Is our God a petty tyrant? 神様は、家庭での暴君ですか？
イエスは言われた。「イザヤは、あなたたちのような偽善者のことを見事に預言したものだ。彼はこう書いている。
この民は口先ではわたしを敬うが、
その心はわたしから遠く離れている。
人間の戒めを教えとしておしえ、
むなしくわたしをあがめている。』あなたたちは神の掟を捨てて、人間の言い伝えを固く守っている。」
更に、イエスは言われた。「あなたたちは自分の言い伝えを大事にして、よくも神の掟をないがしろにしたものである。
マーク 7:6-9 新共同訳
He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
” ‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.’You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.”
And he said to them: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!
Mark 7:6-9 New International Version
今日の福音でイエスに挑戦している人々は、公然とイエスを辱めようとしています。敬虔な人々は食事の前に手を洗っていましたが、ばい菌を取るためではありませんでした。（当時は誰もばい菌については知りませんでした。） 神社で参拝する前に手を洗う人のように、或いは教会に入る際、聖水を頂くカトリック信徒のように、彼らは精神的な清めのためにこれを行なっていました。ですから挑戦者は、神のみことばの伝達者であることを主張するイエスが、敬虔な人々がみなやっていることを弟子に要求さえしない、と言っています。
しかし、今朝の朗読では８節目から後の５節が省かれています。その部分でイエスは、そこにいる「律法学者」のある者が、年金制度もない古代社会で、年老いた両親の扶養義務から人々を解放するために巧妙な方法を見出していることに気づかせます。彼らはただ次のように言うべきだと言っていました。「私が今後両親にあげると決めたものは何でも、両親ではなく神殿の神におささげすると今誓います。」と。
イエスは、彼らが聖書に述べられていない`言い伝えを取り上げて、それを弟子たちの問題行 動にしていることで、彼らが偽善者であることは明白だ、と言っています。同時に、聖書に述べられている第四戒（汝の父母を敬え）に対する違反、より良い老後をもたらすようなその掟に対するひどい違反を見過ごしていることで、彼らの偽善があらわになっていると話して反対者を辱めています。
聖書に関わるあらゆる信仰生活者（ラビ、牧師、司祭、修道者）は、食物規定、断食、決められた祈祷、禁酒といった特定の規則に執着しすぎる傾向にあると、私は思います。私たちは二つの大きな掟、神の愛と隣人愛に対比してそれら各々をチェックすることを忘れています。
大抵のカトリック教徒にとってのこの強迫観念は、性行動にあると思います。もちろん、そこには大いに深刻な性的罪があり得ます。不倫、強姦、児童虐待は死ぬまで加害者にひどい傷を負わせかねません。しかし、私たちが若い頃聞かされたのは、性的罪に小罪はない、ということです。たとえ誰も傷つけなくても、不純な考えやでさえ大罪であると。もしそれが深刻でそれでも自ら選んだとしたら、いつも大罪であると。
私は頭ごなしに聞かされたその理由を決して本気では納得しなかったと思います。そして、結局ためらわずにはっきりと考え、これに取り組むようになったのは、私が年齢を重ねてからであることを認めなければなりません。
もし夫と妻がその深い愛を互いに分ち合うとき、でも妊娠を避けるべく方法をとるとしたら、私たちの神は彼らに対して永遠の破滅を送るような神であると言うとしたら、何と不敬な物言いでしょう。男子高校生は性的目覚めや失敗によって欲求不満を起こし、自ら快楽を求ます。神はその子が告解して心から謝り、二度としないと真実決心するまで聖体を拝領することを許さないほど、真に立腹なさるのでしょうか。神はどんな狭量な方なのでしょうか。
厳密に言えば、バチカン発行の要理書（カテキズム）の最近の見直しにおいてさえ、まだそうした行動の全ては客観的に大罪とされています。しかしこの要理は、こうした罪が甚だしい激情か根深い習性のために、人が真に自由に選択したものではないので、かなりの場合小罪になると認めています。
私たちの神は、イエスのうちに私たちに現われたように、弱く、貧しく、虐待され、意気阻喪し、忘れられた人々へのあわれみに満ち溢れた神です。私たちの神は、そうした人々を搾取している人々を探し出し、悔い改めへと呼んでおられます。そして打ちのめされた人々 を助けるために私たちを呼んでおられます。
The people who challenge Jesus in today’s gospel are trying to shame Jesus in public. Pious people washed their hands before eating, but not to remove the germs (nobody knew about germs then). They did this to cleanse their spirit like a person washing hands before praying at a Shinto shrine or like a Catholic taking holy water while entering a church. So these challengers are saying that Jesus, who claims to be God’s messenger, doesn’t even require his disciples to do what every pious person does.
But after verse 8 our reading this morning omitted five verses. And in those verses Jesus reminds them that some of their “scribes” find a clever way to relieve someone of the obligation to support their parents as they grow old in that ancient world, which had no pension system. They said that a person only had to say something like the following: “Today I vow that any thing which I may decide to give to my parents in the future, I shall give to God in the temple instead.”
