Homily for Monday, 1 January 2024– Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God

Readings of the day: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

Sisters and brothers, Happy New Year and a happy Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God!

Our Church has also celebrated New Year’s Day as the World Day of Peace since Pope St. Paul VI first connected this day to an ongoing prayer for and reflection on peace in our world in 1967. Peace is much richer than the mere absence of conflict. Perhaps the absence of conflict sometimes (if not frequently) can mask the absence of true peace in our world and in our relationships.

Since Mary’s time, Jesus’ time, and well before then, since the time the Book of Numbers from which we hear God’s blessing of peace through Aaron today was written, peace has been based on the multidimensional Hebrew word, shalom. Shalom can mean a simple, friendly greeting, like, “Hello,” “goodbye,” or “farewell.” It means peace in the fullest sense possible, the desire for wholeness, well-being, harmony, for ourselves and everybody.

From when I was an elementary school-aged child, I remember the Hebrew traditional song we learned in music class:

Shalom, chaverim. Shalom, chaverim.

Shalom, shalom.

L’hitra’ot, l’hitra’ot

Shalom, shalom.

Farewell (or greetings), my friends.

Farewell, my friends. Peace! Peace!

Until we meet again, until we meet again.

Peace! Peace!

Aaron’s blessing of the people of Israel that we hear today in Numbers is similar in spirit to this little folk song. Aaron blesses the people of Israel in God’s words to him:

The LORD bless you and keep you,

the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace [shalom].

Those of us who attend the 9:30 am Mass here at St. Joseph’s College with the Children’s Liturgy of the Word will be familiar with this blessing of Aaron. Our music ministry has been singing a lovely arrangement of it when our children go out for the Children’s Liturgy downstairs.

I have said that shalom, peace, is a multidimensional word. It is a word that suggests movement. Shalom can never be static or stationary. In the Book of Numbers, the Aaronic blessing, shalom begins as a gift of God, a gift we receive from looking upon the face of God, from God turning God’s face to look upon us and, in a word from Aaron’s blessing, shining on us.

Few natural events suggest peace—God’s love for us, for the world; calm, wholeness, well-being, harmony—than a sunrise. This is the first image in my mind when I think of God’s face “shining” upon us. Yet lately, often as soon as I picture a sunrise in my mind and connect it to God’s shalom, my mind is haunted by images from half a world away—say, on the evening news, from war zones like those of Gaza or Ukraine: Cities reduced to rubble. Yet the sun rises over the ruins, the loss of life. These images drive home for me how far we are—how far humanity is—from the peace God wills for the world. They emphasize for me how far we are from the shalom with which God shone his face on Aaron and Moses for the people of Israel; the shalom for which God sent his only-begotten Son into our world, born as one like us of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God. But still, far as we are from God’s perfection of shalom, God makes the sun rise over us, even over our ruins, our anti-shalom.

If God’s shalom is to be effective in our world, God invites us to do two things with it: First, treasure it, ponder it in our hearts and, second, go out “with haste,” with a joyful urgency, to hand it on to people we encounter. Shalom cannot stand pat if it is to be effective in our world in need of it; it must be actively put into motion!

Mary, Mother of God, Luke says to us today, “treasured all [the] words” of the shepherds “and pondered them in her heart.” This is the second of three times in which Luke’s account of Jesus’ infancy describes Mary as treasuring or pondering the mysteries of God’s shalom as they unfold. And each time Mary profoundly treasures or ponders is when perplexing, even frightening, peace-disrupting events are taking place around her.

First, the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she “will conceive in [her] womb and bear a son,” whom she is to name Jesus. Luke says that Mary ponders “what sort of greeting this might be.” Second is Mary’s encounter with the shepherds in today’s Gospel reading. By the time the shepherds have reached “Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger,” it seems that they have already told everybody they could “what had been told them about this child.” They had organized the baby shower, done the “gender reveal,” and everything, all before Mary had had a chance to breathe, to meet these excitable shepherds for the first time. Still, Mary treasures and ponders shalom, calm, wholeness, well-being, harmony at her very core. And, a third time, when Mary and Joseph find the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, teaching and listening to the teachers, after three days of frantic searching, again Mary keeps “all these things in her heart.”

