In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning, beloved in the Lord, I want to share with you three theses. It comes from my scholastic background, not that I was ever a student, but I did study sometimes. First thesis: God is generous; second: man is free; and third: there’s a problem. The first two will come easy; the third one…

First, God is generous. God is generous. Look at that adjective. “Generous” comes from the Latin genus which means birth or family. Thus we speak of generations: birth or family. You speak of a genus in biological distinctions: families. Things are said to be generic if they refer to a genus. This adjective, “generous,” evokes the giving of life, even the establishment of family. “Generous” in English, the oldest meaning is high born: people of nobility. Then it becomes a spiritual quality. “Generous” is a spiritual character. I think we still mean something like that, don’t we? A generous spirit. It’s something actually in the genes.

What is a generous person? Here’s the definition. A generous person is someone who confers life by extending goodness. Now in defining it this way, I’m following the lead of St. Augustine, the greatest thinker to live West of the Adriatic, and that goes for all time—West of the Adriatic and south of the Mediterranean. St. Augustine says of the good—what in Greek is the kalon, a word of Plato and Aristotle, the kalon, or in Hebrew the tov. God saw the light, saw the or, and saw that ke tov; saw that it was good. Here’s what Augustine says: Bonum diffisivum sui. The good is diffusive of itself. Generous: good diffusive of itself; it diffuses itself.

The generosity of God is the theme of today’s gospel, isn’t it? If we love our enemies, as our Messiah, our teacher, our law-giver—if we are merciful and giving, we will be sons of the Most High, for he is generous. Now, come to the Greek word that corresponds: chrestos. And that’s what he says: “You will be sons of the Most High hoti aftos chrestos; as he is generous.” There’s a play on the word chrestos. It’s one letter different from christos. Christos, chrestos; the Messiah, generous. We’re told to model ourselves on the Most High and on his Anointed One.

Now generosity carries the quality of freedom. Indeed, the two ideas are inseparable. A generous act is always a freely chosen act. It is the act of free choice. If it’s not free, you can’t really speak of generosity, can you? A generous deed comes from a generous heart. When God makes us, he does so freely. There is no need. We are the embodiments of his own generosity. That’s how we should look at human beings: as the embodiments of God’s generosity.

And our own freedom is an expression of God’s generosity. Notice how we tied these two ideas together. I defy anyone logically ever to separate them, logically or empirically ever to separate them: generosity and freedom—which brings me to point two.

Man is free. Now, I know that a lot of people in this world don’t believe that now, although the freedom of human beings—freedom to make choice—is the basis of our entire judicial system. We assume that, but in fact lots of behavioral scientists do not believe it; they believe we are simply instinctive people who are deluded by the idea that we’re free. I remember years ago, back in the ‘60s, when I was teaching in college, people were reading a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity. One of the most important books I’ve ever read because it was the clearest formulation of an insane idea. One thing about insane ideas: you want them clearly formulated.

We Bible people believe that the human being is the only creature on earth endowed with freedom of will. No other animal has this capacity.

Let me just contrast us with the animals that are closest to us, the animals that tend to mean the most to us: our cats, our dogs, our parakeets, our goldfish, our bunny rabbits, our gerbils. Did I miss any? Iguanas! [Laughter] I knew somebody was going to get a lizard in there somewhere. Now, these animals have lived in our company for thousands of years. They’re part of our civilization. The three cats that live in our house know more about human beings than they do about cats. They’re somewhat familiar with human history; they’re not at all familiar with cat history.

But in spite of having lived as the constant companions of human beings, cats and dogs and parakeets, to say nothing of goldfish, have never picked up on this quality of freedom, because freedom is inseparable from the conscious act of thought and the ability to reflect on one’s active thought. That’s the thing that makes us—psychologically, it’s the thing that makes us free, that we can reflect on our act of thought and do something called change our minds, which of course is the whole meaning of metanoia, isn’t it? To change your mind. The changing of the nous, the changing of the interior of a man.

Now, our animals can certainly be generous. This is especially true of dogs. Cats… maybe, although I’ve seen some awfully generous cats. Was it last year or the year before, they had this wonderful thing that was running on Facebook and over the internet; they put it on the news, of the little boy who’s being attacked by a dog on his little tricycle, and the cat came down and made mincemeat of that dog. It was really quite impressive. I looked at my cats with a new affection. [Laughter]

You see, these animals can be generous, but their generosity is entirely instinctive; it’s completely instinctive, because they don’t make free decisions. They do not weigh options. I’ve stood down there by the hour and tried to preach the Gospel to the goldfish in our pond in the back—the koi: I didn’t want to insult the fish. Even though they gather in what’s called a school, they don’t seem to learn anything. They’re loyal to us. It is, of course, admirable, but it is not freely chosen.

