Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. What is forbidden by this edict? In dealing with the third commandment perhaps it is better to ask what is bidden by it. What is the positive challenge in God telling us to rest one day a week?

For many years, for most of us, the third commandment simply meant that we could not do our normal work on Sundays and on that day we were obliged, as well, to go to church to fulfill our “Sunday obligation”. Western culture, for the most part, played along and most non-vital businesses and commerce shut down on Sundays. If we transgressed, we confessed: “I missed going to church on Sunday” or “I worked on Sunday”. 

Today there is considerable confusion about what it means to keep the Sabbath day holy and, for the most part, this commandment is being benignly ignored. More and more in Western society there is business as usual on Sundays and many of us are obliged to work on that day, whether we want to or not. Church attendance is also declining steadily. In this context we must again ask: What does it mean to keep holy the Sabbath day?

The book of Genesis states that God created the world in six days and on the seventh day, the sabbath, God rested. We too are to rest on that day because God did. But that is a curious logic. First of all, how does God rest? What is meant here has not so much to do with God being busy or at leisure as it has to do with the purpose of creation. Biblically, the sabbath is the end, the feast, for which all creation was made. Hence, Jesus tells us that we were not made for the sabbath, the sabbath was made for us. Simply put, the sabbath prefigures the end times, the world that is to come, heaven. What the precept to keep the sabbath holy asks is that we, individually and collectively, regularly, have a sabbatical (notice the root of that word) by stopping our normal work and activities so as to try to taste a little of what the final state will be like. 

Hence, according to Scripture, our lives should have a certain rhythm: work should be followed by play, pressured time by unpressured time, duty by worship, earth by heaven. Every seventh day we should taste a bit of play, unpressured time, worship, and heaven. Very practically, the idea of the sabbath suggests that we should have this rhythm in our lives: we work for 6 days, then have one day of sabbatical; we work for 6 years and have one year of sabbatical (only a few privileged academics get to actually live out this part); and we work for a lifetime and then have an eternity of sabbatical, that is, an eternity of rest in God. One day a week, Sundays for Christians and Saturdays for Jews, we are supposed to remind ourselves that we are made not for work, but for play, that we do not live by work and worry alone and, in the end, we will not live by work and worry at all. 

But there is further element involved in observing the sabbath, reconciliation. We stop work once a week not just to rest and worship God, but also, and especially, to forgive debts, to bring ourselves more into a general sympathy with all things. To observe the sabbath means to cancel debts, to forgive others, to let go of our hurts. Our failure to do this is the reason why, so often, our vacations and recreation times do not really renew us. We come back from a holiday, physically rested and suntanned, only to find that almost immediately all of our problems return and we are tired again. We have not really been renewed, we have only suspended our worries for a while and they return because we have not forgiven anyone. 

Hence in examining ourselves against the third commandment, we should not just confess that we did not go to church on Sunday or that we did business as usual on Sunday, we should also confess that we did not forgive others on Sunday. 

Observing the sabbath is a critical observance, both religiously and psychologically. Unless we pull back from our normal lives regularly, one day a week, and rest, worship, and forgive, we lose perspective on what is really important and become compulsive, driven persons who are caught up in the rat race. Likewise we become ambitious, greedy, and resentful, unable to pray, to forgive, and simply enjoy life. It is no accident that today, as Sunday observance is slipping, we find ourselves ever more trapped and pressured, always behind, never really able to rest, and unable to delight in the deep joys of life. What this means is that we are not observing the sabbath.

The sabbath is our day. Once a week we have a chance to taste a wee bit of heaven – to rest, worship God, forgive each other, and to feel a bit more in sympathy with all things.

Among all the commandments, the first is the most difficult to keep. We are forever worshipping strange gods. Idolatry, more so even than atheism, is what is natural to us. But how do we, believers, Christians, sincere churchgoers  – break the first commandment? How do we have strange gods before us? 

