Today’s gospel brings up a question, and I think for our time it is an important question to consider: How do we live our lives as Catholics. In order to answer this question, we need to consider the vision of Catholicism. Let us look at this question through the Gospel of today.

First, as I always say when we are looking at a gospel like this, we have to remember that in the background is a giant clock counting down from forty years to zero. When zero strikes, the political structures of the Jewish state and the temple will be destroyed. The state will not exist again until 1946, the temple will never exist again. These, as I always say, are not insignificant realities. They represent that the message of the Angel Gabriel to Mary are real. God is no longer there, He is here within us. As Jesus reminds us: The Kingdom of God is within. To forget this reality in the future of John the Baptist’s preaching is like recounting the flight of the Japanese war planes on December 7th 1941 without recounting the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

However, it is important for us to ask, what was destroyed with the loss of the temple and the Jewish state. The answer is simple: the political structures that were not true to the message of God. The Jewish religion was not wiped out, indeed, some of its most powerful teachings came in the aftermath of that time. It exists obviously even today. But the oppressive structures at the time, those same structures that used the law to prevent Jesus from healing, and to crucify Him were destroyed.

This brings us back to the question, what does it mean to be Catholic? Let’s look at this answer through John the Baptist. He is the precursor to a revolution that will change the world. We only need to read history to see the fruit of that revolution. Yet, when we look at the action of God in the world, He is our liberator. The people are turning from the oppression of sin and then turning to John the Baptist and asking him what they are do to. He gives a series of answers that I will sum up in one command sentence. Act as people who have been liberated from the oppression of Sin.

I want to address this with us, because I think we too are walking down a path that leads us to ask the question how do we live as Catholics. I firmly believe that we are coming out of a dark time in our faith, a time, like the time the Christ entered into that was characterized by law over freedom through the law. I say that in light of many people today  live in terror of Hell, they live in terror of the judgment of God. George Carlin the comedian mocked the concept of a loving God who casts people into Hell. However, that concept has indeed been one that many in our faith have felt defined Catholicism.

As part of our regular ongoing formation the members of the New Song Community were asked this week to read the words of Cardinal Dom Claudio Hummes, prefect for the Congregation for the Clergy who preached during the week of the Pontifical Recognition of the community in Rome, last year. He spoke, reminding the community that we don’t follow a code of ethics or a list or moral rules, but we act on an encounter with the person who is Jesus Christ. This encounter is one that radically changes our way of living.

However, what is this encounter about. Jesus Christ is all about freeing his people from oppression, beginning with the greatest of all oppressors of Sin and continuing to the fruit of sin which is death. I think this part of the message has been lost over the past century, it was this part that Pope John XXIII wanted to bring to the forefront in his calling for Vatican II. Signs that it has been lost are that confession is seen as that sacrament that takes us from the door of Hell, instead of that sacrament that puts us in God’s presence to experience his mercy, when we have allowed ourselves to be enveloped by the darkness of sin. Other signs are fearful that someone may not receive the last rites for fear that may end up in Hell instead of yet again seeing the sacrament in the light of bringing Christ present in the most scary time in a person’s life, that transition from this part of the Kingdom of God, to that one.

People have been afraid that the loving God will cast them into the Hell for committing a minor infraction, instead realizing that Hell is for those forces, human and angelic that seek to oppress the citizens of the Kingdom of God. Hell is exists to keep the free people of God free from the obstinate evil that can never repent of its desire to destroy the free.

However, when people turn from Jesus, they walk back into the darkness of the oppressors. You, however, are here because you have continued to choose to be part of Jesus kingdom, which is a kingdom whose mission is to destroy the oppression that enslaves God’s people. So how should we act. We act as people who as St. Paul teaches elsewhere, are on the path to the freedom that Christ gives us.

That means our actions must be by definition different from those who are in the clutches of the oppressing forces of sin. So as we see in John, we live in a way that demonstrates that we rely on God’s providence in our lives and that we are part of the free people who make up the Kingdom of God as lights of the world, and salt to the Earth to a world in darkness.

Now make no mistake about this, this world is in darkness and that darkness is growing, especially as people grow more and more away from God, they will as Romans 1 explains make more and more decision rooted in their minds influenced by the lack of light from God and growth of darkness of a false wisdom that is human alone, with no divine input. That is why our behavior must be different from them, and our hopes and aspirations must be different as well. We rely on wisdom that is human influenced by the divine, but we must be humble before that wisdom, obedient to it and to act on it. This is what John is talking about, for he knew change was coming, a change that the oppressors did not see coming until it was too late when it came upon them.

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