Mary is the master of the first movement of shalom, treasuring and pondering. For the shepherds’ part, in today’s Gospel reading they are masters of the second movement of shalom, going with haste—with a joyful urgency—to communicate shalom once they have received it. The shepherds’ setting out “with haste to Bethlehem” and then returning just as quickly to their fields, “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen,” echoes Mary’s own action earlier in Luke’s Gospel of going “with haste” to visit Elizabeth when Mary learns that Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist at the same time she is pregnant with Jesus. Mary is Mother of God, the God-bearer in both these movements of shalom: Treasuring-pondering and going out with haste, actively bearing shalom to the world.

The shepherds, Joseph the husband of Mary, and especially Mary, whom we celebrate today as Mother of God, are master communicators of shalom. They are models for us of how we can be God-bearers in the sense of peace-bearers, shalom-bearers to our world. For us to be consistent bearers, communicators of shalom in our world, in our relationships, households, among our friends, in our places of work and leisure, in our Church can be challenging.

I find it interesting that, in his Message for the World Day of Peace this year, Pope Francis reflects as deeply as he does on the effects of new and ever-developing technologies—in particular artificial intelligence—on peace in our world and our human relationships. “Progress in science and technology,” Pope Francis says, “insofar as it contributes to greater order in human society and greater fraternal communion and freedom… leads to the betterment of humanity and the transformation of the world.”

How science, technologies like AI, the media of social communications lead “to the betterment of humanity and the transformation of the world” depends on how we use them, regulate them toward “the integral development of all individuals and peoples.” Scientific and technological progress can bear great promise, but also great risk. Pope Francis says, and I think this is easy to see, that science and technology, the ways we communicate and gain knowledge, pose challenges not only for any understanding of the human person as sacred but also social. These pose challenges in ethics: Political, social, economic; challenges in the areas of international law and the resolution of armed conflict when nations create weapons that can cause greater destruction more remotely than ever before. Progress in science, technology, communication pose challenges for education, for upholding especially the God-given dignity of the poor and people in need, for alleviating poverty and need, for protection of the natural environment.

How are we, this community of faith here at St. Joseph’s College, to manage all this? Understandably, maybe many or most of us feel powerless to effect any good against great global dangers to human well-being, human relationships, human life. But we can start small, local. We can start by helping the poor when we can. We can start by consuming less of what we do not need to consume. We can start by challenging ourselves to think critically about the information we absorb from media; as Pope Francis asks, “What are the social and ethical aspects of the development and [our] uses of technology”? We can start by challenging ourselves to one or two simple acts of kindness a day if we are not already doing this.

We can start by imitating the way of Mary, Mother of God, of Joseph, of the shepherds: First, treasure and ponder. How am I—how are we—being called to be bearers of peace, shalom, to our world and in our human relationships? Second, go “with haste”: If we have peace, kindness, mercy, calm, truth, hope, love to communicate, do not hesitate to communicate it, by word or the simplest of actions, like a friendly smile!

And, most important of all, pray, all of us, for shalom in our relationships, our world. That is the prayer God gave Aaron to pray for the ancient people of Israel. That is the prayer of Mary, Mother of God, for us:

Shalom, chaverim… Peace, my friends.

The LORD bless you and keep you,

the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Homily for Sunday, 19 December 2020– Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C

Readings of the day: Micah 5: 1-4a; Psalm 80: 2-3, 15-16, 18-19; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45

The “rags-to-riches” motif is one of the more common ones in storytelling, because it resonates, does it not, with our heartfelt human inclination to encourage the heroic underdog to overcome the odds against her or him. In reality, these kinds of scenarios may be less common than we would like them to be: So many poor, maligned, marginalized people remain poor, maligned, and marginalized in our world. But occasionally some people overcome all odds against them, or at least they become the heroes of their stories or of pivotal moments in the greater history of our world or a society, or they keep other people from suffering the same marginalization as they have.