The answer is not easy. The idolatry that afflicts us has little to do with worshipping icons, misguided devotions, and other such things. It is subtler. It has to do with the false images of God to which we give obeisance. Allow me to name 10 such false gods whom we habitually substitute for the real God, Yahweh, the Father of Jesus Christ.

1) The arbitrary god of fear.

2) The insecure, defensive, threatened god.

3) The dumb, non-understanding god.

4) The exotic god of special places.

5) The ascetic god whose Christ does not proclaim feast.

6) The emasculated god of unbalanced piety.

7) The orthodox god of strict theological formulation.

8) The unholy god our own image and likeness.

9) The overly intense, wired, god of our own neuroses.

10) The anti-erotic god, anti-enjoyment, god of our guilt.

Space does not allow for a commentary on each of these, but allow me a few, more general, reflections. I apologize as well about the directness of some of the comments. They are not meant to be irreverent, but … iconoclasm, smashing false gods, is never a gentle business.

In the Greek myth of Prometheus, humanity is punished for stealing fire from the gods. In ancient mythology, the gods have life and want to keep it for themselves. We, humans, are an unwanted pregnancy, unwanted children. Hence everything we do, especially anything creative, is threat to the divine realm.

We have never overcome this. By and large we still believe that God is petty, defensive, and threatened by us. We feel that God likes us better when we are uncreative and docile, when we don’t steal his fire. It is no accident that many creative persons leave the church and that the church has so often been defensive about progress, evolution, and human creativity. The God we believe in is too threatened and defensive.

We also, habitually, worship a god whom, unconsciously, we consider to be rather dumb and non-understanding of our human complexity. Just one typical example: I once officiated at a funeral for a young man from a very religious family who, while away from the church and living rather dissolutely, was killed accidentally while drunk. The people at his funeral, good churchgoers all of us, were not only grieving his loss, we were also fearing for his eternal salvation. One woman remarked to me: “He was good soul, underneath it all. I knew him. If I were opening the gates of heaven, I would certainly let him in, despite his irresponsibility.” She was an understanding woman, but she was not giving God credit for the same thing. All of us tend to mirror that attitude. We do not give God credit for being as bright as we are. 

The god we worship is also, most often, an ascetic, an anti-erotic, celibate who does not want his children to enjoy sex and who is less happy when his children are smiling than when they are suffering. This god sends us, as messiah, not a Jesus who declares that the kingdom is a wedding feast, but an ascetic who never says: “Weddings must increase and I must decrease!” Rarely do we worship a smiling, relaxed God, who makes forgiveness as easy to access as the nearest water tap. 

We commit idolatry too when we make God more monastic than domestic, when we limit God’s presence to churches and holy places and do not notice God in our kitchens. When I cannot see the wounds of Christ in the pained face of the person across the table from myself, then my crucifix is more gold calf than icon. 

Finally, we break the first commandment when we make worship of God more a question of proper orthodoxy and correct doctrine than a question of letting the life of the Trinity, Love, flow through us. God, I suspect, prefers a loving, gracious heretic to person who is theologically correct, but bitter and unloving.

Whenever we conceive of God as somehow being defensive, exotic, anti-enjoyment, less compassionate and intelligent than ourselves, and preferring orthodoxy to compassion, we are breaking the first commandment. Such is idolatry.

I have been a priest for more than twenty years and one of the great privileges of that has been the opportunity to say mass daily. At that daily mass (Eucharist, if you prefer the more contemporary term) I have met an interesting variety of persons. I say ‘variety’ because there is not just one type of person who comes to daily mass.

Who does come to daily mass? In my experience no single category does justice here. On the surface at least, it appears that there is little common among those who attend daily mass. It is a most strange mixture of people: some nuns, some unemployed people, a lot of retired women, some retired men, a few young persons, some housewives, and a motley collection of nurses, businessmen, secretaries, and other such professionals on their lunch break.

