Many people criticize Christianity because they think it is an empty list of do’s and don’ts. They resent the Church’s moral standard because they think it limits personal freedom. They think that the Church’s moral teaching comes from an irrational thirst for power, domination and control. This is entirely false.

The real reason behind the Church’s moral teaching is explained by

St Paul in this weekends Second Reading at Mass. He says we Christians strive to live according to a demanding moral standard because we have come to know and believe in Jesus Christ.

• We have experienced His love, power, forgiveness, and grace.

That experience has shown us what the universe really looks like: Without Jesus, human life lacks meaning. It has no purpose and no future. No reason to be. It is a chasing after the wind, vanity of vanities, as the writer of Ecclesiastes says so clearly. Because without Jesus Christ, everything we do here on earth would simply come to an end when we die. It would have no lasting value, like the mark your finger leaves in the water when you dip it into the sea.

But Jesus came to earth, suffered and died for our sins, rose from the dead, and ascended back into heaven, in order to give us a chance at lasting value, eternal worth and place. Through faith in Christ, our lives are now plugged into eternity, “hidden with Christ in God”, as St Paul puts it. Everything we do can now be linked to salvation history. Before Christ, we were shipwrecked on a desert island, with no escape, dying. Life was vanity. But Jesus Christ came to rescue us, and as long as we cling to the wood of His Cross, we can rest assured that He will bring us home to His glorious, everlasting Kingdom.

That’s why we are encouraged to strive to avoid anything that could possibly separate us from Jesus, anything that could break our friendship with Him by violating His command to love God and love our neighbour: impurity, greed, dishonesty – every form of self-centeredness, as St Paul points out.

Our faith in Christ has consequences for our life. It has given us a friendship that will last into eternity – if we let it. When St Paul makes his list of sins that put our friendship with Jesus in danger, he puts a spotlight on one particular type of self-centeredness, as if to say that we need to pay special attention to it.

He writes, “Stop lying to one another, since you have taken off the old self with all its practices.” We are being reminded today that lying, deceiving, and manipulating the truth are Sins. With a capital ‘S’! They unravel God’s plan for human society and endanger our friendship with Jesus.

God, the author of all truth, has given us the capacity to know and communicate the truth, so that we can build up healthy relationships. When we abuse this gift, obscuring the truth for selfish reasons, we make ourselves enemies of God and friends of the Devil, whom Jesus called “the father of lies”.

And, at times, we all do it. We have learned our communication skills partly from a media culture, full of expert spin doctors who don’t hesitate to put a questionable spin on what they say or don’t say in order to further their agendas. Advertisers do it, reporters do it, screenwriters do it, and, sometimes, we do it. We put spin on the reports we make at work or school, on the explanation we give to our loved ones, on the permission we ask for from our parents.

There’s so much spin going around that many people have become permanently dizzy and concluded that truth doesn’t even exist.

Jesus doesn’t want us to go through life being dizzy. He wants us to see clearly, so that we can love deeply and live truly as His family members, being like Him.

Let’s renew our friendship with Jesus and, with the strength He supplies in the Blessed Sacrament at Mass, let’s confidently embrace once again the consequences of that friendship, which includes being Warriors of Truth, not Mercenaries of Spin.      

Fr David Jones OLW