We live in a world full of ungoverned passions, and are fast becoming a people that struggles to understand why others aren’t convinced by the sheer emotional conviction behind our own opinions.
Sheer will, sheer belief, sheer emotional commitment is insufficient to changing people’s minds. Just as surely as mere logic does not persuade the heart, so also, mere fidelity to an idea, sheer enthusiasm, is the sign not of truth, but of one’s commitment to whatever it is, whether or not it is truth.
In the Gospel, when we hear about the woman caught in adultery, the people bringing her to Jesus relish their ardor for the law as they understand it. The people in the crowd who shouted, “Crucify Him,” and “Bring us Barrabas,” likewise were in many cases, persuaded by those around them, and what seemed like conviction, to convict the innocent, and release the convict. Conviction of one’s ideas divorced from love and truth is merciless, like Inspector Javere in “Les Misérables.”
Conviction based on passion, blows with the emotional tides that spread palm leaves before the Rabbi riding into the town on a donkey one week, and jeer and spit at the same man as he carries a cross four days later. Conviction, passion, must be the result of discernment, not merely the consequence of groupthink or worse, mob rule.
So how do we make sure we are not drifting with the emotional tide of the times? We turn to what is eternal, because God no matter when one seeks God, is the same. God is love. God is
eternal. God is always. God is a mystery bigger than we can conceive, but we know above all God is all good. So if our emotions are not oriented toward the good, the true, the merciful, and the healing, we know our emotions are not oriented towards God.
If we know nothing else, we can look at the fruits of our words, our labors, our lives and know something of whether we will be crying, “Lord! Lord! When did we see you?” or crying out, “My Lord and My God, I am not worthy to enter under your roof, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.” One is asking for proof of the rightness of God’s judgment. The other is trusting in God’s infinite mercy and judgement, to be good and true and more than we deserve.
We need to see as God sees, when we come to receive, distracted, some dressed less than as they should, as we come, confused stupid sheep that we are, to receive Jesus in the mass. We carry Him back amidst our distraction about the weekend, the weather, the groceries, the bills, the schedule, the games, and the griefs. Jesus is amongst all these things with us, because He knows who we are, and why all these things both are important, and distract. He gets the minutia that crowds our hearts and distracts us from Him. Christ knows what we need even if we don’t.
He calls us to friendship and all that loving a Loving God entails. It means loving despite seeing the reality of sins, of flaws. Speaking truth that one can see that attrocities done in the name of defense are still attrocities, and that peace through surrender is not peace, it is surrender. We cannot pretend that if our goal is just, injustices can be excused. We also cannot pretend if our cause is unjust, that it’s okay to support it because others have been more unjust. Life, real life, requires the awkward hardness of reality –of living with people who do not agree, do not understand, do not support, do not endorse, do not approve, do not like us, and somehow understanding that we’re still called to love them –not for them to earn our love.
It’s a harder thing than we would prefer, because it requires we surrender our sureness of our own righteousness in favor of loving the disagreeable, difficult, hard to engage person in front of us. It’s not that we must be agreeable, it’s that we must orient our actions and words towards the washing of feet, and remember, it is always Christ’s feet we are offering to wash.
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