IN SIN HATH MY MOTHER CONCEIVED ME

 A MESSAGE FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY

In the 50^th psalm, its author King David conveys to us the revealed truth from God that we are conceived in sin, that even at the moment of conception, when an infant must surely be at its most innocent state, there lurks within that child’s soul nonetheless the stain of original sin.  So we are conceived, so we are born, and upon entering into this world the first duty of the parent is to arrange for that original sin to be removed by the sacrament of Baptism, thereby giving their beloved newborn the greatest gift of all, the ability to enter heaven.

Unfortunately, another danger surrounds our children.  For when they attain the use of understanding and reason, when their free will becomes truly free, they develop the ability to abuse that free will and stain their souls all over again.  Like Adam and Eve when they bit the apple, our children discover the knowledge of good and evil, and they start to commit sin.  We were also children once, so we know it happens to us all.  It’s an awakening to a power to choose heaven or hell, and our parents hopefully prepared us for this gradual awakening by teaching us to love God and his commandments as soon as we were able to understand.

We’ve all been given this solemn duty, to love God by keeping those commandments, but it’s important to have a clear picture of what this duty entails.  Imagine you’re the manager of a small business.  You hire a part-time worker to come in and install a computer network in your office.  He shows up on time and you give him everything he needs to complete his work.  At the end of the day you return to make sure it’s all working properly and what do you find?  Instead of installing the computers and hooking them up to the wi-fi and the internet, he’s decided instead to spend the day painting the office a beautiful shade of green.  Obviously, you would not be pleased.  And despite his demands to be paid for his day’s work, you wouldn’t give him a penny because he didn’t do what you hired him to do.  “But I didn’t do any harm,” he might say.  But that’s beside the point.  He was given a specific job and he didn’t do it.

So when God places us on this earth, it is with the understanding that we’ll do the job he puts us here to do.  Those duties can be summed up in what our Lord described as the Greatest Commandment, to love God with all our heart and mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  All the commandments depend upon this one, and it is by obeying them that we fulfill the role for which we were created.  It doesn’t matter how “nice” we are, how “polite” or “tolerant” we are.  It doesn’t matter if we go through life merely “doing no harm” and being what we think is a “good person.” If we don’t perform the task for which we were created, we’re not going to deserve to get paid at the end of the day.  We must take care of those Catholic duties God gave us, to be a member of the Church he established, to obey the commandments, and to worship him in the manner he prescribed at the Last Supper.  If we decide to neglect any of these three things we should resign ourselves at the same time to the fact that we’ll never be paid for anything else we might do in this world, no matter how hard we work on it, how well we do it, or how nice a shade of green it turns out to be.  Know, love and serve God, that’s all, and you’ll get your paycheck.