Fourth Sunday in Lent
March 26, 2006


Do you pay much attention to warning labels?

If you go to McDonalds and get a cup of coffee, somewhere near the bottom of the cup itself, on the outside, you will find this message. “Danger! Contents are hot, beware of burns!” If you go to the dry cleaners and bring home a suit, on the plastic bag you will see the warning: Danger of Suffocation. This is not a toy. Do not breathe inside the bag or give to small children to play with.” On a container of Draino: “Poison: Do not swallow. Keep away from children and from pets.” On lawnmowers: “Danger: Keep your hands and feet away from the underside of the lawnmower while in operation.” It does not take a rocket scientist to figure any of these things out, yet we know that the warnings are there because people have been hurt in just those ways, and have sued the companies involved for their own stupidity.

And in our litigious society, you know that those warnings are there just as much for the companies as they are for the safety of the consumer. As long as the companies can show that they warned people ahead of time, and clearly enough, then people are responsible for their own decisions.

The book of Chronicles reads like a company’s pre-emptive strike against lawsuits. “Early and often did the Lord, the God of their fathers, send his messengers to them, for he had compassion on his people.” It is a warning label, written not on a tag or the cup or on plastic, but rather on the human heart. And in this last book of the Hebrew bible, in the last words that we hear recorded in its original order (not how our catholic bibles have listed them), the chronicler, the historian of the Jewish people says in effect: You have been warned. You know the choice that is before you. You know the good that our God has done. You also know the consequences for choosing wrong. See in the Babylonian captivity the consequences for your deeds. This is not the result of a faulty product, or a vengeful God, but of the human choices you made to ally yourselves with civil powers and not with God. Your condemnation comes, not from without, but from within. It’s not the fault of the coffee that burned you or the plastic that suffocated you, or the Draino that poisoned you – it is the fault of your human freedom acting against God.

And when John comes on the scene, writing some 70-85 years after the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, he puts it even more simply. You have a choice. Light or Darkness. Jesus or not Jesus. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, his final messenger, his final ‘warning’ as it was. But unlike other warnings that say: “Flee from this danger,” this last message said: “Come to this light and live.” Come to the brightness and find that which brings meaning and love. Come and know a redeeming love that will set you free to walk in the daylight, even when it is dark around you.

“This is the verdict: The light came into the world, but people preferred the darkness to the light, because their works were evil.” Will you prefer the light or the darkness? That is the question.

We have all been warned. We have all been invited. In the end, God simply honors our choice…