From the word of God, we hear today from the prophet Micah. Maybe the most memorable verse from Micah, at least for me, is his admonition about what the LORD requires of his people: “To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” I especially love this verse from Micah because it does not only exhort the people of Israel (and us) to act with justice, kindness, and humility. The Hebrew words Micah uses, which are notoriously difficult to translate but that we hear in English as justice, kindness (or mercy), and walking humbly, apply attributes of God to the people: Do justice, because God is just; love kindness, because God is kind and merciful; and, maybe most strikingly, “walk humbly with your God,” who walks humbly with us.

This verse, Micah 6:8, portrays God himself, and God’s prophet Micah, as by nature just, kind, merciful, and humble. And Micah is known as just that: A just, kind, merciful and, above all, humble prophet. Micah lived and preached at the same time in Israel’s history as much more famous prophets than he: Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah. These other prophets were from Jerusalem (in Isaiah’s case) or small towns. Micah, though, was from the countryside, between the downslope of the Judean mountains away from Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea coast. Other prophets preached to kings; Micah was the prophet of the common people.

And the part of the Book of Micah we hear today, Biblical experts say, may not have been his but an interpolation or insertion of a text from another, even more anonymous prophet. How is that for a humble situation, that of the prophet Micah? And his message today is one of the humble becoming great. Not from big, showy Jerusalem, with its mountains and its temple, but from little Bethlehem, the “house of bread” in Judah, the economic “have not” region of Israel in Micah’s time, would arise a great king in David’s line: “One who is to rule Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.”

We Christians have traditionally understood this prophecy of a great ruler in David’s line from little Bethlehem in light of the earthly life of Jesus Christ. And that is fine. Our Gospels often connect Jesus with the Davidic line of kings of Israel. But Micah looks back into Israel’s history in order to look forward, too. Micah’s references to David today are clear: David was a native of Bethlehem. He was a humble, obscure shepherd before slaying the giant Goliath and inheriting the throne of Israel. The ruler of Micah’s prophecy, like King David, will be a shepherd from Bethlehem. And, Micah says, while the king of whom he prophesies rules, he will return to be on a level ground with the common people; he will rule precisely by shepherding: “And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God.”

The Psalmist carries on Micah’s shepherd-king contrast: “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth.” Here God himself is depicted as a shepherd and, at the same time, a heavenly and mighty ruler. God is mighty in his humility, and humble in his might. If we are to be anything like God, we are called, as Micah once said, to “walk humbly with [our] God,” because our mighty God walks humbly with us.

Our mighty God was born, humbly, to us in Bethlehem yet again, in the person of Jesus. This Jesus, shepherd-ruler of the universe, was born into a stable; a manger where animals eat, in Bethlehem, as a vulnerable human baby. We are less than one week from celebrating the birth of this shepherd-king who has saved this universe, sisters and brothers, by choosing to walk humbly with us and inviting us to walk humbly, justly, kindly with him and among one another.

If God’s humility is shown to us in the Nativity of Jesus, it is shown that much more in Jesus’ giving of his life for us on the cross. When I was in my first parish as a priest, St. Kateri Tekakwitha in Rochester, New York, one of my favourite liturgical elements during this time of Advent and Christmas was the conclusion of the Prayer of the Faithful (or General Intercessions), which reminded us how “the wood of the cradle” was fundamentally connected to “the wood of the cross.” May we always remember this connection, sisters and brothers.

The letter to the Hebrews today reminds us, in a way, of this same connection of the wood of the cradle and the wood of the cross; of Bethlehem to Calvary. Hebrews draws on the Psalms and prophetic writings, especially those of Isaiah, and places them on the tongue of Jesus: “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me… See, God, I have come to do your will.”

I admit that Hebrews’ reflection on sacrifice is challenging to me personally: Not only that Jesus made the ultimate, saving sacrifice of himself on the cross, but that doing God’s will, in an ambiguous sense in our reading, somehow replaces or “abolishes” the need and the value of religious acts of sacrifice. Even our Eucharistic celebration is often called “the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” I do not think, then, that Hebrews is saying that what we celebrate here is worthless. By no means! But any religious ritual, including our Eucharist, can only have meaning if it is God’s will for us. And Jesus, at his Last Supper, commanded his disciples, “Take and eat… Take this cup and drink from it… Do this in memory of me.” This is how we know that our Eucharist is God’s will for us. In our Eucharist, we celebrate a historical action by Jesus, his sacrifice of himself through his passion and death on the cross, that is finished and past. We make it perpetually real and present through our memorial of Jesus’ passion and death, Jesus’ once-forever sacrifice, but that sacrifice can never be replicated or outdone.

