The sin of doing nothing!

Mat 11:20-24

20 Next Jesus let fly on the cities where he had worked the hardest but whose people had responded the least, shrugging their shoulders and going their own way. 21 "Doom to you, Chorazin! Doom, Bethsaida! If Tyre and Sidon had seen half of the powerful miracles you have seen, they would have been on their knees in a minute. 22 At Judgment Day they'll get off easy compared to you. 23 And Capernaum! With all your peacock strutting, you are going to end up in the abyss. If the people of Sodom had had your chances, the city would still be around. 24 At Judgment Day they'll get off easy compared to you."

Food for thought!

When John came to the end of his gospel, he wrote a sentence in which he indicated how impossible it was ever to write a complete account of the life of Jesus: "But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (Jn.21:25). Today's gospel is one of the proofs of that saying.

There is no record in the gospels of the work that Jesus did, and of the wonders he performed in Chorazin and Bethsaida, and yet they must have been amongst his greatest. A passage like this shows us how little we know of Jesus; it shows us, and we must always remember it, that in the gospels we have only the barest selection of Jesus' works. The things we do not know about Jesus far outnumber the things we do know.

What then was the sin of Chorazin, of Bethsaida, of Capernaum, the sin which was worse than the sin of Tyre and Sidon, and of Sodom and Gomorrah? It must have been very serious for again and again Tyre and Sidon are denounced for their wickedness (Isa.23; Jer.25:22; Jer.47:4; Eze.26:3-7; Eze.28:12-22), and Sodom and Gomorrah were and are a byword for iniquity.

It was the sin of indifference. These cities did not attack Jesus Christ; they did not drive him from their gates; they did not seek to crucify him; they simply disregarded him. Neglect can kill as much as persecution can.

Here we have the modern situation in so many countries, families and lives today. There is no hostility to Christianity; there is no desire to destroy it; there is blank indifference. Christ is relegated to the ranks of those who do not matter. Indifference, too, is a sin, and the worst of all, for indifference kills. It does not burn a religion to death; it freezes it to death. It does not behead it; it slowly suffocates the life out of it.

It is also a sin to do nothing. There are sins of action, sins of deed; but there is also a sin of inaction, as we say in Mass when we confess our sins ... sins of omission. Sin is not only doing evil; sin is also not doing good, when we could. Many of us will be condemned, not for doing bad things, but for not doing good things to others. The sin of Chorazin, of Bethsaida, and of Capernaum was the sin of doing nothing. Whenever we stay indifferent, whenever we refrain from doing good to others, when we can, we sin.

This gospel further reminds us that to have heard God's word is a great responsibility. Everyone will be judged according to what he has had the chance to know; the little or the more we know is always enough to either save us or condemn us. We allow things in a child we condemn in an adult; we forgive things in a mad person we punish in a normal man. Responsibility is the other side of privilege. And privilege is the other side of responsibility. Whatever we have been given in this life, both spiritual and material, is both a gift and a responsibility. In other words, God has equipped each one of us for a task; we are custom-built for something. We are what we are, we are where we are for a purpose. If someone else had been given half the chances given us, " they'd have been on their knees long ago, repenting and crying for mercy."