For Good Friday and all you classical music lovers, Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion is being streamed at WRTI 90.1 until 12:00 Pacific Standard Time
A Lenten Homily by Charles Seagren, ocds
Why do good people do bad things?
Why was it virtuous to kill heretics?
Why was slavery ok?
Why did so many good people
vote for Hitler?
It’s the mystery of iniquity.
There’s nothing stranger than sin.
If we knew what we were doing
we would never have done it.
There’s a kind of blindness, a darkness of the heart
that makes sin look like virtue
and virtue like sin.
Cardinal Newman once said:
In every age there is a great evil
people regard as normal.
Jeremiah tells us what we don’t want to hear.
Let’s get rid of him. He won’t be missed.
We have plenty of prophets to say what we want
in every age.
In every age we crucify Christ
or run away or deny him.
It begins when we see our neighbor
not as a child of God
but as a thing.
We have to see Tutsi as cockroaches
before we can chop them up with machetes.
Father forgive us, we don’t know what we’re doing.
We come before You in Holy Communion
with contrite hearts.
Help us to see with Your eyes,
eyes of mercy, eyes of love.
And then send us
to bring Your love
to a darkening world.
SOURCE: Homily, Lent 2017 Copyright 2017, Charles Seagren, ocds