This is the surpassing humility of God that we remember and celebrate here: “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired… See, God, I have come to do your will… Do this in memory of me.” It is the surpassing humility of God that impelled the preaching of Micah about a shepherd-king to arise from little, insignificant Bethlehem; a shepherd-king who would save Israel; humankind; the entire created universe. It is the surpassing humility of God that impelled the song of the Psalmist that called upon the LORD: “Stir up your might, and come to save us.”

And it was the surpassing humility of God, whom the Virgin Mary carried within her in human form, as she “went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country” to visit and care for Elizabeth, also pregnant, with John the Baptist. Luke’s Gospel gives us many sublimely beautiful words and images today. Luke gives us Elizabeth’s greeting, on which part of our “Hail, Mary” is based: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Elizabeth is described as “filled with the Holy Spirit,” as Mary was from the moment she conceived Jesus at the Annunciation. John leaps with joy in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary greets them.

But maybe the most moving moment of today’s Gospel for me is in Elizabeth’s question to Mary: “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me”? Elizabeth was not lacking in humility, by any means. But this event, the Visitation and these last days of preparation for the Nativity of the Lord, are greater than Elizabeth. These events are greater than us. They are greater than a simple lowliness-to-riches scenario. We could ask the same question as Elizabeth does: “Why has this happened to us, that our Lord has chosen to be born as one of us, to come to us through the Virgin Mary, through a humble manger in Bethlehem”?

This event is all about God’s humility: That not only would God send his Son into our world in this way to save us, but that now God regards us, little and insignificant though we are (if we think about it), as fit to do his will: To feed his flock (that is, one another); to act with justice and kind mercy; to “walk humbly with our God,” if only because God has chosen to walk humbly as one of us.

Homily for Sunday, 25 August 2019

Readings of the day: Isaiah 66:18-21; Psalm 117:1, 2; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, and St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Do many of us ever reflect on the phenomenal diversity in our world of religious faith; of the number of faiths in our world, each with a particular approach to encountering the divine through acts of worship and devotion, and also through acts of individual charity and social justice? Of the more than 7.5 billion people on Earth now, 2.4 billion are Christian, and 1.1 billion are Catholic. Even among these 2.4 billion Christians and 1.1 billion Catholics in our world, do we not see great diversity of religious practice, some of which is divisive, even a counter-witness to Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel that we might “all be one,” but much of which is legitimate and enriches our Christian faith and the world?

Our reading today from Isaiah and our Psalm particularly view this diversity of faith in a positive way, especially for the time of these Old Testament writers. Isaiah writes originally to encourage the people of Israel who are nearing the end of a lengthy exile in Babylon, a foreign nation that worshipped gods foreign to Israel and Israel’s God. I suppose Isaiah could have urged the people of Israel to close in on themselves and to develop a set of religious practices and worship of the God of Israel closed off to the rest of the world. But instead Isaiah prophecies that peoples and nations who do not even know the God of Israel, “the coastlands far away that have not heard of [God’s] fame or seen [God’s] glory,” will be drawn to the God of Israel by the descendants of Israel’s exiles to Babylon.

Isaiah does not say how these foreign nations will be drawn to the glory of the God of Israel, only that they will. This presumes that the people of Israel will become messengers, prophets after their prophetic leaders like Isaiah, of the glory and fame, and so right worship of the one God, the God of Israel. But how they will communicate this message and have all the nations accept the glory and right worship of one God remains a mystery as the book of Isaiah ends at the prophecy we hear today.

Our Psalm, even more than Isaiah, emphasizes that the worship of the one God of Israel is and will be for all nations and all peoples. Psalm 117, the shortest Psalm in our Bible, proclaims with pithy energy, “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love to us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.” Again, though, our Psalm is not specific as to how all peoples and all nations are to praise and extol the LORD, or how they are to experience this “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” of God that the Psalmist proclaims to be so universal. After all, can religious experience ever be exactly uniform everywhere and at all times, even among people of the same faith, let alone among people of different faiths?