Why did God not make animals free? Back when I was teaching college, right before I got here, I seemed to be having a perpetual feud with the people in the psychology department, who somehow or other believed that animals could do all these things. No one would love that more than myself! The idea of a thinking animal! A dog who would talk back to me, about dog history and dog philosophy: I would love that! This isn’t a bias in my part; I love stories about talking animals. I love stories like the Redwall series, for example, or Narnia. But we recognize that that just doesn’t work.

Why did God not make them free? Because they are called to be only what they are. He makes them what they are and doesn’t call them to be anything else. They were not created for any other purpose than to be what they are. But with respect to us human beings, the entire essence of freedom is rooted in our call to become something else. Got that? That’s why we have freedom, so that we can choose to become something else. God did not create us simply to be human beings; he created us in order to become children of the Most High. God created us, wrote St. Gregory the Theologian, for theosis, for participation in his own life. God made us for eternal loving union with himself. He called us to become his children.

Probably the most important text in my own time growing up as a child was a very simple text called the Baltimore Catechism. I think there’s several of you, if I ask you the first question in the Baltimore Catechism right now, you would be able to give the answer. First question in the Baltimore Catechism—first question, very existential, extremely existential: “Who made me?” We start with “me.” Who made me, Dennis? [God.] God made me! God made me! And why did God make me? God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next. I learned that as a little tiny kid! That’s my purpose in life. God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next. God did not make me to pursue my own interests. God did not make me so that I might strive for some sort of psychological fulfillment. God made me for one purpose only: to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.

If a child is taught that, it transforms his entire mind. He gets that rooted down in his DNA, he’s going to be a different human being. You see, the freedom of human beings is given to serve the destiny of human beings. We are made free in order that we might choose God. Our freedom exists for purpose. See, freedom is not simply indeterminacy. We’re not free in the sense we would use, for example, freedom in the sense of particle physics or something of this sort. No, we’re not free in that way. That’s just stuff that happens.

Man’s inherent freedom must never be separated from man’s vocation to become a child of God, what the Fathers of the Church call theosis: participation in the divine life. Now in the case of man—and here I’m following very closely to the thought of St. Gregory the Theologian—freedom must be worked out in history. In this respect, we’re different from the angels. The angels are created free, and they made one decision, yes or no. They made one decision, and that’s why there are fallen angels.

Human beings know. Human beings were created to work out their destiny through this experience of history. St. Gregory the Theologian says again that Adam and Eve were to grow up in the garden. We sort of picture—when we do picture it, we tend to picture Adam and Eve in the garden as adults. The Fathers did not; they pictured them as children, growing. In fact, Gregory is pretty eloquent on this point. Adam and Eve were to grow up in the garden. Through the experience of human life, they were to learn how to love; how to love God and to become his children. According to Genesis 3, they failed. Called to become godly through obedience, they chose to take the shortcut through disobedience. “If you eat this, you will become as God.” To become as God was exactly what he intended all along. They took a shortcut. I’ve taken a lot of shortcuts in my life and almost never ended up where I was going to. They chose disobedience, and there’s a problem. And that brings us to point three: there is a problem.

Let me being our reflections on this point with a little illustration. It might not seem to be germane in the moment, but give it a little moment to perk in your mind. The illustration I give is from the third of the twelve trials of Nazi criminals conducted by American military courts at Nuremberg after World War II. Most folks know about the great Nuremberg trial, the international tribunal; most folks know about that, the great trial. A lot of people don’t know about the twelve subsequent trials which were held in the American sector entirely by American courts. These later trials are known as the subsequent Nuremberg trials. These were completely American enterprises, but also held at Nuremberg.

The third of these twelve trials was conducted from March 5 to December 4, 1947. This third trial is known as the Judges’ Trial because it considered the cases of the Nazi jurists, judges, lawyers accused of perverting justice by serving the iniquitous programs of the Nazi regime, including war crimes, torture, the plunder of private property, mass murder, and what would be generically called crimes against humanity.

