31st SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Fr. Pat Earl, SJ
Our readings today are saying two different things. Especially our first reading – from the Book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Scriptures – tells us we should fear God and then it says we should love God. Fear and love are difficult to reconcile as ways to approach God. Yet this is what Moses says: “Fear the Lord, your God, and keep all his statutes and commandments…” But then he says: “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
I’d like to talk about fearing God. The reason is that I think we have greatly misunderstood what the Bible means when it speaks of “fear of God”. This misunderstanding has had tragic consequences for many who are trying to live life faithful to the Word of God. They feel commanded to become fearful before God. So, a sensed distance before God is good; an anxious distance is expected. And correspondingly, the God who commands our fear also commends our cringing. Being religious somehow translates, bottom-line, into becoming a fearful, anxious person. That can get further translated into becoming fearful in the church before church authority. Such fear in the church is never acceptable.
Unfortunately too many of us have learned fright, anxiety and dread at the very thought of coming into God’s presence, especially at the hour of our death. With confidence I say that is not what God wants for us. What God actually wants for us – Jesus tells us. It is the Father’s pleasure to give us the kingdom – that and all things beside [Lk 12, 30-31].
It will help us to take a look at what the Bible means by “fear of God”. The “fear of the Lord” spoken of in the Bible is a healthy sense of reverence, wonder and awe when coming into the presence of the divine. And so it is called “the beginning of wisdom” as it opens us up to the presence of something larger and wiser than ourselves. Fear of the Lord recognizes how utterly other God is but also allows us to recognize the holy in our midst. And it also allows God to awaken in us larger and wiser desires and responsibilities that we have been afraid to contemplate for ourselves.
Fear of the Lord expands us. It fills us with God’s own ambitions for us and our world – what Jesus calls “the kingdom of God”. This fear of the Lord has quite the opposite affect than the kind of fear that shrinks us, making us too cautious to move beyond our own self-interest. It is precisely this kind of shriveling fear that God through the prophets tells us we should not have. “Fear not!” is the Bible’s most repeated command. That kind of fear only diminishes us. And we should be very careful not to allow it to shape the way we see things nor the way we decide things. Fear – in religion as well as in politics – is always a bad counselor.
Fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom, leads us into doing the love of the Lord. I’d like to finish with a Jesuit thing. It’s from Fr. Pedro Arrupe who was the leader or superior general of the Jesuits and for us quite a hero. Listen to how he describes the kind of life we will lead if we let ourselves be led by fear of the Lord.
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide… who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
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