to love, how to fight temptation, how to be persecuted, and how to die. But why? It doesn’t make any sense!!
It doesn’t make any sense because couldn’t be any less selfish! He is actually all gift and directed towards another. That is love. True love can never be directed towards yourself, it must be directed towards another – to will the good for/to another. That is why we have a Holy Trinity, one God in three Persons. Self-love is and will never be fruitful, but a husband and wife loving each overflows in with so much fruitfulness that another person is created. It is why the marriage between husband and wife is so sacred. Marriage provides a living and tangible example of the Trinitarian relationship of God here on earth. Your marriage is a living witness and testimony of God to the whole world!! The love that a family shares is the very love of God writ small. How awesome and incredible is that? I bet marriages would last a lot longer and be taken more seriously if they realized that their relationship participated in the very divinity of the Holy Trinity. (Suddenly a Vegas wedding in a drive thru chapel doesn’t seem so appealing anymore.) And what kind of parent would not give their children the world? Again God is emulated in this as well. As a Mother or Father cleans up after their children’s mess, God cleans up after ours. How many parents have stayed up with their kids doing homework? Or maybe your kids are working on a big project and it is taking every fiber of your being not to do it for them? Or when they are first learning to tie their shoes, you have to resist the urge to do it for them. Some parents have more success than others – let’s just say in my family, I wore Velcro almost through junior high. Having children helps to draw out the habit of love and turn it into virtue – the love from their hearts into concrete action. That love is and should be completely unselfish, compassionate, and unconditional.
When I hear these readings proclaimed, I am humbled at what God has done for me personally, and then I am struck in awe when I’ve see what He has done and continues to do for the whole world, redeeming creation and making it new. How can this be selfish? How can this be self-serving when He offers Himself only Son for our salvation?
If Jesus Christ did not come into this world to reveal Himself, to heal us of our infirmities, forgive our sins, and bring about virtues that are always grounded in Him, then we might have reason to suspect that this religion and belief thing is all one big game. But He did come into this world: healing the paralyzed, making the blind see, the deaf hear, and forgiving people’s sins. He has shown us the way, the way to look beyond ourselves and to start looking at our neighbor. Selfishness will never look beyond the self, but in God’s great act of love He extends not only His forgiveness, but also His divine Sonship. That means that we have become sons and daughters in Christ. This divine adoption is incredible when you think about… We belong to God, we are in His family. It’s not us versus Him, we are all in this together. That’s why we pray for each other, that’s why we help each other, and are called to love each other – we are in one big family.
I said in the very beginning that God is selfish. Lest I go into heresy or blasphemy or Fr. Ivey gets angry letters and phone calls, I want to qualify what I meant. God is first and foremost love. He is the very definition of love and the measure by which we love. He created us out of love because He wants to share it. He loves us so much that He would never want to suffer eternal punishment for disobedience. He could have made us like robots and never given us free will. But we all know that’s not real love. Forced love is cannot be real love. Love must be freely given and freely reciprocated, given back. So everyday He shows us how much He loves us by giving himself in the Eucharist. Like the paralytic man coming down from the roof, Jesus comes to be with us in the Eucharist. Where the paralytic needed healing, Jesus gives us the healing. Where the man needed forgiveness, Jesus comes and gives us forgiveness. In addition to all of that, when we receive the Eucharist, we receive Him and become transformed into His Body. We become the Body of Christ. As the early Church Fathers wrote, “God became man, so that man could become like God.” As the Father loves the Son, the Son brings us into Himself so that He may love us all the more as sons and daughters of the Father. I think it is pretty incredible then. God is selfish, but only in the sense that He loves us so much that we become like Him and be brought in union with Him – we are His.
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