God is perfect…not fastidious.
“God so loved the world that… [he] did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved… but people preferred darkness to light” (Jn 3: 16-19, 4th Sunday of Lent).
The old Jansenist heresy, once so common in Catholic circles, held (in its simplified form) that, essentially, God only loves good people. And, since you and I are clearly not particularly good people but are horrible, rotten sinners, God doesn’t really love us. At best, he puts up with us.
The implications of this were many and varied — wracking shame and guilt over the most trivial offenses or passing thoughts, reluctance to go to communion unless one had been to confession immediately before Mass, tremendous fear and anxiety around the act of going to confession, and crippling dread of the likelihood of going to hell.
Jansenism as a lived heresy caused tremendous suffering to millions of people and is, in fact, at the root of that awful stereotype many people have of the “guilt-ridden Catholic.”
Jansenism had its heyday, for sure, and still today lurks here and there. In its wake, though, came quite a counter-reaction. I have heard this view expressed, for example: God is loving and loves all his creatures. God loves you. But God who is perfect can only love what is perfect. Therefore, you are perfect just the way you are, and you don’t need to change in any way. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!
This view, expressed plainly in various New Age movements, but often implied in Christian or Catholic circles that downplay the reality of sin to near non-existence, is really (if you think about it) just Jansenism in reverse. The idea is that God can only love what is good. Jansenists say,“You’re clearly not good, so God doesn’t love you.” The reverse view says, “God clearly loves you, so you are just fine as you are.”
What is really awry here is the vision of God. What an impoverished, petty deity is being worshipped in both these worldviews!
A God who just can’t stand anything but perfect people, a God who is so fastidious that nothing but the best will do for him. If we meet a person who is like that, disdaining anything or anyone who doesn’t measure up to their expectations, we usually don’t like them very much or want to spend much time with them. Why would we want to love a God who can only love the good?
The great Good News of our Catholic Christian faith is found in the Gospel for the 4th Sunday of Lent, the famous, God so loved the world (Jn 3). Loved it enough to not condemn but to save. And, yes, came to save a people who do evil and prefer darkness to light. But loves them nonetheless and holds out the hope of salvation and eternal life to all who come to him.
Well, that’s all of us. Most people are not raving maniacal villains such as we see in movies, but virtually all of us have, to some degree or other, done evil and chosen darkness over light.
The reality of human sin, the capacity of all human beings to make a deliberate choice against God and against good, is a terrifying one. It is very scary to know and admit, without excuses or rationalizations, that we not only possess that capacity but that we have actually sinned. We really do need mercy; we really do need a savior. If we take that seriously, it scares us. What if he doesn’t choose to save … me?
Jansenism resolves that terror by enjoining us to try harder and harder and to lacerate ourselves with guilt and shame. Surely, if we just feel bad enough about ourselves, God will be forced to take pity on us. Fuzzy New Age “spirituality lite” resolves it by sunnily pretending none of it is real. We are all just fine, fine, fine, and the real problem is anyone who ever made us feel otherwise.
This is a project doomed to failure. We all know, try as we might not to know it, that we have in our lives at least moments (if not more) of selfishness and cowardice, spite and malice, greed and dishonesty. No one is exempt from such things, and the efforts to pretend that all of that simply is not what it is are truly pitiable. And saddest of all is that we don’t need to do that, let alone beat ourselves up with guilt over our sins and offenses.
What we need is a God who is good enough to love that which is not good, a God big enough to love what is small and weak, a God beautiful enough to love what is ugly, a God triumphant enough to love the failure, the botched job, the disappointment. You and me, in short.
How blessed we are to have just such a God. God loves us in our sins as well as in our virtues. He loves the underlying good creature he made (God’s image and likeness), and he loves the mess we have made of it. He doesn’t love you just when you’re well turned out, behaving yourself, doing everything just so. He loves… well, you! The whole you — good and bad, righteous and sinful, all together.
Now God loves us all so much that he wants us to be better. What kind of love would it be if it didn’t mean that? He died to save us and bring us eternal life, and eternal life means nothing if it does not mean living the life God lives. And God’s life is love, goodness, mercy, justice, tender care of all creatures, righteousness, and truth.
The beauty of our faith is that the more we hold our gaze on the God revealed to us in the Gospels, that beautiful face radiating light and goodness, the more we do in fact become more filled with light ourselves. Better, more giving, more loving, more courageous.
And this is the whole Lenten project. It is not a matter of beating ourselves up with neurotic guilt or a matter of feverish self-improvement projects and moral reform.
It is a matter of total absorption into the contemplation of Christ and his love for the world so that he may live in us, love in us, and, in the end, die and rise in us so that we live no longer, but Christ lives in us (Gal 2:20). Perfect indeed, in the end.
And that, my brothers and sisters, is Easter. See you there.
