GRAPES OF WRATH

A SERMON FOR SEXAGESIMA

If our audience today were limited to adults over the age of 21, my words to you this morning would be a good deal more graphic than those to which I’m limited. But why, you might ask?  What am I seeing in the biography of St. Paul, or the parable of the mustard seed, that you’re not seeing?  Actually, the answer is nothing, but let’s not forget that other reading, the one the priests read at Matins.  Last week it was all about the creation of man.  We saw how all the beauties of the world was made out of nothing for the sake of this one chosen creature, picked out of all eternity to be God’s loving companion forever.  We saw man’s response to this incredible privilege, his disobedience to the one and only law, his betrayal of God’s confidence and love, and the bitter consequences that would befall not only us, his descendants, but one descendant in particular, our Blessed Lord, son of Mary, Eve’s offspring, who would give up his last drop of Blood for us.

This betrayal should appall us.  We should be left shaken by the magnitude of the disloyalty of our first parents. Saddened, certainly, but angry even. If we’re not, if we are not moved by this story to some form of anger and/or sadness, our insensitivity can come from only one of two things: either we don’t understand what happened, or if we have understood how evil an act this was, because we simply don’t care.  Let’s be honest with ourselves now and look at our sinful life, our own response to Adam’s sin, a sin which, by the way, we have had the enormous grace to have had lifted away through Baptism, and then let’s decide which category we fall into.  Are we sad and angry, or are we unmoved and uninterested? 

This period of Shrovetide is meant to stir us out of that lethargy of spiritual inaction that deadens our soul for most of the year.  Lent’s coming, we’re going to be following our Blessed Lord to some dreadful places, Gethsemane, the prison in Jerusalem, Calvary.  We can’t afford to be emotionally carefree when we accompany our Savior to these places.  Last week it was Adam’s sin that should have woken us up.  This week, it’s the story of Noah.

Adam’s descendants wasted no time in showing God what they thought about his beautiful promise of a Saviour to come.  They fell, in other words, into the category of not caring that they would eventually be damned.  It started with Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, and it was all downhill from there. In the Garden of Eden, history got off to a roaring start of sin and depravity, and there seemed no end to its depths.  It became so bad that the Bible says that God “repented” of having created man.  This of course is just man’s attempt to express God’s anger and sadness in human terms—God cannot make be mistaken, and therefore cannot repent of having done something wrong.  But let’s face it, God was not happy at all with man’s abuse of the free will he had been given.  Their first abuse, the biting of the apple, was just the start.  It wasn’t really an apple, remember, but the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Now man really knew the meaning of good and bad, that “good” and “God” go together, and so do “evil” and “devil”.  And the vast majority of them chose the latter.

So what happened?  What was God’s response to this almost universal option for evil?  He sent a chastisement.  The Great Flood.  And in it, he drowned every man, woman, child on the planet.  Even the animals were not spared.  The planet was covered with the depths of the sea, and if you were looking down on the planet earth at that time from some rescue plane, all you would have seen would be a dark planet covered with nothing but endless ocean depths, in which nothing but fish could survive.  

But this terrible Flood was not just a punishment for the wicked.  Look more closely, and you’ll notice something else bobbing up and down on the waves.  Take out your binoculars, scour those depths long enough, and you’ll see what looks like a tiny boat in the distance.  Get a little closer, and you’ll see it’s actually quite large.  Big enough in fact to contain a man, his three sons and their wives, and two animals of every kind.  For God, in one of his greatest acts of mercy and love, had chosen to spare one family, and for his sake enough animals to keep them fed and clothed.  In other words, he spared mankind, because Noah’s three sons and daughters-in-law had been chosen to regenerate the world’s population.  And the important point is that this new population would now remember the story of the Great Flood.  From now on we would all realize God’s power over life and death, and even if we didn’t love God enough (which we don’t), we would avoid sin out of fear of being punished. Because of the chastisement of the Great Flood, we would now have to mitigate our lust for pleasure and sinfulness with the knowledge that God can, any time he wants, simply wipe us out.  We know now that there are consequences to our action, consequences of which the Great Flood was merely our warning.  We are now painfully aware that sin has consequences, that by our actions we stand to lose the heavenly reward God has in store for them that love him.  We can do whatever we want because we have free will.  But if do, we’ll be replacing a beautiful and blissful eternity with most awful and everlasting torments we can imagine.  

God promised man he would never again send a Great Flood to wipe them out. He promised them instead a Redeemer who would re-open Heaven’s Gates, and, he sealed his promise with a sign in those heavens, the sign of a rainbow, with its many colors symbolizing the blessing of God.  on Noah, his sons and daughters-of-law, who would now begin their holy task of matrimony and childbirth.  It was a blessing on the billions of souls who would be the descendants of these great patriarchs, who would live, and who would die thenceforth and unto the world’s end, as loving and grateful sons and daughters of God, eagerly awaiting their final union with him in heaven.  So it was meant to be.  What a beautiful symbol the rainbow is!

As I was driving to New York last Sunday night for the delivery into this world of one of those children of God, the mother of that child went into labor. The punishment for Eve’s wrongdoing was meted out to one more woman as she learned the meaning of the words “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.”  And in the midst of all this pain and suffering, what did I see as I drove along the highway but a huge advertisement for an “adult store” with a short list of the highlights that await the sinner who shops there.  “Here we go again”, I’m thinking.  This is modern man’s response to God’s mercy, to God’s constant attempt to show man the true meaning of the sanctity of life, where an entire industry has formed around the carnal pleasure associated with the sacramental act of marriage.  And then my mind wandered further, to the inhuman murder of the unwanted, unborn children, fruit of the misuse of that marital act.  We’re now seeing the logical end of this perversion—not just the toleration of abortion for the sake of some misguided notion of the rights of women, but the celebration of abortion for its own sake.  And let’s not forget the rainbow, sign of God’s mercy, God’s beautiful sign of his love for the sanctity of life and for the true meaning of love between man and woman, as Noah’s three sons and their wives began their task of populating their brave, new world.  But what has man now done to the rainbow?   Evil men have twisted God’s beautiful sign of love and mercy into one that symbolizes the very opposite of what God intended it to mean, and rainbow flags everywhere now proclaim man’s pride in his own sinfulness.

And for this reason, as I drove along over the dark icy mountains of Pennsylvania, I felt, like never before, anger at man’s evil, and that sadness that God’s mercy and love should be treated with such contempt.  I hope that our Sunday readings have helped wake all of us up to the anger and sadness we should be feeling today, and that these emotions will nurture a resolve to be generous, to give back to God some of the love he has shown us.  It’s Sexagesima Sunday, only one week and two days before Lent starts.  Reminder!  We’re called to do penance not only for our own sins, but in reparation for the sins of all mankind.  It’s time to renew our resolution to say the Rosary more often and more fervently, to focus on the things of God and not our own miserable appetites.  Let’s be generous with those sacrifices, let our penances be great and numerous, for so are the sins of man.