Jesus shames his opponents by saying that they show their hypocrisy by making a big issue for his disciples about a custom that is never mentioned in the Bible, but at the same time they ignore a horrible violation of the fourth commandment (Honor your father and your mother), which would make the last years of the lives of one’s parents bitter.
I suppose that the elite practitioners of every biblical religion (the rabbis, pastors, priests, religious) have a tendency to get too obsessed with specific rules about diet, fasting, saying certain prayers, avoiding alcohol. We forget to check each of these against the two great commandments: love of God, love of neighbor.
Surely for most Catholics this obsession has been sex. Of course there can be profoundly serious sexual sins. Adultery, rape, abuse of children can terribly wound the offended persons for life. But when we were young we were told that no sexual sin was a venial sin. Even if no one was harmed, even a dirty thought or impure touch of oneself was a mortal sin. If one was aware that it was serious and if even so one freely chose it, it was always mortal.
They convinced me by their confident assertion, but I suppose I was never really convinced by the reasons they gave us. And I must confess that it’s only in my old age that I have at last felt free to think it through clearly and challenge this.
Suppose a husband and wife share the depth of their love with each other—but do what they must to keep from getting pregnant now, What a blasphemy it is to say that our God is the kind of god who could send them to eternal damnation for this! A high school boy is frustrated by his awkwardness and failures and seeks pleasure by himself. Can our God really be so offended by that, that He won’t allow the boy to come to communion until he goes to confession and really is sorry and really decides never to do it again? What kind of a petty God would that be?
Technically, even the latest revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published by the Vatican, still holds that all of these ways of acting are objectively mortal sins. However, this catechism does acknowledge that very often they become venial because the person really does not make a free choice because of overwhelming passion or ingrained habit.
Our God, as revealed to us in Jesus, is a God who is full of compassion for the weak, the poor, the abused, the depressed, the lost. Our God seeks out those who exploit these people and calls them to repentance. And calls us to come to the aid of his afflicted people.
Reverend Wahl:
I have read your comments regarding Mark 7:6-9 with interest, especially about taming our sexual passions and valuing holy purity. You seem to minimize the wisdom of the Church over the ages in its understanding and judgments that have cleared the path of confusion regarding sexual conduct and appropriate guidance. It is important that psychology, too, learn from its parent, theology, in not compromising sound principles of integrity with the fashion of the day! The theological underpinnings of our spirituality of human sexuality and behavior were dutifully defined carefully by the Council of Trent and numerous subsequent papal and Vatican documents that amply clarify the Church’s teachings and expectations.
Father Thomas Replies:
Thank you for your toughtful contribution to the question.
We surely must always come back to the central issue of moral theology: Jesus (and Paul) insist that the whole moral law (all the Law and all the Prophets Mt 22:40; Rom 13:8-10; Ga 5:14) is summed up in the two Great Commandments of Love of God and Love of Neighbor. Now, there is no indication in the Bible that such behavior as solitary seeking of sexual pleasure or avoiding conception in intercourse (practices that must have been known in Biblical times) are sinful. (In the one exception, the story of Gen. 38:7-10 Onan is struck dead. But the reason is because Onan is refusing his serious obligation in justice [at that period] to produce an heir for his elder brother from the brother’s widow. It would surely have been as serious if he had simply refused to sleep with her for the same reason.)
The Catholic Church (correctly as I believe) supplements biblical judgments about behavior by appealing to natural law. For instance, slavery was regulated in the Old Testament and tolerated in the New Testament. But the Church now declares slavery completely morally forbidden. It does so because of Jesus’s call for love (”Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself”), and because it is impossible to find reasonable justification for one person to claim ownership of another. That is, justification that would seem reasonable to persons who had no personal stake in the question. That’s what Natural Law is supposed to be about.
I, and I suppose you, have “always” found the idea of the solitary pursuit of sexual pleasure to be shameful, degrading, and infantile. But those feelings are because we were given that message almost from the first moment of awareness of sexual pleasure. We were told by people we trusted that if we gave in to that pleasure we were committing about the biggest sin we could, that we deserved eternal hell, that we must confess them to the priest, that if we received Communion without a good confession we committed an even greater sin against God. Those people told us that, not because they were evil and wanted to torment us, but because they themselves had always been told it.
I’m here to tell you that this is a misunderstanding that has kept growing uncontrollably through fifteen centuries and more. I am telling you not as a priest, an official teacher in the Church–as a priest I felt I had to tell what the church still technically teaches. But I tell you as a serious fellow Catholic Christian, trained in theology to study “How do we know what we know?” I tell you as an old man who has been given the grace to step back and ask, “What would a reasonable person think of this if they had not been raised the way we were?” And I can tell you, the reasons that theologians give would not convince anyone! I pray that Rome may come to recognize this as it has already reversed teachings on slavery, the taking of interest on loans, and freedom of religion.
