23^rd Sunday of the Year 2002

"So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me.

Of all the tasks which belong to God's chosen Prophets in the Old Testament, none was more daunting, more frightening really, than the role of acting as God's watchman over the chosen people. The role of the watchman in the civic life was less daunting than that of the Prophetic watchman, for all he had to do was stay awake and warn the population when some physical threat was approaching, an army of the enemy, a roving band of marauders, perhaps even a devastating storm. This kind of warning required good common sense, good eyes, a strong voice, and an ability to stay alert at all times. But the civil watchman was actually in the reverse situation from the prophetic watchman in one sense, that is, in the way the fulfillment of his duties was greeted by the population. If he was a good watchman, that is, if he warned the people in a timely way of danger, he was treated like a hero, and only if he failed to warn the people of impending danger in a timely fashion was he ever going to be condemned, derided, rejected, condemned.

This is quite different from the situation of the prophetic watchman. If the prophet warned the people in a timely fashion of impending danger to them, he was almost always going to be treated with derision, persecution, contempt, as if he himself were an enemy, and this is the reason men like Jeremiah express dismay at times that God had chosen them to be his prophets, because they knew that being. His watchman was at times going to make them very unpopular, and at times even place they're very lives in danger. Some prophets were actually put to death, and Jesus reminds us of this during his own confrontations with the leaders of Israel which led to His own death.

The reason the prophetic watchman was treated so harshly is important for us to understand. The prophet was sent by God to warn the people in a timely fashion that they were in mortal danger, but what angered the people, was that the danger that threatened them was proclaimed as coming not so much from any external enemy, but from themselves, from their own moral evils or spiritual infidelity, which threatened their very existence as a people and their salvation as individuals. Even when the warning included an external enemy who would reek havoc on the people, the message always connected that physical threat to the moral and spiritual degradation of the people as primary cause, and saw the external threat as more of a consequence of and/or punishment for their moral and spiritual depravity. In other words, the prophet had to proclaim that they were their own worst enemy, for their depravity was root cause of their civic and political decline which opened the door to their enemies attacking them, and bringing down on their heads the consequences of their own moral decline.

It was a hard message, and the reaction was often violent. Individuals and nations are blinded by their own actions, and rarely can see the truth of their situation. The conversion of Nineveh by Jonah is a rare example of a prophet's warning meeting with national repentance, and the irony of the fact that this was a pagan nation, and not God's chosen people, is not lost on the sacred writer, nor on Jesus, who points to this specific example to warn Israel about the terrible consequences of their rejecting. His message, including the warning that it would lead to the destruction of their civil and political institutions, which it did.

Jesus was put to death not by some misunderstanding, but because he stood in the line of the prophets as watchmen for Israel. He called for repentance and conversion, warned of the consequences of His rejection, and warned that the nation as a whole would suffer, the innocent along with the guilty. That is always the case, that the corruption of national institutions by the few, by leaders, political, intellectual, and religious, brings suffering to all, the innocent suffer because they are part of the nation in decline, the nation in rebellion against God, against his sovereignty, His laws, his Word. Jesus stood in the line of the prophets in this regard, but he transcended that whole line in other ways. He was the message not just the watchman, and he warned the people not to save Himself, but solely to save them. The prophets might well act out of self-preservation when they warned the people: "...he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life." But when Jesus acted, he acted out of pure charity, for as Paul reminds us, and this teaching is based on Jesus in action: "..Love is the fulfilling of the law."

The Church today has to put into practice this prophetic role of the watchman in imitation of Jesus, for the sake of Love, not to save her own skin, but to save man and his human institutions, his civilization, his world. The Church must preach the moral law and the whole truth about man, his fallen-ness, his desperate need of redemption, and thus of repentance and conversion, today as much or more than ever before. If she does this she will be rejected by many, even persecuted by some, but if love of man is at the core of her mission, which always includes her prophetic role as watchman, then she cannot remain quiet, or sidelined, or silent in the face of the manifold moral evils and spiritual decline that grip our societies. She must speak the truth, that evil is not good, and good is not evil, and that neither good nor evil are merely subjective determinations of human intellect, will or conscience. She must speak with charity, with understanding of the often invincible ignorance that accompanies and causes this moral depravity and spiritual emptiness, and the often not so invincible ignorance. But regardless of anyone's subjective responsibility, the evil that results is real and destructive of individuals, families an family life, society and its fundamental institutions. And this societal decline that results from individual and sometimes collective moral and spiritual depravity threatens man and the world today as perhaps never before, and the collapse of human institutions will bring, is already bringing untold suffering to the guilty and innocent alike, and this suffering will only increase until man repents and turns back to God and his laws.

