In January of 2021, I was struggling with my marriage. I was angry, bitter, and resentful toward my husband. All I could see at that moment were all the things he wasn’t doing to help out and to make my life easier. Our relationship was becoming a toxic wasteland because of all the saltiness and bitterness toward him that I allowed to flow into me.
It was making me feel unloved, depressed, and helpless to
change things on top of all the anger, bitterness, and resentment I was
carrying. I was deeply unhappy with my life but I didn’t feel like there was
anything I could do to change things because I couldn’t change him.
The Power of Perspective
Our relationship stayed that way for months. However, in
June – shortly after we began attending adoration again – I was given the grace
to see that the party in need of correction was not my husband. It was me.
I was choosing to focus on everything my husband was not
doing and the ways I felt he was not supporting me and holding on to those things
in my heart rather than focusing my attention on the long list of things he was
doing and ways that he was supporting me.
It was my choice in how to handle his behavior, not his behavior
itself, that was making me miserable and turning my life into a miniature hell
on earth. My lack of gratitude was turning the waters of love into a dead sea
of misery.
A Reflection on Today’s Mass Readings
Today’s Mass readings are taken from Joshua 3: 7-17, Psalm
114: 1-6, and Matthew 18:21-35. It seems, at first glance, an odd set of
readings to put together. However, as I was listening to today’s TV mass by Father Arthur Lee, it
all became clear. I saw the connections between what I had experienced in my
recent past to the readings of today and, with it, a powerful lesson in
creating paradise or choosing hell for our lives.
Joshua 3: 7-17
In the first reading, the Lord instructs Joshua on how he is
to lead his people into Paradise, the Land of Canaan, the Land of Promise. He
tells him to let the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant enter into the
rushing waters of the Jordan river and stand there. The Lord tells Joshua only
that He is going to reveal to the people that in Joshua now rests the power of
Moses.
Joshua, stepping out in faith and with full confidence that
the Lord will do as He said, orders the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant
into the Jordan ahead of everyone. The moment their feet touch the Jordan, it
not only stops flowing, it flows upward as if the water had encountered a wall.
The people once again pass through a wall of water on dry
land to enter into their Promised Land. This is a repetition of the miracle
that the Lord had performed at the Red Sea when He, at Moses’ command, parted
the waters to allow the people to pass. Once again, the Lord has used water to
save them and to usher them into a new life of freedom from slavery.
Psalm 114:1-6
Psalm 114 is a song of celebration of this moment of victory
when the Lord held back the waters both at the sea and then at the Jordan just
across from Jericho. Mountains skipped like rams, it states, and the hills like
lambs in the face of the Lord’s command. It is a reminder to all who reflect on
it that the mighty things of the earth – the seas and the waters of the rivers
and the mountains and hills – are all at the command of the Lord and we should
have faith in Him rather than fear of them.
Matthew 18:21-35
The Gospel reading is the parable of the man who owed a
great debt to a king. The king was set to sell this man, his wife, and his
children into slavery along with all of his possessions when the man pled with
the king to be patient and swore that, if given the time he requested, he would
pay back all that was owed.
The king was merciful to this man and let him go free. Yet
when this man encountered another person who owed him a much smaller debt than he
owed to the king, he not only demanded it be repaid in full but showed no mercy
when that man begged for additional time to pay it back. Instead, he handed
that man over to the jailers.
The king was furious when he heard what the first man had
done and handed that man over to the torturers to repay in full the debt he
owed with his flesh and blood. We’re told that this is how God will act toward
those who refuse to forgive others their sins.
Connecting the Dots
To understand the connection between the readings, we need
to take a look at the Ark of the Covenant as a symbol of Christ, the water as a
symbol of the Sacrament of Baptism, the Promised Land as a symbol of God’s
Kingdom, and the final reading as a teaching on the value of the Sacrament of
Reconciliation and the need for forgiveness.
Christ Alone Has the Power
Christ comes first. The priests had to carry the Ark of the
Covenant into the water first. That Ark was a symbol of Christ. It held the
showbread, the Mana which came from Heaven. Christ is the Living Bread that
Comes from Heaven.
It also held the tablets of the 10 Commandments, a
representation of God’s Laws. Christ is the fulfillment of that law.
Finally, it held Aaron’s Rod, which was used to prove that
he was God’s chosen representative. Christ is God’s chosen, His only begotten
son.
Christ alone is able, through His power, to hold back the poisonous
waters of Anger, Resentment, and Bitterness if we are willing to allow him to
enter into our hearts to do His work. Christ alone can do this for us. Christ
alone has the power to wrestle with the Accuser and to stop his work. It is
through Christ alone that we are able to be redeemed and to enter into Paradise
safely on the other side of the wasteland of our misdeeds.
Baptism: Cleansing Us of Sin and Allowing Us To Enter the Promised Land
Just as the people of Israel had to pass through the waters
of death to enter into their new life in the Promised Land, so we must enter
into the waters of baptism and die to our old lives to enter into our new life in
Christ and thus gain the Promised Land of the Kingdom.
