After my mom died, I had this immediate weird thought that seemed strange even to myself, my thought was this: “I want to be better.” My mom’s death made me want to be better, to live a better life, and it wasn’t like I was living a bad life or anything, I just knew I could improve in some ways.
As I have reflected on that, I feel there are two main reasons, first is probably the obvious one, I love my mom and I want to be with her in heaven, so I want to be better in order to enter heaven and see her again. I don’t want to mess that reunion up!
Second, it used to be when I sinned - when I didn’t live as good as I could and knew I could improve - it was usually not in front of her, like I was here in Dubuque and she was in Tama where she couldn’t see what I was doing, like when I went to three graduation parties in an evening and ate way too much food and was almost sick because of it, that’s gluttony, right?
Well she couldn’t see it, but now that my mom’s soul was detached from her earthly body and was a spirit, she can see what I am doing, in what ways I am sinning, and I just didn’t want to disappoint my mom like that. That made me want to be better as well. Plus I could hear her voice, “do you really need that third piece of cake?”
As I have reflected, these are both fear based, fear of not going to heaven, fear of disappointing my mom, and this is the fear that Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel.
Today's gospel is at the end of Jesus’ speech to his first missionary disciples.
They are afraid of what they will encounter when they go out into the world, they have to pivot from whispering about Jesus in private to proclaiming Him publicly on the rooftops, and they knew it could get them killed like John the Baptist. Jesus tells them: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” There are 365 variations of “be not afraid” in the bible, but here is an instance where God says to “be afraid.”
Now I’ve always taken this line “be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” to mean be afraid of Satan, which it could be, but other parts of scripture seem to indicate this is a fear of God, such as Isaiah 8:13 which says, “But the Lord of hosts, Him you shall regard as holy; let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread.” (Revised Standard Version)
Fear of the Lord is a rational fear, unlike so many of our irrational fears, it is rational to fear losing our souls. In other words, not that you should be afraid of God to where you can’t have a relationship with Him or you think He is a tyrant, what Isaiah is talking about here is a rational awe, a rational fear of offending God, a fear of sinning against the righteous and holy God, such that you would be separated from Him, that you would break the covenant with Him, that you would break your relationship with Him.
It is much like this fear I have about not going to heaven or disappointing my mom - I’m not afraid of her, I just love her so much that I am afraid of disappointing her and I want to do better. A love that is so deep that it fears disappointing the other.
This is what Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel. Jesus wants us to understand this, so immediately after this statement He starts talking about how God cares for the sparrows and says “do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” See, our God really loves us, so much so that He gives us free will to transgress against Him through sin, but He always welcomes us back when we acknowledge Him.
And it is tempting to think, when something bad happens to us, we might have doubts and wonder “Why did God let this happen to me? Has he abandoned me?” But the reality is, no matter what happens in our lives, whether someone persecutes us or we suffer in some way, God is with us. Jeremiah was a man of suffering and He spoke of this in our first reading saying, “But the LORD is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph.”