There is no similarity in character among them, but there is something among them (and I am speaking here only of those who truly have the habit of attending daily mass) that is held in common, namely, in the end, they are all there for the same reason. What is that reason? It is something that is deeper and less obvious than is immediately evident. Simply put, people who go to mass daily are there in order to stay alive. They go to mass because they know that, without mass, they would fall apart, inflate, become depressed, and be unable to handle their own lives.

That’s quite a mouthful! People go to daily mass in order to stay alive! I doubt that most people who attend mass daily would tell you that. More likely they would tell you something to the effect that they go to mass to pray to God, or to be nurtured and sustained by God, or to touch God and to receive God’s blessing upon their day, or because they feel it is only right that they should offer some of their day back to God. On the surface, those are their reasons. But for anyone who sustains the habit of daily mass for a long period of time there is a deeper reason, always. Daily mass is a ritual, a deep powerful one that sustains a person in the same way that the habit of attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting sustains a man or a woman seeking sobriety.

I understood that parallel when an alcoholic friend explained to me why he goes regularly to AA meetings. He told me: “I know, and know for sure, that if I don’t go to meetings regularly, I’ll begin to drink again. It’s funny, the meetings are always the same, the same things get said over and over again. I know everything that will be said. Everyone coming there knows that. And I don’t go to those meetings to be a nice person. I go there to stay alive. I go there because, if I don’t, I will eventually destroy myself!”

What is true about Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is also true for daily Eucharist. Granted, it is a prayer, it is a our primary coming together as Christians, it is Christ’s prayer, the perfect prayer that Jesus left us, and it is the place on this earth where God touches us physically. Eucharist is these things. But it is more: it is also a ritual, a container, a sustainer, a coming together which keeps us from falling apart.

And we are always falling apart, failing in most everything: we fight, divorce, have relationships go sour, fill with resentment, lie, slander others, fall from grace, betray our friends and convictions, and only have pleasures which are never whole because they are never fully shared. We go to daily mass not to escape these things so as to fly off into some kind of immortality and freedom. No. The ritual of daily mass reminds us precisely of the fact that we are unfree, that we are sinners, and that we must die – just as an AA meeting reminds those there of the same thing. One approaches the Eucharist table daily precisely to keep oneself aware of the fact that “My name is Ron .. and I’m a sinner!”

Interesting too is the fact that there is a something else held in common among those who attend daily mass, they don’t want a service that is too long or too creative. They want a clear ritual, a predictable one, and a short one. Because of this they are often at the mercy of critics who look at this and, simplistically, see nothing other than empty ritual, rote prayer, people going through the mechanics of worship without heart. Nothing could be further from the truth and this type of accusation betrays the misunderstanding of an outsider.

Daily mass is not meant to be an experience of high energy and creativity. It’s a ritual act, simple, clear, profound. It’s a touching of Someone so as not to fall apart and die.

Bernard Lonergan, one of the great intellectuals of our century, used to speak of something he called differentiated consciousness. For him, that meant a mind that did not think simplistically, namely, which did not divide up the world too quickly into blacks and whites and either/ors. To have a differentiated consciousness is to be able to hold seemingly opposing forces together and see them not as contradictory but as paradox. In such a consciousness there is less either/or and more both/and. As well, the person who has such a mind is able to carry the tension that this kind of paradox creates.

1996 will be a good year, for the world and for the church, if all of us can be a bit more differentiated in our consciousness. Put more simply …

1996 will be a good year if conservatives can be a bit more liberal and liberals can be a bit more conservative. How much easier it would be to have community at every level – political, ecclesial, social – if conservatives would be more open to risk and if liberals would respect more the need for a certain caution.

1996 will be a good year if social justice groups begin to stress more the value of private morality, including sexual ethics, even as various prayer groups and conservative Christians begin to underscore the importance of social justice. Think how rich would be our spirituality if everyone stressed equally both the private and social domain.

1996 will be a good year if those who stress responsibility put just as equal a stress on human rights and those who are so morally and politically righteous about human rights, each time they speak publicly, speak also of the responsibilities concomitant with those rights. Think about the possibility for public discourse if every speaker equally values both rights and responsibilities.

