NO STRANGE GODS

JUNE 14, 2008

We are about to conclude our Confirmation season. It has been exciting and enjoyable to visit thirty-one of our parishes to invoke the grace of the Holy Spirit on the lives our young parishioners. The parishes I did not visit this year were served by the dean of each area; next year, I look forward to visiting them for Confirmation.

This year, in my homily to the young Catholics being confirmed, I spoke of several of the Ten Commandments and explained how they are applicable today, just as they were when God first gave them to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Several of the parents asked me to repeat my reflections in this weekly column. I will do so over the summer months.

Today, let us consider the First Commandment: “I am the Lord your God, you shall not have strange gods before me.” To place this into context, let us recall how God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. It was on Mt. Sinai; God summoned Moses to the top of the mountain, where He conversed with Moses for forty days and forty nights. During this time Moses received the Tablets of the Law from the Almighty.

Moses came down from the mountain, joyful that God had given guidance for His chosen people and eager to share the good news with them. As he approached the foot of the mountain, Moses heard revelry and merrymaking. To his astonishment, he saw that they were worshipping a golden calf. They were breaking the very first of God’s commands. He became infuriated, took the Tablets and hurled them to the rocky ground; they were shattered into a thousand pieces and later God would give Moses a replica of the Commandments etched in stone.

We ask ourselves, how does this first commandment apply to us? We would not even think of building a golden calf that we might adore. It is true that in our Catholic churches we have images of Christ and of the saints, but we do not worship them; they are simply reminders of the person or the mystery that they represent. For example, the crucifix reminds us of the mystery of redemption, of God’s love for us, a love so great that he gave His only Son to die on the Cross in order to save us from sin and death. We do not worship the crucifix or the statues of Mary and the saints. We know that there is only one God and three divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Him only do we worship and Him only do we serve.

God has given the human being tremendous intellectual powers, so much so that the technological advances we have achieved motivate us to seek greater knowledge and attain even greater progress. Let us never forget that we are, and will always be, dependent on God. Let us not allow the serpent of pride to make us feel, as did Eve, that we can “be like gods who know what is good and what is bad" (Gen 3:5).

One of the areas of experimentation in which we may easily be tempted to think that we are like gods, is in the field of genetics. The efforts to “create” test tube babies without the active participation of a man and a woman in cooperation with God tend to lead us in this direction. The divine plan for creation involves the participation of a woman and a man, duly married, and God. The man and the woman together, by an act of conjugal love, provide the body and God provides the soul.

The same is true when we attempt to clone a human being or when we study a sonogram, to determine a developing child's qualities and deficiencies, and then modify DNA in order to produce a child that looks like us. We learned from our early catechetical training that the human person is created in the image and likeness of God. When we do these types of actions, we tend to want to create a child in our own image and likeness. On the other hand, when we discover deficiencies in the child that is in the mother's womb, we are advised to abort the child. It is God who gives life and only God can take it away.

Through actions such as these, we make ourselves the false god that replaces the golden calf. What do you think is worse: to craft a golden calf that one might worship or to make oneself a god with power over life and death?
My brothers and sisters, let us be the faithful people that God wanted his chosen people of the Hebrew Scriptures to be. Let us be the people of God that the Second Vatican Council called us to be. Let us be faithful to God the Father who has made us in His own image, let us be faithful to God the Son who came to save us from the effects of sin. Let us pray to the Holy Spirit to empower us to recognize the one true God in all that we do.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 17-Jun-2008 8:37 sitemap