On the Tension Between Christ’s Demand for Perfection and Mercy

This is what the dogmatic perfectionists on social media (whether right wing obsessives about a few pelvic issues or left wing utopian puritans) don’t ever seem to get and the Church’s pastoral tradition does.

The challenge Jesus set himself and us is nothing less than the deification of an entire species of fallen predators, creatures who made themselves so depraved that they only thing they could think to do when they met the sinless Son of God was torture him to death and who keep doing that over and over whenever they meet goodness that is weaker than themselves. The paradox of the progress of the gospel in leavening our species is that it has raised our expectations far more quickly than it has raised our willingness to live out those expectations. So the past few centuries have seen repeated attempts to immanentize the eschaton and create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth through law, force, fear, blood and iron. The MAGA Cult is but the latest iteration of that. And like all secular messianic parodies of the gospel, it is straight from Hell.

676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatalogical judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.578 (2425)

677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.581 (1340; 2853)

Meanwhile, the Church’s approach (especially in the confessional) like the Spirit’s approach in taking his own sweet time in bringing humanity from a bunch of Bronze Age savages to becoming creatures capable of amazing acts of self-sacrificial love and participation in the divine nature has always been patience with our incredible weakness and slowness to get a freaking clue. We see this constantly with Jesus’ own teaching of his disciples. On the one hand, he calls them to dizzying heights (“Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect”) while constantly enduring and forgiving their dimwitted density and their completely predictable cowardice and even treachery.

All of us are in that boat. And we will never escape it because that is the species Jesus committed himself to save whether we believe it or not and whether we like it or not. We are the raw material of the Church that Jesus has created and so we will always feel both the Spirit’s demand that we be better than we are and have to put up with the Spirit’s demand that we endure and have patient mercy on ourselves and everybody around us when we and they fail.