1996 will be a good year if social analysts, schools of psychology, and secular moralists stress more chastity and purity, even as church circles, especially conservative ones, stress sexual passion and sexual enjoyment within marriage. How rich will be that marriage – passion and purity.

1996 will be a good year if men become more sympathetic to the oppression of women even as women become more understanding of the depression of men. In fact, 1996 will be a very good year if both sexes take more to heart Virginia Woolf’s plea that “we adopt an attitude of sympathy towards both sexes, given that life, for both of us, is arduous, difficult, and a perpetual struggle.”

1996 will be a good year if the elite (artists, intellectuals, and theologians) listen more to the poor and the less educated, if the intelligentsia take popular culture more seriously. Conversely, however, improvement here will only happen if, at the same time, the less educated and popular culture takes more seriously what is emanating from the circles of the elite. It was Aristotle who made the statement that a society is healthy when the elite listen to the common folk and the latter return that favour.

1996 will be a good year if liturgists who value so strongly prescribed ritual are more open to creative innovation, even as all liturgical congregations and celebrants respect the place and power of ritual and accept that the liturgy, since it transcends them and belongs to the whole community, is not theirs to do with whatever they like. How good our liturgies could be if we had the same respect for both ritual and creativity.

1996 will be a good year if those groups and individuals who value so highly political correctness would loosen up somewhat, regain their sense of humour, and not make a grandiose ideological drama out of everything. The value of this, however, is contingent upon those who are not hypersensitive becoming considerably more sensitive and less callous to the issues that cause all this hypersensitivity.

1996 will be a good year if the scientific community acknowledges more the importance of poetry, metaphor, and religion, even as artists, poets, and theologians learn the importance of mathematics.

1996 will also be a good year if newspaper columnists are less self-righteous and they live more what they preach.

“About the best way I can describe the transformation is to say that, now, I see colors!”

A man once shared this story with me: He had recently undergone a serious conversion. That conversion, as he described it, was not strictly speaking a religious one, nor, in a certain manner of speaking, even a moral one. It was an aesthetic conversion of sorts, though ultimately it was also profoundly religious and moral.

What had happened to him? He was in early middle-age, unmarried, and he had always been quite religious, fulfilling his religious duties with a vigor bordering on the scrupulous. Morally too, prior to the conversion he described, his life was essentially in order.

What he suffered from were two interrelated addictions, masturbation and alcohol. But even here, on the surface at least, these were relatively under control. They never, at least so it seemed, interfered with his work, his relationships, or his religious life. He was highly respected and no one who knew him would have guessed that he had a problem.

Except . . . except he knew he had one. As he matured, through his prayer life and through the respect that others entrusted him with, he began to see his own inconsistencies and he sought help.

His counsellor advised him to enter a separate 12-step program for each addiction, alcohol and sex. At first, he resisted, thinking: “I’m not an alcoholic! My sexual issues aren’t that serious!”

Eventually, however, he entered the programs and they, to use his own words, “wrought a great transformation” inside of him: “It wasn’t like I was that bad or anything before I entered those programs. My life was always essentially in order.

“So what happened to me? As best as I can put it, now that I go regularly to Alcoholics’ and Sexual Anonymous meetings, I see colors again. Before that, I wasn’t a bad person, but I was always so taken up with my own needs and yearnings that, most of the time, I wasn’t really seeing what was in front of me. Now, I see colors again and my life is rich in a way that it never was before.”

What kind of conversion is this? Is the challenge of the Gospel about seeing colors? I think so.

Abraham Maslow, after suffering a near fatal heart attack, went on to write: “One very important aspect of post-mortem life is that everything gets precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things—just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting.

“Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.” (Quoted by John Shea, Spirit Master, p. 99).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in his spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu, describes his own effort at letting things be piercingly important, I paraphrase: “It is a question of seeing. I long to see the fire that shimmers deep beneath things and deep within things. Oh, to see all things ablaze with God’s fire!”

