Could the message of today’s Gospel possibly be any clearer? As a Christian, the way you should always hear Jesus’ teachings is in the first person singular. When received in that way, you quickly realize you have enough to take care of in your relationship with the Lord that you don’t need to go on a search for even the beam in our brother’s or sister’s eye, let alone any hard-to-see splinters.
Among ourselves as Christians, it’s safe to say that on judgment day that none of us wants to receive what we deserve. Rather, you and I want God to be merciful. This brings to mind the tax collector in Luke’s Gospel, whom Jesus contrasts with the self-righteous Pharisee, the latter of whom is so proud of the meticulous manner in which he keeps all the rules.
Unable to go in or even look up while praying the precincts of the Temple, the tax collector could only beg, saying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”1 These words constitute the core of the ancient and venerable Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is of this tax collector that Jesus says, “I tell you, this man, rather than the Pharisee, went home justified.”2
Because of Jesus Christ, you can count on God being merciful but on only one condition: that you are merciful. God will forgive you but, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, only insofar as you are willing to forgive those who have trespassed against you. Being merciful only toward those who ask for mercy is no mercy at all.
You will not be condemned to the extent that you don’t condemn anyone else. It's interesting that the Church canonizes various women and men, declaring them saints and models of Christlikeness. The Church also teaches both the reality of hell and that hell will not be empty. But the Church has never officially, let alone infallibly, declared any individual person to be in hell.
In terms of not judging others, Saint Paul puts this very well in his First Letter to the Corinthians, no doubt referring to those who made a habit of denigrating him in the very Christian communities he founded, the so-called Judaizers or, as the apostle mockingly refers to them, “superapostles”- “I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself.”3
Examining your conscience before going to confession is how you judge yourself. Having honestly judged yourself, like the tax collector, you confess your sins and, in the Act of Contrition, ask for mercy and pledge that, by God’s grace, you will endeavor not to keep sinning. It is often the case, nonetheless, that you not only keep sinning but often continue doing so in the same ways.
To quote the title of a book by Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy.4 Extrapolating from this just a bit: the name of mercy is Jesus Christ. In this book, the Holy Father relates the story of a priest who heard a lot of confessions. He writes that sometimes the “priest said he would go to the tabernacle and say to Jesus, ‘I'm sorry I forgive too much, but it was you who set the bad example.’” Of the course, the point of the story is that he didn’t forgive too much.
As we begin this Second Week of Lent, let’s ask “for the grace not to tire of asking forgiveness,” because the Lord never tires of forgiving us. Then, having received the mercy of God, let us, in turn, ask for the grace to never tire of forgiving those who trespass against us.
You make something of a mockery of Christ, however, if your relationship with him is only about what he can do for you. Referring back to the Act of Contrition, it's not just important but necessary that we say, "I firmly intend with your help to do penance, to sin no more and avoid whatever leads me to sin." It is crucial that you mean these words when you say them, especially in the context of the sacrament.
There is perhaps no greater temptations than to withhold forgiveness, to render judgment on a another, or to condemn someone. These are wrong because all of them are recapitulations of the first sin: seeking to make yourself God.
1 See Luke 18:9-14.↩
2 Luke 18:14.↩
3 1 Corinthians 4:3.↩
4 Pope Francis with Andrea Tornielli, The Name of God is Mercy. Trans. Oonagh Stransky. New York: Random House, 2016↩
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