Let me be clear, the reasons against, adultery, making babies outside the stability of marriage, and other cynical sexual exploitations of people usually have horrendous lifelong effects on human beings (including the children). But the things I was dealing with in the article above may be infantile, but so is biting one’s fingernails. They do not in any way rise to the level of mortal sin. The attempt to use Natural Law to prove that they are serious has no justification. I am convinced of this, and I say so as God is my witness.
Michael
25 Aug 09 at 5:54 pm
Dearest fathers,
I am a man of only 23 years, raised in Australian public schooling (including all of the moral “formation” that includes) and hope that as a Catholic layman I may contribute.
In the sphere of public education, masturbation is lauded as a “normal release”, “harmless pleasure” and similar. I have not in any way been raised in the atmosphere you mention of a solid formation in Catholic moral teaching. Even though I grew up in a culturally Catholic family, attending mass between weekly and monthly, I never once heard a homily on sexual morality (or even generic morality) and my family’s only discussion of religious matters was that when my grandparents died they were happy with God in heaven.
Therefore, to dismiss the reaction of shame and disgust at masturbation as a cultural artefact is invalid in my case, and in the case of anyone in my generation. The reality of this reaction in an individual such as myself invalidates the claim that it is based purely on nurture, rather than the inherent natural disposition to natural law implanted in every human soul by God, as taught by Holy Mother Church.
Furthermore, the rejection of Humanæ Vitæ’s definitive proclamation on contraception is baffling. Everything the Holy Father wrote has come to pass - the damage done by contraception are impossible to ignore, and they extend well beyond the mere “conception of a child outside the stability of marriage”. The human spirit itself is being crushed by the abandonment of proper sexual morality.
I do not understand why you have ignored Rev Wahl’s reference to the consistent teaching of the Church on sexual ethics (not just from Trent, but St Augustine) and instead appealed to the vague “reversal of teachings” on slavery, usury, and religious freedom.
The fact of the matter is that the Church has never taught as sinless something that was previously taught as sinful. The Church will always interpret new judgements consistently with old, and you can’t get much older than the Christian traditional understanding of sexual morality. The church does not still “technically” teach these things to be true, she holds them as pearls of great price, the great gift of the Deposit of Faith from Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Reply from Father Thomas
Dear Friend,
I am deeply moved by your testimony. Your sensitivity to the disorder involved in masturbation and artificial birth control is a grace, I believe. I hope that in what I wrote I did not deny the possibility that these behaviours are sinful; I did not mean to do so.
Nevertheless, in Catholic teaching not every sin is of equal seriousness. Remember the story of the young shepherd who cried, “Wolf! Wolf!” to be amused by the distress of the adults. When the wolf actually came the adults ignored his warning. The Catholic Church has no trouble recognizing venial sin in matters of justice and charity: a cruel insult or pilfering a library book is wrong, does far more damage than the perpetrator thinks, but these things are not grounds for eternal damnation. Why can we not admit venial sin in matters of chastity?
In the early church the only sins that called for a formal ceremony of reconciliation were murder, adultery, and apostasy (or heresy). These were dealt with by the bishop. Otherwise one might talk about one’s serious offenses with a wise old Christian or the presbyter, but the reconciliation with God was seen as coming by God’s grace through repentance and receiving Communion. And that is still the practice of the Orthodox Churches of the East, the Armenian, Syrian, and Coptic Churches–Churches whose traditions are respected by Rome itself.
The first Christians who really regularly practiced something like our practice of confession were the early monastic men and women of the desert. For help in their spiritual journey they would reveal all their desires and worries, failures and plans to a spiritual father or mother, who in turn would give them some words of encouragement or challenge or compassion. When this practice had reached Ireland it tended mostly to become a confession of faults and sins. Certain eminent Irish monks tried to help the spiritual fathers by writing lists of sins and appropriate penances. Because the monks were supposed to be living celibate lives many sexual faults were included–with light penances of a few psalms for things that occurred in their sleep, but severe penances for deliberate sins in waking hours (two years without communion for what seems to be masturbation according to one of the lists). These lists spread through Europe, and when lay peoople began to take monks and even parish priests as spiritual fathers the penances meant for monks were applied to lay people. That, I think, was what led medieval theologians to give an exaggerated weight to these sins that cause little or no direct harm in charity or justice to others.
If we put too much weight on these sins and faults, we shall have lost all sense of perspective when we come to the great life-destroying sins like adultery and child abuse, astronomical fraud in business, or the psychological demolition of a child or a spouse. And we make our God into an impulsive, unpredictable petty tyrant.
I would be grateful for informed criticism of my historical notes here; I have done a fair bit of study but there may be readers who are well informed or can do more research to confirm or modify what I have said. Thomas Wahl
R A Bautista OPL
4 Sep 09 at 5:04 pm