That water we enter into with full faith in Christ cleanses
us of all that is preventing us from loving others and begins to heal the
wounds that lead to our failures to love. It frees us to become a conduit of
grace, receiving His love and giving it without hesitation.
Reconciliation: Setting Us Free from Our Debts So We Can Set Others Free
When we stumble and fall in our walk with Christ, we hurt
others. We do damage to our relationships and we turn the waters of love that
bring joy into our lives into toxic waters that lead to a sea of misery and
death.
Our fall as a Christian is an especially grievous sin
because we have professed to be in union with Christ and we have, therefore,
borne false witness to who Christ is by our failure to love. We haven’t just
damaged our own lives. We’ve damaged the faith of others in Christ’s power to
love them.
We owe the Lord for every soul we’ve hurt and everyone whose
faith we’ve damaged. But how can we possibly make a return to Him for the debt
we’ve recurred? Only through His grace is this possible.
That is the reason we need Reconciliation. We need Christ’s
power, acting through His priests, to once again stop the flow of death and
restore the flow of the waters of life. We need His grace to heal the wounds
that have led to our fall and those that we have caused by our failures.
Our Duty To Pass on Forgiveness
However, with this great gift of Baptism and Reconciliation,
we receive a charge to give to others what we have received. If we have been
forgiven by God all of our many sins and if we have received His love, then we
are to pass on to others the Love that we receive.
The message is clear: Forgiveness is not optional. It is a
requirement. It is the only way we get to enter into the Promised Land of the
Kingdom, and it is the only way that we get to live if we want to avoid being
handed over to the jailer and spend our lives a tortured wreck.
A Cautionary Tale
God’s justice is always perfect. What we do to others we
will find done to us. How we treat others is how we will find ourselves being
treated in kind.
God doesn’t do this out of spite. He does it in this life so
that we might develop compassion for how it feels to be the other person and
that we might repent of our sins and reconsider our ways.
However, if we remain obstinate in our refusal to be just to
others and to be as merciful to them as we would have Him be to us, to love
them as we have been loved, then His justice demands that we pay the full price
of all that we owe to Him. That’s a price we can never repay. The jailer Christ
refers to is the Great Accuser, Satan.
The Accuser’s Torments: Anger, Resentment, and Bitterness
If you want to make yourself miserable and destroy your
relationships at the same time, choose to reflect only on what other people
have done to hurt you. Never consider for a moment anything good they’ve done.
Assume that they owed that to you.
This will be a recipe for a miserable life filled with
anger, resentment, and bitterness. You’ll find no room for love when you’re
living like that. You’ll drive out love because you won’t appreciate it or value
it. You’ll be so ungrateful that people become discouraged in trying to love
you and will find your presence a burden rather than something to be welcomed,
sought after, and desired.
Your relationships will turn from being a paradise to being
a wasteland as the waters of love that are so necessary for them to flourish
and thrive turn salty and bitter. Nothing new will grow in that hellish
landscape you’re creating because you’re too busy cultivating the decaying
remnants of a past that no longer exists to sow anything new.
Satan is the Great Accuser. He is more than happy to help us
find reasons to accuse the people we love of wrongdoing and to find fault with
them. He wants us angry, resentful, and bitter because that’s his nature and
his character. He will puff us up with pride and reassure us that we’ve done
nothing to deserve all of this, that we’re a victim just like he thinks he is,
and that we’re “owed” better.
He’s happy to help you forget all the things you’ve done
that have hurt others and to blind you to the many ways you fail to show up for
others or to be appreciative of their efforts on your behalf. He’s happy to lull
you into spiritual complacency because once he has you there, you belong to
him.
God can’t snatch you out of his hands as long as you remain
in that state. His justice won’t allow Him to. He will do His best to send
graces your way to shake you out of that complacency and get you back on the
road to salvation, but it’s all up to you as to whether or not you accept those
graces and act on them.
Gratitude and Paradise
Gratitude is the key to all of this. It is the secret to
forgiveness. When we truly appreciate the sheer magnitude of the gift that we’ve
received, we won’t be able to help ourselves but want to pass it on to others.
Gratitude will lead us to step out in faith into the churning
waters and place our trust in Christ’s free gift of salvation. Gratitude for
the love we’ve received will lead us to pass it on to others.
Gratitude will lead us to see confession as the great gift
it is and to humble ourselves enough to receive it. Gratitude will lead us to
stop focusing so much on other people’s faults and failings and the things they’ve
done wrong that we miss out on all the joy and the blessings they’ve brought
into our life.
Just as it did in my own life, Gratitude will transform
those toxic, bitter waters that were leading to misery and death into healthy
waters thriving with love and life in them. It will transform a wasteland in to
a paradise and restore and redeem the relationships that we were hurting with
our choices.
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