God Forgets

 

Yesterday our pastor declared that, quite unlike us, God doesn't just forgive; he forgets! I'm like, WHat?! So we forgetful human beings actually have a faculty of memory superior to that of God Almighty?! Hold up just a minute there. 

If you think that God forgets, that means God isn't eternal (or omniscient). If you believe in a God who is not eternal, you don't believe in a God who is the Creator of the world. In other words, your belief is not even theistic. It's not Christian, let alone Catholic.

So why say such a thing in a homily at mass? A friend suggested an allusion to a story she’s heard about Catherine Laboure (you know who I mean: 'laboo-RAY'). Supposedly a bishop wanted to authenticate Catherine’s visions of our Lord, so the bishop asked her to ask our Lord what he the bishop confessed at his last confession (perhaps forgetting our Lord's words, "it is an evil and adulterous generation that asks for a sign" and “it is written, thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test”). When Catherine had her next vision she asked the bishop's question and Jesus's response was, "I forget."  

Now that's a lovely pious story (I guess - I'd like to find a source for it and read it in whatever the original form of it is), but what would it prove? It would prove one of two things: (1) Jesus has a sense of humour (or sarcasm, perhaps); or (2) the vision was not of divine origin. 

Yesterday’s gospel, which apparently inspired our pastor’s reflections, was Luke 15, the parable of the lost sheep (one out of 100) and the parable of the prodigal son. According to our pastor, the latter could well be called the parable of the prodigal father: “this powerful story contains the essence, indeed the heart of Jesus’ message. It is the ‘Good News’ par excellence. It reminds us that ‘God loves each one of us, as if there were only one of us to love,’ and that when we go astray, He goes all out in search of us and that when eventually He finds us, nothing can stop Him from showing mercy and forgiveness.”  

And this sounds like very nice, bland, late 20^th century universalism (basically: “all shall be saved, because God wills it”).  

But surely it’s really repulsive nonsense, if we think about it. In James, ch. 1, we read:  

“Only you must be honest with yourselves; you are to live by the word, not content merely to listen to it.  One who listens to the word without living by it is like a man who sees, in a mirror, the face he was born with; he looks at himself, and away he goes, never giving another thought to the man he saw there. Whereas one who gazes into that perfect law, which is the law of freedom, and dwells on the sight of it, does not forget its message; he finds something to do, and does it, and his doing of it wins him a blessing. If anyone deludes himself by thinking he is serving God, when he has not learned to control his tongue [whereby he expresses his understanding], the service he gives is vain.”

Now, we don't live by an entirely different, disconnected 'word' each week. When we read Luke 15 (or think about some saint story we may have heard) one week, we mustn't forget that in previous weeks we also read, for example, Luke 14: “I tell you, none of those who were first invited shall taste of my supper”; “none of you can be my disciple if he does not take leave of all that he possesses. Salt is a good thing; but if the salt itself becomes tasteless, what is there left to give taste to it?  It is of no use either to the soil or to the dung-heap; it will be thrown away altogether. Listen, you that have ears to hear with.” Or Luke 13: “you will all perish as they did, if you do not repent”; “Fight your way in at the narrow door; I tell you, there are many who will try and will not be able to enter”; “But he will say, I tell you, I know nothing of you, nor whence you come; depart from me, you that traffic in iniquity. Weeping shall be there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets within God’s kingdom, while you yourselves are cast out.” This is all part of the one word which is the gospel of Christ, the word incarnate (and we can note that, for rather obvious reasons, the notion of gospel, Greek euangelion, is really not well translated as ‘the Good News’ (see Benedict XVI's "Jesus of Nazareth"), despite what our missals say).

Now it’s not likely that our pastor simply forgot these passages from the immediately preceding chapters of Luke’s gospel when he prepared himself to preach on Luke 15. So why did he ignore them, and speak as if he’d never heard of them? I’m not sure. Could it be that he just sees the ‘Good News’ gospel as a series of therapeutic-moralistic teachings to be opened up like so many fortune cookies, but not something we’re tasked with understanding as a coherent whole (he prefers psychology to philosophy - which doesn't excuse neglecting the latter). Perhaps he believes in “the Holy Spirit of surprises” (shout-out to Pope Francis) who surprises us by blandly contradicting himself from chapter to chapter (or from week to week), even in the divinely inspired gospels. Perhaps he doesn’t believe in the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge and understanding. And perhaps he doesn’t believe that he has a sacred pastoral duty to guide and form in his congregation a genuine, coherent knowledge and understanding of the apostolic faith handed down. It’s just, peek in the mirror each week, and forget about what we saw there any other week (and imagine God – and the inspired gospel-writers – as in the habit of doing the same thing!). When you open one fortune cookie, you don’t bother thinking about what your last one said, and how the different fortunes fit together and complement one another. Why not approach the gospel the same way? (“Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.” - “But God forgets; so why shouldn't I?”)

Or maybe it’s not that. I don’t know! But I find it really bizarre. How can a Christian be so indifferent to believing and preaching sound, coherent theology? -- to believing in and preaching the one true God (theos) who is revealed in the gospels as the Word (logos) made flesh? Why do pastors sometimes say in a dismissive tone, “Well, that's theology...”? “Woe upon you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites that encompass sea and land to gain a single proselyte, and then make the proselyte twice as worthy of damnation as yourselves.” Woe upon you pastors, who preach every week without showing care for true understanding of the gospel of Christ, then make your congregation twice as worthy of damnation, teaching them to scorn both natural and super-natural intellectual virtues even more than yourselves.

The old (how old, I wonder?) saying comes to mind: “God doesn’t call the equipped; he equips the called.” Oh really? But how do you think he does that, reverend sir? Just magically??...