After the Blessing

Glorious mud, new life, and contentment

Ezekiel: "I will take your stony hearts from your bodies and give you natural hearts"

If we recognize the hand of God at work in our lives it is unnatural to have a stony heart. If we are aware of the life and love that flow from the Author of Life and the one who is love, how can we be "stony hearted?" But people do, nevertheless, become stony hearted. I wonder why that is so common? Is your heart "stony"? There is no higher calling for us than to glorify God, and there no way more pure to do that than to truly love with our hearts.

Today's gospel has the story of the woman caught in adultery that the crowd drags before Jesus and asks if she should be stoned under Moses' law. The stony-hearted crowd was standing around, ready to kill, but they had made Jesus her judge. Instead, he frustrates their effort by asking them to first judge themselves, saying "let the one without sin cast the first stone". Imagine the tension in the crowd as they waited for somebody else to make the first pitch, and the pressures as more and more turned away in admission of their guilt. Jesus does not condone adultery, which is clearly sin. But he does give this guilty woman a chance for salvation, telling her "go and sin no more". He separates the sin from the sinner, who he is about to suffer and die for.

This passage reminds me of the excerpt from Matthew where Jesus is talking about divorce. There he says Moses allowed divorce because the people were "stiff-necked", adding that it was not so from the beginning. With the New Testament comes the higher standards Jesus sets for all the commandments, without allowing for natural human frailty, but adding the power of the Messiah's saving grace.

Remember this story the next time you are ready to chunk a rock at someone who has behaved badly.

Judge Acts, Not Souls

"God himself is the judge"
"judge not, lest ye be judged"

How do we apply these principles when in fact every decision we make requires some level of judgement? We decide our level of friendship with another person based in part on how we judge that person to be. We develop prejudices as we grow. We trusted people in the past who let us down, so we do not trust them again. For example, I have been robbed twice in my life. Both times it was a black man who did it. I trusted them, and was robbed. So my "prejudice" is not to trust strange black guys with valuables. Still, some of the finest people I have known were black. I would have missed out if I hadn't trusted them, but they showed themselves to be trustworthy.

Every man (or woman) is a child of God, and as such deserves some level of respect due to that dignity. There is within all men the capacity to good and to do evil. When you are deciding on your relationships you have to judge whether it is prudent to trust the other. My advice is to look at past acts of the person (to the extent you can). Words can be deceiving. Look objectively at what they have done. A history of lying, stealing, or cheating implies that they are likely to select that behavior again. Those acts (or any break from the Commandments) are the real red flags. We must judge behavior, but not the people. Christians are told to "turn the other cheek", to forgive "70 times seven times". That does not mean we should ignore or accept sinful behavior. Don't wear jewelry or carry a lot of money into a place where poor people who have few role models live or hang out. I don't know how I may have grown up in an impoverished neighborhood where law breaking is common and no one knows their father. It is not up to me to judge those robbers' souls. But it is up to me whether or not I go into a ghetto wearing or carrying something valuable. Those children of God are not beyond salvation.

Examine your conscience. There is sin within all of us. Christ died to save sinners. Admitting our own sins is very hard to do, but it helps us. Keep striving to choose to do good, but don't trust thieves or liars. Help each other down the path, but don't be a "mark".