THE UNTEACHABLE HUMAN NATURE AND GRACE

FRIDAY, SEVENTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

Reflection from Friar Nicholas Okeke, OP 

James 5:9-12; Ps 103:1-4,8-9,11-12; Mk 10:1-12

Dealing with our unteachable human Nature

From our reflections on the instructions of our Lord this week, what comes to the fore is the difficulty of handling our fallen human nature. The most outstanding reference to this comes from the Lord’s teaching in the gospel passage of yesterday, when he said that everyone will be salted by fire. How did our human nature lose its savour? The answer to the question is not farfetched, for we started the week reading the story of the fall of our human nature in the book of Genesis. The fall of human nature through Adam and Eve essentially means that the evil one planted his seed of disobedience and sin in our nature. Subsequently, each of us experiences the working of the law of sin within our members. The tendency to seek self in everything is the effect of the principle of sin in each of us. Our obsession with self is the cause of our difficulty in submitting our will to God in faith. God made us for himself, but the fall shattered our connection with God and left us linked to the principle of disobedience that deceives our nature with the lie: ‘You will be like God.’ 

This is the cause of our difficulty in keeping the commandments of God and living in harmony with each other. By deceiving Adam and Eve with the lie of being like gods, he sowed the sinful desire in our nature which had already destroyed his angelic nature. The difficult process of uprooting this sinful root in each of us is what is meant by salting by fire. We see the effect of the sinful root in the discussion on marriage and divorce between our Lord and the Pharisees in the gospel. “Is it against the law for a man to divorce his wife?’ They were testing him. He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you? ‘Moses allowed us’ they said ‘to draw up a writ of dismissal and so to divorce.’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘It is because you were so unteachable that he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.” Here is an instance where God altered his will and allowed Moses to give the people a commandment that was not totally in conformity with the will of God, but to accommodate the stubbornness coming from our fallen nature. Our Lord Jesus withdrew that accommodation made when grace was not available. Since grace is now given in Christ Jesus, human nature must now be renewed in the image of the Son. This is why everyone must be salted with fire. 

In the first reading, St. James admonished us to exercise patience. The virtue of patience is necessary for the purification work God is doing individually in our nature through grace. “For your example, brothers, in submitting with patience, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord; remember it is those who had endurance that we say are the blessed ones.” Our faith in God is purified by our submitting to the fire by which he salts our sinful nature to bring about our death and renewal. The same fire of the Holy Spirit puts to death our old nature and brings about our new birth in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. This involves a singlehearted commitment to the Lord in every situation. This commitment to the Lord is expressed in our fidelity in marriage and faithfulness in discharging our duty to each other, children, relatives, colleagues, friends, the Church, and society. This faithfulness to God is born of solid daily prayer commitment, through which we learn to hold unto God and live in him and through his grace. God purifies and transforms our inner self through the Holy Spirit that he has sent into our hearts to be like his Son in truth and spirit. We must cease to live by the unteachable nature by submitting it to death daily and draw our lives from the Holy Spirit he has given us to abide with us forever. 

Let us pray: Grant us, Lord, to understand the need we have of your grace and the Presence of the Holy Spirit within us, that we may patiently submit to the purification which is accomplished in us for our salvation.