Although you may be justified to react to another person’s bad behavior by having them face the consequences, it may not always be an effective response. In this edition of By Your Life, we discuss how to respond to others who have done us wrong, knowing when to pick our battles, and avoiding the temptation to react with our own bad behavior.

Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/2019/19_04_14.mp3

Palm Sunday – April 14, 2019

Welcome to the fifty-fifth episode of By Your Life. Thank you for joining me. If you haven’t already, please subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on the right side of this page so I can send you notifications when each new episode is posted. And please forward to a friend, if you think they would benefit from By Your Life.

My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.

In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. I don’t even know how to begin to select individual passages from the Scripture to reflect upon. Everything in Jesus’ life was a preamble to the events of the Last Supper, his Passion, Death, and of course, Resurrection. But we don’t get to ponder the Resurrection just yet. This week we are focused on the man, Jesus, who suffered as any human would suffer the agony of death by crucifixion. Despite this, he placed himself in his Father’s hands and abandoned himself to the Father’s will. The Father didn’t take away what Christ had to endure but strengthened him to face his Passion. Christ serves as a reminder that we should turn to prayer whenever we experience fear or pain and submit ourselves completely to God’s will, who will never fail in strengthening and consoling us.

So, acknowledging that I can never come close to doing an adequate job of reflecting on the readings that are the pinnacle of our salvation history and core to our lives as Christians, I will nevertheless pick out a few things that I think we can use as we head to work this week. The first is how we respond to others who have done us wrong, and the second is how we respond to our own sinfulness.

Unfortunately, there are times in our lives when we, through no fault of our own, are the victims of someone else’s wrong action. It may be something as little as being cut off in traffic or rear-ended, or more serious like being robbed or physically attacked. For the person who did one of these things to you, their actions define who they are. How you deal with it, defines who you are.

I recently taught a class on Ethics and Values-Centered Leadership for a group of county employees. We were talking about doing the “right” thing and how it isn’t always black and white. What counts as moral, or right, often depends on the circumstances, but not always.

I showed the group a picture of a dog pooping and asked if that was right or wrong. Of course, if you are the dog, there is nothing wrong with it. But if it was your dog, the answer to “Is this right or wrong?” depends on whether it was your yard or if it wasn’t, it depends on whether you picked up after him. Then I asked, “Let’s say, your neighbor allows his dog to poop in your yard and doesn’t pick it up. Is that right or wrong?” The group agreed that would be wrong. So, the next question was, “What is the right thing for you to do in response?”

Scripture, Matthew Chapter 18, tells us what the right thing is.

“If your brother sins [against you], go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.” (Mt 18:15-17)

So, let’s say you talk to your neighbor about it and he tells you to “go pound sand.” He doesn’t care and if you don’t like it, you can move. The next step is to talk to your homeowner’s association and see if they can help you convince the neighbor to comply with the HOA regulations, county laws, and possibly just be a more considerate neighbor.

So, your neighbor says he’ll stop, but he doesn’t, and his dog continues to poop in your yard, and now you step in it. Now what? You might feel like picking up that poop and putting it on your neighbor’s doorstep, so he can step in it and get a taste of his own medicine. While that might temporarily feel like justice, it is not likely to be very effective. That is, if your goal is to get the neighbor to stop allowing his dog to poop in your yard without picking it up, provoking him further may not be helpful. It also is not what our Lord taught us. Remember your neighbor’s behavior defines who he is. How you respond, defines who you are.  As Potter Stewart, former Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court said, “Ethics is the difference between what you have a right to do, and what is right to do.”

To know what is right to do, let’s turn to Scripture. Our readings this Sunday described how Jesus withstood unbelievable amounts of physical and verbal abuse. He endured spitting, flogging, torture, and ultimately crucifixion, all the while being verbally insulted and mocked. Through most of it, he remained silent. When he spoke, it was not to fight back. Rather, he spoke to further his mission.

In last week’s episode, I talked about how “Mission is King.” For Jesus, the mission was king. Everyone wanted to make him the king, but he rejected that. When Pilate said to him, “‘Then you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.’” (Jn 18:37) The mission was king, and it directed everything he said and did in his life. His mission was “not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me,” John 6:38 and “to seek and to save what was lost.” (Lk 19:10)

So, as he’s being crucified, our Lord said, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34) His mission was to save what was lost. It drove everything he said and did on this earth. So, in the midst of being physically and verbally battered, his response was to pray to the Father for those who persecuted him.

