2016 Red Mass homily

Monmouth County Red Mass | Oct. 2, 2016
St. Michael Church, Long Branch

If you believe in God, you will have no difficulty understanding the existence of law. If you believe that God created the world, you will have no difficulty understanding the significance of law. If you believe that God has redeemed the world, you will have no difficulty understanding the purpose of law.

 

Our belief in God and his creation — our faith — reveals an inherent, integral, even intimate connection between God and law as it has come to exist in the world he created and redeemed.  God is the starting point of both … and God is the goal.

 

The Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Scriptures tells us that in the beginning there was nothing except God. It is hard for our minds to conceive this. Many theories and explanations have been offered — some rooted in faith, others rooted in science — but all of them lead us back to the simple fact that at some point in the mystery of eternity, something happened and the world came to be. That something was God’s intervention, God’s action, Gods word:

 

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was and formless waste and darkness covered the abyss and God said: let there be light!  And there was light.

 

And it was God who created something out of nothing.  It was God who brought order to chaos and that order became law.

 

We believe in God. Such belief is part of the fabric of this great country of ours.  "In God we trust" is a national motto. We believe that God created the world. We claim "One nation under God" as we pledge our allegiance. We believe that God redeemed the world. "So help me God" is the usual way we end our promises, our commitments and our oaths of office. We believe and as Americans we possess the freedom to believe.

 

If we follow the Book of Genesis, as the Church understands it, we get the clear sense that God's first and most noble action was to create order: something out of nothing. Light out of darkness. Order out of chaos. God created. And the result was law something that "lights" and "orders" our world, our lives.

 

It sounds strange, perhaps, to connect the abstract notion of law with the specific reality of God but that is the way that law works, is it not? Law arises as some abstract principle from some specific event only to return to specific events to help explain them, to give them meaning, to give them direction and order. Without specificity, the abstract makes no sense. Without the abstract, the specific eludes its purpose. Without God, law lacks foundation. We believe that.

 

The eminent jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., understood these principles well when he wrote that your task as lawyers "is to see the relation between your particular fact and the whole frame of the universe." The "whole frame of the universe" is God's idea, God's creation, God's action, God himself. Your "particular fact" as lawyers is God’s as well. As you engage your profession as lawyers, you continue God’s idea, his creative work, his action in the universe, in the world that is both your frame of reference and the context of your particular fact. A noble profession, a noble task and a profound responsibility. Let no one doubt it.

 

We live in a larger world, however, where belief in God cannot always be presumed, where faith often finds not only closed minds but closed hearts as well — powerful enemies. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that God's actions — that God himself — is subject to great doubt and significant scrutiny. Perhaps God exists.  Perhaps God created the world but the chasm between God and humanity seems to grow wider and deeper the further we get from that first moment of his creation and from the eventual moment of his redemption.  God disappears, belief evaporates, faith vanishes and law no longer finds its divine foundation.

 

In a world without belief, it is easy for law, for justice to lose its place. In a world that does not permit or, worse, that works against belief, law and justice have no place.  I fear that this is the kind of world we are creating where the freedom of belief — the freedom of religion — are assaulted by the very laws we make and by the very way we make them.  The founders of this nation and the framers of the Constitution recognized God the Creator as the source of certain inalienable rights.  Religious liberty was the foundational principle that gave rise to our national existence in the first place.  What has changed since then?

 

In the world that God first created there were no poor, no captives, no blind, no oppressed. In the world that we “re-created,” there are so many who fit those sad descriptions: whose lives are at risk born and unborn; healthy and ill; innocent and guilty; educated or ignorant; friend and strangers; countrymen and immigrant; like us or different. The law can be, should be, and must be the means that moves us from how we currently live to how we ought to live.  And true justice demands that the law never prevent us from discovering how we ought to live in God by restricting our religious freedom.

 

On this day when we reflect upon law and its significance and purpose for our world, many ideas and definitions probably come to mind. I like the one written by St. Robert Bellarmine, a simple thought that conveys a profound truth. "Law," he said, "is simply charity, a love that binds and obliges us." As lawyers, then, let that insight be for us and for those who seek justice at our hands.

 

If we truly believe in God, "let there be light," the light that faith and conscience and freedom provide.   If we believe that God created the world, let there be justice, so that every human right might be seen as rooted in him. And if we believe that it is possible to be redeemed through God’s light and justice, let there be a love that binds and obliges us all one to one another in the freedom of the Lord.

 

Most Reverend David M. O’Connell, C.M.
Bishop of Trenton