Oh, to see color! I have a hunch that Jesus had precisely this in mind when he warned us: “Stay awake! Stay vigilant! You know not the time nor the hour!”

There are different ways to being awake, just as there are different ways to being vigilant.

Normally, we take Jesus’ words to stay awake and be vigilant as a more direct (and crass) religious and moral challenge: “Get your life in order because you don’t know when death will hit! Do the reconciliations you need to do! Wrap up your unfinished religious, moral, and relational business because death can catch you rather suddenly! Stay awake and vigilant—religiously and morally.”

There is truth and wisdom in that interpretation of things, but Jesus isn’t just talking about preparation for death, he is also talking about seeing colors while we are alive.

Like Maslow and Teilhard he is saying: “Be awake to the fire that is beneath and within things. Let things get precious and piercingly important—when you are still pre-mortem.

“Be awake to the beauty of babies, and flowers, and your family, and your friends, and your own health—before you are separated from them. Don’t be asleep while you are awake. Don’t be dead to life while you are living. Don’t be blind to miracle, especially to the miracle of your own life.

“Repent . . . and begin to see colors!”

There is a story told about St. Vincent de Paul which, while perhaps embellished by myth, needs nonetheless to be told and told and told again for its challenge is perennial. It runs something like this:

Vincent, whose life-effort, as we know, was directed to serving the poor, once gave his community the following instruction: “When the demands of service seem unfair to us, when we are exhausted and have to pull ourselves out of bed yet another time to do some act of service, we should do it gladly, without counting the cost and without self-pity, for if we persevere in serving the poor, persevere to the point of completely spending ourselves, perhaps someday the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive us.

“For it is more blessed to give than to receive . . . and it is also a lot easier!”

On the surface at least this is a curious comment. Why must the poor forgive us? What needs to be forgiven, especially if we are giving ourselves to them in service?

Our minds may not see the entire logic of his statement, but I suspect many of us, at the level of feeling, have a pretty good sense of what is at issue here. At a simple level, all of us know that there is a certain humiliation in needing to receive, just as there is a certain pride in being able to give.

What is worse than being too busy? Having nothing at all to do. What is more painful than having to give away most everything we own? Having nothing of our own to give away.

What is harder than being dragged out of bed to minister to someone in need?

Being the person who needs to drag someone else out of bed to minister to his or her needs. What is harder than being brought to our knees by the demands of those around us for our time and energy? Being on our knees begging someone else for his or her time and energy.

At one level it is easy to see why it is easier to give than to receive. But there is more.

There is divine power, literally, in being able to give. The one who gives gets to be God—or, at very least, to mediate God. That is not an overstatement. God is the source of all that is, the source of all gift. When we are in a position to give, we mediate that and feel that power, even if only unconsciously. There is a blessedness in that which, while ideally a great grace, can unfortunately easily be used to make the recipient feel inferior.

It is important to understand this, otherwise there is the perennial danger that we will use our gifts of service in a way that further demeans the poor. It is not easy to learn to give gifts in a way that does not shame the recipient.

But Vincent’s challenge goes further: He meant this too to be an antidote to self-pity. For anyone who is in a giving role—a parent, a priest, a minister, a teacher, a nurse, an advocate for justice, or even a politician—there is the constant temptation to fall into self-pity: “Look what I am doing! Nobody is doing anything for me! I am so tired! Is there no end to this? Am I the only one who cares? This is asking more of me than is fair! I have my own problems!”

It is easy, especially if one is tired and frustrated by lack of support, to lose heart, to begin to feel sorry for ourself, and to, eventually, feel oneself as victimized by those one is serving.

That is very common today. More and more, care-givers themselves are beginning to feel victimized by those to whom they are giving of themselves. Thus, psychologists have coined the term, “compassion burnout.”

Moreover, many good people are beginning to resent the demands of the poor—the welfare system, the push by various groups for their rights, the pressure of immigrants, the drain that the sick put on the energy and money of a society, the cost of repairing the damage done by youthful vandals, and so on.

