Thursday December 21, 2017
Once, after having preached on God’s love and forgiveness at a Mass, I received a phone call from a parishioner who was deeply troubled by my homily. “Father,” he said, “you preach too much on God’s love and forgiveness. You must preach more on God’s judgment than on all this compassion stuff. It is clear in the Bible that God will punish evil people. And there are too many of them in the world.” My forty-five-minute effort to convince him that God’s judgment is tempered by His mercy was a failure.
It saddens me to find many well-meaning Catholics so preoccupied with fulfilling the many rules of the Church and ritual compulsions that the joy of Christian living has gone out of them. These men and women are more Levitical than Gospel, for they are more concerned about the laws and punishments in Leviticus than the liberating forgiveness of the Gospel. Perhaps they should take note of the joy that permeates the encounter between Elizabeth and Mary and read the Song of Songs more often than the book of Leviticus.
It is said that when he was requested to give a teaching while on his deathbed, St. Thomas Aquinas, who had known and written about God more than any other mortal, chose to speak on the Song of Songs. Can anyone ever preach too much about God’s love?
