3rd Sunday of Lent 7.3.10 A new heart
St Paul in the epistle is instructing us to avoid impurity of any kind. Good advice certainly. And the same could be said for any sort of sin: avoid outbursts of anger, avoid seeking revenge for injuries; avoid stealing, lying and so on.
We agree with it all, and we only wish we could put all those things into practice.
But the sad tale is that we are not as strong as we would like to be and we often do things the opposite of what we intended. (As St Paul himself observes in Romans 7).
At which point many Christians will simply pull out of the race as far as seeking perfect holiness is concerned and settle for a kind of comfortable mediocrity – sometimes getting it right; often wrong, but not worrying too much either way.
However, with a little perseverance we can discover a very different outcome.
What God commands He also enables.
What He tells us to do He enables us to be.
One of the psalms says, Create a clean heart in me, O God. In Ezekiel and Jeremiah God promises to take our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh instead.
When God says, for example, Be pure, He is not just giving us a rule to follow, as though leaving us to our own devices. He would not be so cruel as to command the impossible.
He is saying, Be pure, and I will enable you to be that because I will put purity into your heart.
(And likewise for charity: love your neighbour and forgive your enemy - and I will put charity in your heart. And so for all the virtues and commands.)
He will give us a different set of desires. What makes us want to be impure? It is that our desires and passions are disordered; they are all the wrong way round, like an untidy room. If the room is tidied the desires find the right place and balance.
The key to the process is the sacramental encounters we have with God (Jesus). When we receive Him in Holy Communion, for example, He is entering our hearts, taking possession there.
The Gospel today speaks of evil spirits occupying us, and this can happen. But so can God occupy us with exactly the opposite results.
With God possessing us we are likely to manifest the behaviour described by St Paul in Galatians 5 as the fruits of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency, chastity
God takes over our minds! Not to the point of removing our free will but by way of giving us a new way of looking at things. We see the futility of sin, the damage it does, and we gladly reject it. We see the freedom and beauty of God’s ordered creation and we gladly follow His ‘commands’ which are now seen, not as burdensome but as friends along the way. ‘Lord, how I love your law’ as the Psalmist puts it.
This puts a whole different light on Church teaching, rules and regulations. It is routinely asserted in the media and often by Catholics themselves that Church teachings are too hard and should be relaxed. The real answer lies in invoking the power of God to come into us and give us new hearts, new ways of seeing things, new desires. Then we are Christ-like. Disciples of Christ were never meant to be just following a book of rules; to be His disciple means to have His vital spirit within us, guiding us and motivating us at the same time.
It is possible after all, and being possible it is compulsory, because it would be an insult to Christ to refuse what He is offering us.
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