If we see our world today, would it not seem that prophecies like those of Isaiah and our Psalm are far from realized? Some experts on these questions estimate that there are about 4 200 recognized religions in the world today. It would seem, then, that we are far from all peoples acknowledging and worshipping one and the same God, much less the God of Israel; the God of “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” extolled by our Psalm.

Even among people of the same religious faith, there is sometimes great diversity in religious experience. There are not only differences in denominational traditions, as we see in Christianity among Eastern and Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, but differences within each of those traditions: Differences in particular private devotions and forms of prayer; generational and ethnic differences from one worshipping community, parish, or diocese to another; differences in religious experience created by the increasing mobility of people and globalization nowadays, and so on.

All this diversity and difference can be wonderful, even enriching to a faith community or to the world, but can it not also be a challenge to us? Does this diversity not naturally lead us to ask: When is diversity legitimate or not? What are essential truths (or is there any single Truth) that allow for little or no leeway? Is there one or are there several true religious faiths? And, if there is only one true faith or a limited range of true religious practice, what about the salvation of people who do not belong to the one true faith, who choose not to believe the claims to truth of a particular faith, or have never experienced religious faith? Are people of no faith, by choice or not, saved?

The easy answer to these questions is that all this is a mystery. Whether our God, as we Christians believe God to be the God of all peoples and nations, will save only people of our Christian faith, of many, or all faiths, is beyond our capacity to answer. But simply to evade the question like this may not be helpful to us. In contrast to Isaiah and the Psalmist, whose tone toward the diversity of religious and experience of the peoples and nations around Israel is more accepting, even welcoming (although Isaiah and our Psalm still limit true praise; true worship to one God), in Luke’s Gospel we hear a more exclusive message from Jesus: There is a “narrow door” through which we are to “strive to enter” in order to be saved. The person who asks Jesus, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” seems to have understood Jesus’ teaching correctly: Indeed only a few will be saved. But what does Jesus actually mean by this pessimistic-sounding teaching we hear in today’s Gospel: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able”?

We could go back to evading the question: If we cannot understand what Jesus was trying to teach, why bother continuing to discern what Jesus meant? Or we could try to place Jesus’ teaching about striving “to enter through the narrow door” in the context of the rest of our Gospel reading and of the other readings we hear today. At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are well into their long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. In Galilee, for the most part Jesus and his teaching and healing ministry had been well-received. In Jerusalem, he would enter the city through its narrow, crowded gates. Within days of being received into the city as a king, he would be expelled from the city and crucified outside its gates. A quick note about Jerusalem: I have been to Jerusalem, so I have experienced literally the narrowness of its gates; its doors. Probably, then, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is referring to his impending entrance into the literal city of Jerusalem of his time. More figuratively, to follow Jesus; to be a disciple of Jesus would have meant to follow him through the “narrow door” of the earthly Jerusalem, to the end of a journey that was to lead to death, for Jesus and for many of his earliest disciples. To enter the earthly Jerusalem through its “narrow door,” though, to accept humiliation and even death was and is the only way to resurrection; the only way to salvation; to eternal life.

So I do not think that, by inviting his disciples to “enter through the narrow door,” Jesus is or was excluding anybody who is not of a specific religious faith—who is not Christian, or who was not of Jesus’ own Jewish faith in his time—from the possibility of salvation. In fact, the rest of today’s Gospel reading gives us some needed context on Jesus’ meaning by, “Strive to enter through the narrow door.” Salvation will be denied to those who insist on being “first” at the expense of others they exclude out-of-hand: People who think differently from us; who are of a different religious faith than us; people who look different from us. In this way, people who insist that they can gain salvation on their own, on account of their own wealth or the right ideas or right religious faith and so forth, will be “last” while those dismissed as “last… will be first.”

“The narrow door” is impossible to enter for anybody who tries to enter alone. Salvation cannot be a solo effort. Rather, “the narrow door” will be easier to pass through for any and all who help others to pass through it. Salvation is and must be a communal, whole-Church, whole-world effort. Entrance through “the narrow door” of eternal life is for anybody who not only preaches truth or uses truth in a way that excludes other people who have not experienced the truths we preach, but who lives and gives her or his life in witness to this truth. If we believe in one true God, a God of “steadfast love… faithfulness”; justice and kindness, then these are the values we are to live out to inspire the peoples, nations, and faiths of the world in all their diversity. And we pray that God may ultimately reconcile all this, in a way that is mysterious to us now, into an eternal existence with God that will be open to all nations and all peoples.

