In the past six months, I have been ministering to a woman who has suffered and lived for 20+ years in a brutal, physical and emotionally abusive marriage. The perpetrator of abuse, at first, brought trumped up charges of assault against her, which were dismissed by the judge. And, now he is seeking to alienate her children from her and destroy her financially. The alarming thing about this is that it appears that not only is his lawyer, but to some degree her own lawyer, and the judge presiding over the divorce are engaging in a miscarriage of justice toward this woman. It is clear that neither the judge nor her own lawyer know much about the accumulative damage done to a victim of domestic violence over a long period of time; damage that is forever embedded into the psyche of the victim of domestic violence and never goes away.
This brought up to my mind the many case histories of clergy criminal sexual abuse of children I read perpetrated by a diocesan priest, and a Franciscan priest upon children in two rural parishes in our area from 1940 to 1960. With both the Archdiocese and the Franciscan religious order fighting to cover up the heinous sin of these priests, and in some cases threatening the parents of these children, who had been abused, with lawsuits, one almost cries out in despair to God for some kind of justice. All of the children sexually abused by these priests have been cruelly, emotionally, and physically scarred and destroyed; some dying by suicide later in life, others, losing faith in institutional religion and God altogether, and never, ever having any semblance of a “normal” life in their adult years.
SCRIPTURE READINGS
In the readings of this past weekend, the words of the prophet Jeremiah and Jesus fully cry out about the injustice that plagues humans in this life.
Jeremiah cries out:
“⁷ O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. ⁸ For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. ⁹ If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. ¹⁰ For I hear many whispering: “Terror is all around! Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” All my close friends are watching for me to stumble. “Perhaps he can be enticed, and we can prevail against him, and take our revenge on him.” (Jeremiah 20:7-9, NRSV)
This is how Jeremiah ends it:
“¹⁴ Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed! ¹⁵ Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, saying, “A child is born to you, a son,” making him very glad. ¹⁶ Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity; let him hear a cry in the morning and an alarm at noon, ¹⁷ because he did not kill me in the womb; so my mother would have been my grave, and her womb forever great. ¹⁸ Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame? (Jeremiah 20:14-18, NRSV)
Clearly, Jeremiah was at the point of despair. I find it neglectful on the part of the Roman Catholic Lectionary, that the Church did not allow the final passages of this chapter in the Sunday reading. Have we not all reached that breaking point in our lives at one time or another? Even Jesus cries out in despair during the Passions of Mark and Matthew, “My God, my God, what have you abandoned me?”
Which one of us has not echoed the words of Jeremiah when we have suffered betrayal, abuse, and injustice, especially from people and institutions we were taught to trust? We look for justice in this life and find none. We come away from these experiences refusing to trust even our religious authorities for even they have betrayed our trust as badly as those in other formerly trusted institutions whether it be places of work, local, state, and national government, and our court system. Is it any wonder that so many harbor anger and resentment toward the institutions and people we were taught as children to trust and obey? Is it any wonder that so many people have abandoned forever the mainstream religion in which they have been raised?
In the passage from Matthew’s Gospel, we hear Jesus addressing the reality of justice in our world:
“²¹ From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suff ering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. ²² And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” ²³ But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” ²⁴ Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ²⁵ For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. ²⁶ For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? (Matthew 16:21-26, NRSV)
As much as the apostles want to deny the injustice of their world, Jesus is not as easily duped and reprimands them for their naivete. Jesus, already persecuted by the religious authorities of his own religion, knows full well the lengths to which they will go to silence him. Jesus, and the message he was sent to preach, is a tremendous threat to their way of life and their religious authority. He well knew that they wanted him dead. He then warns his disciples that those who follow him and live the message he preached would be marked for death as well. There would be no justice in this world for those who fully follow the life and the teachings of Jesus.
Jesus’ words were prophetic. Just as his own religious authorities colluded with the Romans to kill Jesus, so have religious leaders colluded with government (sometimes religion and government being one and the same) toward destroying the prophets who have arisen within the different religious traditions, whether they are Christian or non-Christian.
So where can we find justice in our world? Darned if I know. Justice is a very rare commodity in the United States, and far rarer in other nations in the world.
WHAT ARE OUR CHOICES?
Do we place our belief in a final Divine judgment of which Jesus speaks in Matthew 25? Or is that scene no more than what Karl Marx called “the opiate of the people” to dupe vulnerable people into thinking that the evil doers in this world will get their divine comeuppance all the while condemning those same vulnerable people to a miserable existence in this life? These are two very hard questions to ponder.
I remember a Sunday night in Lent many years ago, when my good friend and spiritual mentor, Fr Denny Dempsey was at my house praying Evening Prayer with me. At the conclusion of that prayer, he asked me, “Bob, what if all that we do and say and preach is based on nothing? Are our lives, work, and ministry meaningless?” These two questions were not foreign to me. I and so many others who have ministered in the Church have asked ourselves at one time or another, “What was I thinking when I got ordained?” My answer to Denny that night is one I still believe to this day. I answered Denny, “Our lives have been spent trying to help people through very difficult times in their lives. That, in itself, makes our ministry worthwhile, whether there is a God or not.”I do believe in an after-life. I do believe that there will be some kind of judgment on how well we learned and lived the commandment of love preached and lived by Jesus, or whatever prophet or spirituality we follow.
In reading accounts of Near Death experiences, there seems to be a consistent event of being judged on how well we have loved in this life. It did not matter as to what religion one was raised and lived, or whether one had any religion at all. The event happens to all. The way it is described is that of seeing a replay or rerun of all the relationships they have had in their lives and experiencing the harm they have inflicted upon others. To experience firsthand the evil they perpetrated on others was extremely terrible, so much so, that those who have experienced this say they never ever want to experience that rerun again. What was also consistent about this event, was while they felt the harm and evil they caused others, there was a being of love who stood by them, expressing how much they are still loved. Those who have experienced this Near Death event dramatically live altered lives from that which they had lived prior to their Near Death experience.
EPILOGUE
It is accounted that though there were plots to kill Jeremiah, Jeremiah survived them all, later fleeing to Egypt and living the remainder of his days in exile. Now whether he took the Ark of the Covenant with him, and whether it was really found by Indiana Jones in the Temple of Souls, transported, and later buried in a massive warehouse in Area 51, Nevada, I will leave to the imaginative world of George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg. As for Jesus, those of us who profess to be disciples of Jesus, believe that ultimate justice was reached in Jesus being resurrected from the dead and ascending into Divine Life, a life he promised all who lived his commandment of love.
For the rest of us slogging through this world in search of justice I think we need to be content into living, as best as we can, lives of love and service to others, fighting for justice when we are called to do so, with the knowledge that real and full justice will never be realized in our world. As I said to Fr Denny Dempsey, “Our lives have been spent trying to help people through very difficult times in their lives. That, in itself, makes our ministry worthy, whether there is a God or not.”