Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today, we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us. Peace be with you. Friends, we come to this Sunday right before the commencement of the holy season of Lent. And the church is giving us something of great moment, I think, to reflect upon. And it's the centrality of freedom and choice for the good at the center of the spiritual life. Can I start here with a quote from Thomas More? It's featured in Man for All Seasons, but I think it's based on something More actually wrote. He's talking to his daughter, Meg, and he says, God made the plants for their simplicity and the animals for their innocence. but man he made to serve him wittily in the tangle of his mind. More is reflecting on the variety in creation, that all the different aspects of creation give glory to God in their own particular way. But the human being he made with intellect and will, and precisely in the tangle of the mind and in the sometimes conflictual quality of the will, he wants us to give him glory. And what am I talking about here more precisely? Well, look, there are a lot of things in creation that are just, they are that way. They're just necessary. Think of rocks and quarks and elemental things. They're just there. God made them for their necessity and simplicity. But he wants us to give him glory in a particular way. See, we could be marionettes. We could just be automatons that act the way God wants us to act because he's making us do it. But God doesn't want that. He wants us to serve him wittily in the tangle of our minds, meaning that we come to search out the truth. And then he wants us, listen now, to love him. See, an automaton or a cork or a rock, I mean, they're good, they're fine, but they're not going to love God. They can't imitate the love that God is. But we, precisely because we have intellect and will, are able to respond to God's love with an authentic love of our own. If God were just compelling us to act in a particular way, well, we wouldn't be loving him. If God were simply menacing us all the time, we wouldn't be loving him. He wants us to choose. unfree things can't love only free things can love now you know this goes not all the way but a fair amount of the way to helping us understand this famous problem of of evil where's the evil come from not all of it but good deal of it from the abuse of freedom now think of the billions of people on our planet all with with flawed finite freedoms will there be conflict and suffering caused by that Of course there will be And you say why can God just get rid of this Well, yeah, he could by simply eliminating our freedom. How many would sign up for that? How many would be willing to say, yeah, Lord, just take away my freedom completely? No, no, God doesn't want automatons. He wants people that will love him, serve him wittily in the tangle of their minds, and love him by real acts of the will. See, that's the central point here. Now, what triggered this in my mind was the citation now from our first reading from Sirach. Listen. If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and they will save you. God has set before you fire and water. To whichever you choose, stretch forth your hand. before man are life and death, good and evil, whichever he chooses shall be given him. Now, that's simple language, everybody, but it's naming something of supreme importance. That's life, like every moment of life. We face this choice. Do I walk the path of righteousness or not? Do I choose the good or not? And, you know, whichever he chooses shall be given him, the Lord says. I made you free. I'm not here to intervene like a parent that will prevent a child from ever experiencing anything negative. No, God gives us this freedom, and life and death are before us. There's fire and there's water. Watch this principle, by the way, throughout the Bible. You'll find it famously in the book of Joshua, where he says to the people about to enter the promised land, Look, there's the God of Israel and there's the gods of these people here, and it's up to you. Which one do you want? As for me and my people, we choose the Lord. I love that passage because it's behind Bob Dylan's famous gotta serve somebody, right? When Dylan says, it might be the devil, it might be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody. Dead right, by the way. It's dead right. Oh, no, I don't serve anybody. Nonsense. You serve somebody. There's a choice before you. It's good or it's evil. It's fire or it's water. Which path are you going to choose? And again, life would be a lot easier in a way if we didn't have these choices. But God doesn't want automatons. He wants people that will love him. And that means free people. You know, I might have shared this before with you, but it's a great insight of John Paul II. He says, in every act of the will, we're doing two things. we're choosing a particular act or particular path. Do I do this or that? So I choose. But also implicitly in every choice. I'm choosing the person I'm becoming. I'm creating, in a way, my character. As I choose to love rather than to hate, I choose to be charitable rather than to be unkind, I choose to walk a positive path rather than a path of resentment. Well, I'm doing a particular thing, and I'm making myself more virtuous or less virtuous, more godly, less godly. My character is also being formed in