Hello, brothers and sisters down there Down Under in Australia. It’s Father Elias here from Holland (up here).
Today’s reading from the Gospel for this Sunday is pretty rough. It’s about Heaven and Hell. It’s about judgment. It’s about God and the devil. It’s pretty rough to hear all this, but after all it’s just a matter of common sense.
Sometimes you hear today that we should not judge. That’s completely ridiculous. To be alive means to judge. Already our living bodies are judging all the time. We eat and we absorb what is good for us and we use it for as an energy, and we throw out, yes, the ashes – the smelly ashes of that energy, and we throw out the garbage and all things that are not good for us. Our body judges all the time, and, of course, with our senses – with our smelling and our tasting – we’re. Judging all the time things that are good things, that are bad, things that are smelly, and things that are attractive, things that are tasty and things that are disgusting. To be alive means to judge, and there is no reason why our spiritual life should not also judge.
We have to judge, but we have to judge with Christ in a very special way because if we have faith in Christ, we should not so much fear our judgment but prepare it together with Jesus and what we should fear is to judge too quickly. Jesus talks about these different weeds in our life and that our life gets meaning if we weed already our life like a garden – to separate what is good from bad – but we never judge in an ultimate way, in a final way.
We must help others also to find out what is best for them. Saint Paul does say that everything is allowed but not everything is good for you, so the big challenge of life is to prepare ourselves and prepare others for this final judgment, by judging on the way what is good for us and good for others and what is not good for us or not good for others, and we have to help them in a very merciful, very loving way, but also very straight straightforward way.
The work of Christ in US is a work of discernment. It’s a work of separating good from bad and we can cooperate with that. We get that responsibility with Christ and that’s what makes this life meaningful.
We are not saved in a passive way. We are saved in such a way that we can cooperate with Christ in the work of salvation, and we can in that way return as a Thanksgiving all our sufferings, all the moments where we have to sacrifice something in order to discover a new dimension of reality.
There are Frontiers that we have to cross which are unpleasant for us but that’s where this separation in us takes place. That’s where we get rid of what weighs us down, what makes us lonely, what takes away the meaning of our lives? It’s especially in those moments of darkness and moments of suffering that we get rid of the garbage of our lives, and we discover a new territory = a new light which brings us closer to God.
First shared on The Sunday Eucharist on July 20th, 2023