Sadly, many of us are giving up and giving in, giving up on going the extra mile and giving in to the temptation to resign and take care of ourselves.

Given all this, Vincent de Paul’s little adage must be told and retold: If we do not pull ourselves out of our exhaustion and resignation and continue to serve the poor, they will not find it in their hearts to forgive us. So too we need to remember always that it is more blessed to give than to resign and take care of ourselves . . . and it’s also a lot easier!

Portraits of Vincent de Paul show him with a strong face, a warm face, a face that, everywhere, suggests a comfortable friendliness. He looks like a man you would want over for dinner. But if you had him over for dinner, you might want to make sure that your gift to him was indeed a real gift.

There is an ancient parable about prayer which is also a parable about liturgical prayer. One version of it runs something like this: Two liturgical committees once met to plan their respective Sunday liturgies:

At the meeting of the first committee, a prayer was offered which, below the more obvious words, went something like this: 

“We thank you, God, for gracing us as you have. We know good liturgy and we celebrate it well. Some of us have been to the best workshops in the country. Several of us have graduate degrees in liturgy. Ours is an inclusive liturgy. We are sensitive to gender, race, and justice. We have a homily, not a sermon. We never get devotions mixed up with the word of God. Our music is always well prepared and its themes actually match the readings. Our readers and servers have all taken the proper workshops and perform their ministries with dignity. We use the latest official hymnals, as approved by the national commission on liturgy. Nobody uses missalettes in our community – and nobody needs to, the word of God is properly proclaimed. No photocopied materials appear in our liturgies and we scrupulously respect the copyright on all the hymns we use. Our priest is a most sensitive man who always uses inclusive language, disdains taking upon himself any ecclesial power, and has an alb that was cut in Brugges. Nobody can fault anything in our aesthetics, our theology, our inclusivity, nor in our commitment to justice.

And we thank you especially, God, that we are not like St. Elmer’s Parish down the road. Their priest is a drunkard who hasn’t taken a theology course in 30 years and all the theology he knows is pre-Vatican II. He comes into church on Sunday mornings wearing an old soutane that has egg stains on the front. The parish prays the rosary before mass and mixes up Marian devotions with the prayers of the faithful. They are still singing hymns from thirty years ago and they do not use inclusive language. The preaching is terrible (when, indeed, there is any) and, just last Sunday, in place of the homily the priest read a letter from the Bishop suggesting that everyone should get more involved in Prolife activities. Every pew is littered with photocopied materials – old parish bulletins, announcements for parish bazaars, and hymns (for which they haven’t received copyright permission). The altar top resembles the workbench at the local garage. The PA system works very poorly. Their readers are badly trained and cannot pronounce many of the words. Nobody seems to care, however, since, during the readings, everyone is absorbed in their missalette. There is always a second collection (for some dubious devotional cause) and, not infrequently, someone is actually lighting vigil lights during the Eucharist.” 

But at St. Elmer’s parish a committee was also meeting, to plan the Sunday liturgy, except they weren’t doing any real liturgical planning at all. They just met and said the rosary and then, afterwards, their pastor, Father Ziggy Donker, who indeed has a drinking problem, stood up and said: “Let’s just say an extra prayer now so that on Sunday we can help the others to pray a little better.” After he had said that, he felt pretty sheepish, knowing of course that he had a drinking problem and he wasn’t really worthy to be offering the mass for the people. So, at his bidding, they all said three Hail Marys. Eleanor Murphy then insisted that they should say the litany of St. Joseph (“because it’s March, after all!”). Fr. Ziggy was tired and bored with the litany, but thought it best to endure it because he did feel bad about his drinking. When the litany was finished, he blessed them and they all went home. As he was walking back to the rectory, a little tear appeared on his cheek and Ziggy hoped that, at church on Sunday, he could concentrate properly so that the mass would be a little better for the people.