Last year about this time, a few protestant ministers suggested that the terrorist act that occurred was a warning and even a punishment for America's moral decline. It was perhaps insensitive in its timing, and somewhat simplistic, but I could not help but think about Jesus' own words when he recalled the tower that collapsed and killed 19 people in Jerusalem:

Or those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them --do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!" [Luke 13:4]

Of course, Jesus was not saying that this was necessarily a punishment, but surely he saw it as an omen, a portent or sign of things to come. It is precisely the fact that innocent people can be victims of accidents or other calamaties, such as war, crimes etc., that Jesus fixes upon here. When societies become depraved, when societies come to tolerate moral depravity, there chaos follows in human relations, and the innocent along with the guilt inevitably suffer. So, like those innocent people who died in an accident, he says, many more innocents will die, as the consequence of the upheaval in Jewish society that is growing, and which could be reversed and future catastrophe prevented if only they would recognize His visitation who came to establish God's Kingdom. Their acceptance of Jesus would have ushered in the Kingdom of God in power, and that alone would have prevented the destruction of Jerusalem, by the power of God not their resistance of the Romans, while His rejection hastened the dissolution of the little that remained of the once great civic life of Israel.

Perhaps the what the protestant ministers really meant to say, that the attack was an omen, a warning that we need to change our way of life, return to God and His law, or worse things would surely follow for us in the future. But even if that was their intent, and they had said even just that, I feel confident the reaction would have been pretty much the same: how dare anyone call into question the morality and spiritual state of this country.

Shortly after the attack. I also saw an interview with the hated mastermind of that attack, and I was struck by his moral justification, when he asked, How can Americans condemn this attack on civilians, he asked, when they dropped atom bombs on civilian populations to obtain a war objective, the shortening of the war and saving of even more lives perhaps, and still judge that to have been a morally acceptable action. His question has to be answered. As a nation, we have never faced that issue squarely, but now a terrorist has told us that our fundamental justification of the bombing of innocent civilians to accomplish a good end is the ground of his decision to kill innocent people to obtain what he sees as a good end, putting an end to American influence on Muslim nations and their religion and culture. If we continue to defend those actions in World War II on the basis of an end justifies the means morality, we contribute to a moral chaos in our world, that supports all kinds of monstrous evils like the actions of these terrorists, and innocent people are inevitably going to be the victims.

The end-justifies-the means morality has taken deep root in our society, and is at the root of the culture of death that is taking hold in our midst today. We justify killing 4000 children a day in the womb, because they are inconvenient - the end justifies the means. We tolerate killing the aged more and more, because they are seen as useless or burdens in some cases, or because they are unhappy and request it themselves in others: the end justifies the means. We try to create embryos, clones of human beings for medical purposes: the end justifies the means. We tolerate pornography for the sake of freedom of speech, hand out prophylactics to teens for safe sex since we say they will refuse to abstain: the ends justify the means.

All of this end-justifies-means morality and the consequent decline of religious faith and spiritual life portends much greater suffering and destruction in the future than the twin towers. The twin towers of society, objective morality and spiritual life, are being knocked down day in and day out, and the future can already be seen in snippets of the news: children, some of those who make it beyond the womb, being abused and brutally killed, children killing parents in rare cases still, but parents killing children by the millions, year in and year out. These are omens, like the twin towers, ands the Church must fulfill her prophetic role, like Christ, with Charity to be sure, but with unbending fidelity to the Truth. We have to have compassion, because much of this decline is the result of the most massive distortion of truth in human history, but we have to speak the truth nonetheless, for charity demands it. We should be able to tell the Bin Ladens of this world why any attack on innocent life is wrong, but how can we in the face of our acceptance of abortion and euthanasia? Here is our only answer, if only if we first convert and follow the way of the Lord: Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Amen