Want to know more about this trial? How many of you get Netflix? Hardly anybody? This is pathetic! [Laughter] Don’t tell me you’re watching the reruns of Game of Thrones. I mean, get something decent in your heads! Get this movie; somehow get this movie, called Justice at Nuremberg. At this point I feel like I should probably turn the sermon over to Joseph Letendre, I suspect, because he’s our great movie critic, who could actually give us a critique of this movie! This movie was made in 1961, about the third of the Nuremberg subsequent trials. In the cast of this movie was Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Mongtomery Clift, William Shatner, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland. Now am I getting your interest? She did not sing “Over the Rainbow” in this film.

This trial, which lasted nine months, found some of the defendants guilty. These received hefty prison sentences. None of them were condemned to death, and several of the accused were actually acquitted. Now in these trials, the defense attorneys sometimes used the argument that these jurists actually served as a restraint on crimes and the cruelty of the Nazis. In other words, they cooperated for the purpose of putting a restraint, sort of acting like the brake on a car. These judges, it was argued, moderated the harm done by the Nuremberg laws. There was a great deal made of the Nuremberg laws.

This is a marvelous piece of theater, this trial, Justice at Nuremberg. It’s a great piece of theater, and the dialogue and the themes are worthy of the superior actors and actresses in this film. These judges, it was said, cooperated with the Nazis in order to keep things from getting worse. The most notable of these defendants, Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster, received a sentence of ten years. At the end of the trial, in the film’s final scene, the chief judge, played by Spencer Tracy, visits Janning in his cell. Janning admits that the decision of the tribunal was just, but he pleads with the chief judge to believe that he and the other defendants had not realized that their decisions would lead to the slaughter of millions of innocent people. “We never knew,” he insists, “that it would come to that.” The chief judge, Spencer Tracy’s character, answers, “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

The point here? Human freedom is put to the test. I’m talking about a real test. I’m not talking about these multiple-choice bunny tests. I’m talking about these. I’m not talking about the sort of tests they take in schools nowadays that people worry and sweat over. That’s not a test! A real test is hard. You suffer through a real test. The answers are right, and you know the answers are right, but they’re hard to give. A real test—you should take a test in school, and you’d be punished for the right answer! That would be a test. You’re punished for the right answer: that’s a test.

Faith is put to the test from the very beginning, and the great stories in the Bible—Adam, Abraham, Job, the prophets like Jeremiah, and of course Jesus—all tested. Because of the Fall, because of the continued falling of human beings, our freedom is tested; our obedience is tested. There is a problem.

Now, beloved, let me tell you this morning, because somebody must tell you, because the world does not tell you—most of the time the Church doesn’t tell you—there is no easy way to eternal life. Human beings cannot simply coast along. They cannot simply coast along.

I was talking to another gentleman a couple of years ago. He came from a parish out in the west suburbs. He says that the Orthodox faith is easy for us because it’s part of our Greek culture. Delusion! Absolutely delusion! You tell the martyrs of Asia Minor that! That’s absolute— The man is mad to think such a thing, that a culture can preserve the faith! Tell the people of Russia that, which had had nearly a thousand years of the Orthodox faith. Tell them that, the people out on the frozen ice, freezing to death; people starving to death. Tell them that.

There is no easy way to eternal life. We cannot simply coast along with the culture, certainly not with American culture. The Nazi period was a particularly difficult era of testing, and for that reason it continues to provide moral instruction for man’s historical education. That’s why, as a priest, I feel necessity constantly to be reading about what I was a child, World War II, constantly reading on that subject. All the evil that was being inflicted on the world at that time, not just by the Nazis, but chiefly by the Nazis, but also by the Communists and others. All these things came out of 19th-century philosophy! And much of 19th-century philosophy is still taken as… or at least on campus is taken seriously.

The drama of the testing of souls can take place all the time. It’s always taking place. It is taking place in American society right this moment. Human beings are constantly forced with moral choices, because the moral vocation and destiny of human beings has never changed. We are called and created to be children of God. We are made to know God, to love God, to serve God, and that is hard. And we gather in this place today to be strengthened, strengthened first of all through the proclamation of St. Paul, that 2 Corinthians text we had this morning, where we’re told to leave the world: “Go out of there, my people; we are called to holiness,” says St. Paul. You read the text. We’re called for holiness. Leave the world! Abandon it! Give it up! Don’t pursue what it pursues, in order that we may become children of the Most High.