We are called to do the same. I often—very often—recall this prayer when I encounter unbelievably bad behavior on the part of another person, including the neighbor who lets his dog run free to poop wherever and then starts swearing at me when I ask him to keep him on a leash so he can clean up after him. (Yes, the example I used with my class was near and dear to my heart.) “Father forgive him, for he knows not what he does.”

At work, it is also good to forgive in this fashion, but we can’t excuse bad behavior and just let it go. A boss will lose respect from the rest of the team when she/he allows inappropriate behavior to continue, so, more must be done than just forgive. An effective leader will get beneath the symptom (the bad behavior), understand, and help the individual solve the problem. But in the end, you can’t change someone else’s behavior. Only they can. As Jesus said, once you’ve done everything you can, “If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.” (Mt 18:17)

So, when responding to others who have done us wrong, we need to remember to not behave badly as well by reacting to their behavior. How they behave reflects on them and how we respond reflects on us. We cannot allow their bad behavior to become an excuse for our own.

Which leads me to the second point that stood out to me in this week’s readings: how we respond to our own sinfulness. We have a choice to be like the first thief or the second, the soldiers who divided up His clothing, or the centurion, like Judas or Peter.

A couple of years ago, our parish hosted Cross and Light to celebrate the completion of our new church building. Cross and Light is an extraordinary musical and video experience of Christ’s Passion, Resurrection, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. One of the many songs that left a lasting impression on me was sung by the actor playing Judas and is called “Three Years.” The lyrics, in part, are as follows:

JESUS! THREE YEARS, HAS IT ALL BEEN A LIE?

JESUS! IF YOU’RE THE MESSIAH, THEN SHOW US, RISE UP AND BE KING,

BUT IF YOU’RE A LIAR, I’LL KNOW IT AND HAVE NO REGRETS FOR THE BRIBE EXPOSES YOUR LIES.

NO MORE TALKING OF PEACE, PRAYING TO GOD, HEALING THE SICK. JESUS, STOP WASTING MY TIME! ARE YOU THE MESSIAH OR NOT?

After watching this performance, for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for Judas. I could empathize with him. He thought he was doing the right thing taking matters into his own hands in order to force God’s hand. I felt sorry for him. He took his own life, never knowing God’s love and mercy is for us all.

Peter thought he could go it alone. His denial resulted because he thought that he himself, by his own efforts, could withstand the effects of the devil. Even though it was foretold and he pledged, “Lord, I am prepared to go to prison and to die with you,” (Lk 22:33), he didn’t stay up and pray with Jesus in the Garden when Jesus said, “Pray that you may not undergo the test.” (Lk 22:40) But, unlike Judas, when he realized what he had done by denying Christ, he wept. And, as Jesus had said to him, “I have prayed that your own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers,” (Lk 22:32), he did grow in strength and courage after experiencing profound sorrow and repentance for his triple denial.

We too become stronger when we accept responsibility for what we do wrong. Whether we simply make a mistake and we learn from it and so prevent it from happening again, or more seriously when we sin, and we repent, we grow in knowledge, understanding, and in faith.

So, as I reflected on both how to respond to others who have done us wrong, and how to respond to our own sinfulness, I found the same answer—prayer. We, in our human weakness, cannot address either of these on our own. Alone, we don’t have the capacity to fight Satan’s lure. “Pray that you may not undergo the test.” (Lk 22:40) We don’t have the capacity to withstand persecution on our own. Pray “that your own faith may not fail.” (Lk 22:32) We do not have the capacity to forgive others by ourselves. We need to pray. Pray, recognizing, as the Prophet Isaiah did in the first reading, “The Lord GOD is my help.” (Is 50:7) Only through a serious commitment to daily prayer can we overcome the temptation to reject the Cross. And when we fail, prayer helps us to acknowledge our sin and prayer helps us to return to the Father.

This week, how will you use this Sunday’s Scripture to guide you when you face challenges, when you are tempted, or when you are persecuted or provoked? I will be praying with the Prophet Isaiah from the first reading: “The Lord GOD has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to answer the weary a word that will waken them.” (Is 50:4) Perhaps my well-trained tongue will be given the right words for my neighbor and he’ll miraculously see the light and become more considerate. Most likely, my well-trained tongue will stay silent behind my closed-lipped smile. I have given this to God. I have forgiven my neighbor for he can’t possibly “know” what he’s doing. Considering the Lord’s Passion and in the scheme of eternity, it is rather silly for me to hold onto a bunch of dog poop instead of embracing the Cross.

Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to strengthen us in the face of temptation and to fill us with his love so that we might also forgive them for they know not what they do.

May God bless you abundantly this Holy Week and may you glorify the Lord by your life. Amen.

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