these acts of the will. Well there the spiritual life in a way and Sirach lays it out to us that every moment of every day we facing these choices Which one will it be? What's heaven? Well, we say heaven is the place of perfect love, where we answer the love of God with a perfect love of our own. So what's this life on this reading? This life is a kind of training ground that we need to learn the way of love. We need to be formed in the way of love, to be ready for heaven. You know, in my dialogues over the years with my Protestant friends, and we get into the famous question of justification by grace through faith alone or through works and all that. And, you know, of course, the Catholic teaching is, of course, we're justified by grace through faith. You can't be saved apart from that. But the church has always said, not by grace and faith alone, but that justification increases and grows precisely through acts of love. Because see, in heaven, faith fades away and hope fades away. But love remains, because love is what heaven is. So if you were to arrive in heaven by virtue of your faith, but you had no love, you'd be like a stranger in a strange land. You'd be in this realm of love, but unable to love. And then, as Origen, the ancient church father, and C.S. Lewis quite rightly saw, the love of God would light up the fires of hell within you. See, if you're not suited to the divine love, you haven't developed the capacity to respond to the divine love, then God's love will be like a fire to you. It'll be like a source of resistance to you. And so this life, can we construe it as a training time, a time when we grow ever more deeply in love? Okay, so there's the principle as the Old Testament lays it out. Jesus, who said, look, I've come not to abrogate the law, but to fulfill it. So he's not saying no to any of that. He rather intensifies things. If the point is to grow in love, okay, then certainly our unloving actions have to be eliminated. We have to choose against any acts of hatred, right? So the Lord says, certainly you shouldn't kill people. That's forbidden in the Ten Commandments. That's obviously true. If you're killing people, you're not walking the path of love. But he intensifies it. I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Whoever says, you fool, will be liable to fiery Gehenna. Now, what's he driving at here? If this life is meant to be a training ground of love, that we're meant to cultivate love, yes, evil actions have to be eliminated, But so too must those deep motivations in us that are tainted by hatred, they've got to be eliminated too. So, okay, I'm not killing anybody, but I spend a lot of my time angry at people. I spend a lot of my time bad-mouthing people. You know, you fool. How many times in the course of the day ask yourself everybody we all sinners here right and ask yourself how often do I cultivate these feelings of resentment and of hatred How often do I share negative assessments of people Well, those aren't loving. And so just as I choose against the actions, now listen, I need to choose even against these interior corruptions. And you say, well, look, I can't control my feelings. And that's true to a degree. But to a degree, you can control them. You know, if you have these feelings welling up within you, you can indulge them, or you can actively turn from them. You can cultivate them in a perverse way, kind of enjoy them, or you can choose not to do that. You can choose to forget them or engage in an act of love or anything else. Again, it's a matter of freedom. Jesus wants this loving choice to move all the way down. And then, in a very similar way, listen, so you've heard it said, do not commit adultery. Okay, that's in the Ten Commandments. But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So yes, of course, acts of marital infidelity have to be eliminated. Those are not the path of love, obviously. But so are these sort of lustful, adulterous thoughts that I cultivate. Maybe it's not as bad as performing the action, but the actions come from those thoughts. oh come on bishop i can't control all my thoughts and feelings yeah i know to some degree that's true but you can choose not to indulge them you can choose not to cultivate them you can choose not to be preoccupied with them i place before you life and death fire and water good and evil yes in terms of actions but also in terms of feelings and motivations What did Jesus say? I want you to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. So if you say, look, I'm the externals. I got it together. I'm not doing these bad things. Yeah, but on the inside, remember what he says to the Pharisees? Yeah, you're great on the outside, but you're like whitewashed sepulchers because on the inside, you're full of all filth and dead men's bones. You see, that's what he's driving at here is, my life can look pretty good on the outside, but my motivations and my feelings and my interiority is kind of an unloving mess. No, no, let your choice for the good go all the way down. You know, God is not interested in spiritual mediocrity. Heaven is the place of perfect love. It's perfect love. Well, this life is a training ground. It's a preparation. Let's get started. Choose the good. And God bless you. Thank you for listening to this week's homily from Bishop Robert Barron. For more resources from Bishop Barron, please visit wordonfire.org.