Homélie du mercredi, 31 janvier 2018– Mémoire de St. Jean Bosco, prêtre

Lectures du jour: 2 Samuel 24, 2.9-17; Psaume 31 (32), 1.2, 5, 6, 7; Marc 6, 1-6

jeudi de la 4ème semaine du Temps Ordinaire

Cette homélie fut donnée à la Maison Mère des Lazaristes, Chapelle St. Vincent de Paul, Paris, France.

This homily was given at the Vincentian Motherhouse’s St. Vincent de Paul Chapel, Paris, France.

A-t-on jamais souffert les effets du péché d’un autre, ou bien, même si l’on n’aime peut-être pas penser à cela, a-t-on déjà blessé quelqu’un d’innocent par notre péché ? Quel que soit le cas, qu’on ait blessé quelqu’un d’innocent par notre péché ou qu’on ait été blessé par le péché d’une autre personne, bien qu’on soit innocent, ces instants ne nous ont-ils pas amenés à nous poser la question : pourquoi les innocents souffrent-ils les effets du péché ?

C’est bien la question du roi David à la fin de notre lecture d’aujourd’hui du deuxième livre de Samuel. Bien sûr, c’est David qui pèche en recensant le peuple d’Israël. Pourquoi son recensement du peuple d’Israël est-il si mauvais ? L’état actuel ne recense-t-il pas périodiquement la population de la France, par exemple, sans que ce soit mauvais ?  Alors comprenons le recensement d’Israël par David dans le contexte de la promesse de Dieu à Abraham de lui donner des descendants « aussi nombreux que les étoiles et les graines de sable des bords de la mer ». Essayer de dénombrer cet infini est, dans ce contexte biblique, une tentative de David de se mettre à la place de Dieu. On peut alors comprendre son recensement comme un acte d’idolâtrie.

De toute façon, David se repentit de son péché, comme il le fait souvent, étant en même temps l’un des pires pêcheurs et l’un des meilleurs et plus fréquents pénitents de la Bible. En revanche, même si David se repentit, il doit encore y avoir des conséquences de son péché, mais pourquoi le peuple innocent d’Israël subit-il la peste, la conséquence du péché de son roi, David ?

David lui-même pose cette question à Dieu : « C’est moi qui ai péché, c’est moi qui suis coupable ; mais ceux-là, le troupeau, qu’ont-ils fait » ? La manière dont Dieu répond à cette question de David est aussi importante que la question elle-même : Dieu répond à David avec miséricorde à la fois pour le peuple d’Israël et pour David lui-même.

J’admets que c’est difficile à comprendre comment la peste que Dieu permet d’affecter le peuple d’Israël peut être interprété comme un acte miséricordieux. On rencontre ici, comme à plusieurs reprises dans la Bible, la tension entre la justice et la miséricorde de Dieu. La justice assure qu’il ait des conséquences de notre péché, tandis que la miséricorde met des limites sur cette justice. Dans le cas du recensement de David, Dieu arrête l’ange avant qu’il détruise Jérusalem.

Cette relation entre justice et miséricorde est importante pour nous, de façon qu’on connaisse que notre péché entraîne des conséquences ; ça peut nous faire souffrir, mais aussi faire souffrir notre prochain et peut-être même des personnes qu’on aurait pensé être plus loin du péché et de ses effets. Dans l’autre sens, quand quelqu’un pêche contre nous ; quand on est blessé, l’épisode d’aujourd’hui suite au recensement de David peut nous faire rappeler notre devoir d’agir avec miséricorde ; de mettre les freins sur nos désirs de la justice avant qu’ils deviennent de la vengeance ; avant que nous péchions nous-mêmes en réponse à un péché contre nous ; avant que nous présumions de nous mettre à la place de Dieu, qui est juste bien sûr, mais qui est en même temps miséricordieux.