A strange parable? Unfair perhaps. Persons saying Hail Marys are often too given over to contempt. Alcoholism is no guarantee of humility; indeed, its effects are often the opposite. Priests who have not read a theology book or attended a workshop in 30 years are hardly an ideal to emulate and lack of aesthetics is not a virtue. Moreover, insensitivity to the issues and language of inclusivity is never a good thing, nor is mixing up devotions with the Eucharist and preaching about everything, except the word of God. But that is not the moral of this parable. What is?

Jesus cautioned against contempt, against thinking ourselves better than others. He had many things in mind, mind you, when he said that, but I suspect he was also cautioning us about how we feel about ourselves when we look at what is happening at St. Elmer’s parish just down the road from us.

Margaret Atwood once suggested that things which are painful and difficult to say should, nonetheless, be permitted the present tense. Painful truth, she submits, should not be washed or cauterized, but needs, instead, be said and said again, until it doesn’t need saying any more.

This is true, unfortunately, of social justice. One would think and hope that today there would be no question whatsoever that within Christian life and spirituality, social justice is not an optional item. It is a non-negotiable essential.

Sadly, that is not the case. For many of us, social justice is still seen as one specific and negotiable theology or as one optional part of spirituality. It is still seen as something we can take or leave. Scripture and Christian tradition, however, do not give us that option.

Already in the Book of Genesis, Scripture lays down a principle, which if taken seriously, demands social justice within every relationship we have. It tells us that creation reflects the glory of God and that all men and women are the glory of God.

This affirmation, understood correctly, is what social justice is all about: How do we protect the dignity of each woman and man.

The prophets flesh this out, with a clarity that leaves us no escape clause: For them, the quality of our faith depends upon the character of justice in the land. And according to them, you judge the character of justice in the land in the following way: By how a society treats three groups of persons: widows, orphans and foreigners.

They picked these groups because, at that time, these groups were the most vulnerable and least empowered among all the people. Perhaps less has changed than we suspect in the 2,800 years since the prophets threw out that challenge, given how widows, orphans and foreigners fare in today’s world.

Jesus takes up these ideas and deepens them. For him, we are not just like God, but, given the incarnation, God is also like us. This affords us, every single one of us, an incredible dignity. To protect that dignity requires social justice, namely structures, institutions and laws that promote and protect the dignity of every human person indiscriminately.

Moreover, Jesus deepens what the prophets said about widows, orphans and foreigners. For him, how we react in the face of their plight (and, by implication, how we react to the systems that help cause their plight) ultimately determines our salvation: “Whatsoever you do to the least of these (widows, orphans, foreigners) that you do unto me.”

Jesus identifies himself with the poor, with those on the edges, and tells us that whatever we do, good or bad, to them, we do to him, Furthermore, this is not just true for how our private lives, our personal sin or virtue, touch the poor, but also for how the systems (all the social, economic, ecclesial things we take part in) touch the orphan, the widow and the alien as well.

What we, or our systems, do to them, we do to Christ.

The common conception is that the church picked up this motif, in its social encyclicals, only about 100 years ago and is, only now, insisting on social justice. That is too simplistic. The church has always insisted on social justice. That insistence has simply taken on various forms:

The church has always upheld the dignity and sacredness of each human person and it has always affirmed (at least in theory if not in practice) that each person must therefore have personal access to those freedoms, goods and protections which can ensure that dignity. It also rightly insisted that these rights all have corresponding responsibilities.

Further, it also recognized that these rights and responsibilities play themselves out within a concrete community. It then taught that there are three essential levels to this community: family, nation and humanity.

Prior to its social encyclicals, the church focused much of its social teaching upon the first of these levels, the family. Then, from the late 19^th century until the more recent social encyclicals, the focus was on the issues created by the industrial revolution, wages, unions and governmental responsibilities to the poor.

Today, its social teachings focus more on the third level, humanity and the problems of world peace, gender, race and the like. In this development we see a consistent line and a consistent emphasis on one of the great, non-optional, imperatives of the Gospel – social justice.