Deal or no deal?

There is an instinctive idea that good things should happen to people who do good things. This seems reaffirmed by the beginning of today's first reading (Deuteronomy 6:2-6):

Fear the LORD, your God,
and keep,
throughout the days of your lives,
all his statutes and commandments
which I enjoin on you,
and thus have long life.

Hear then, Israel,
and be careful to observe them,
that you may grow and prosper the more,
in keeping with the promise of the LORD,
the God of your fathers,
to give you a land flowing with milk and honey.

It sounds like a good deal.

History and personal experience, however, teach that good and bad things often happen to people irrespective of their moral state: good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, and most people experience an uncertain mix of good and bad in their lives.

On balance, over the long-term, good things follow from moral actions and bad things follow from immoral actions (which is why good business ethics always makes good long-term business sense), but the cognitive dissonance of bad things happening to good people can still be hard to deal with (especially if you are the afflicted good person).

The classic response to this apparent quandary is that the apparently good person was not perfectly good. Indeed, we are all sinners - we all fall short somehow - and indeed the people of Israel to whom the words of today's reading were addressed would go on to violate quite a number of the statutes and commandments that the Lord had enjoined upon them.

The simple truth is that evil actions always have evil results, even when those evil results are not immediately apparent.

The scary truth is that evil actions always have evil results even when there was not evil intent or when there was an impeccable excuse.

It should therefore be no surprise that the world around us is piled high with the evil effects of innumerable evil deeds - ours and others. Both the deliberate and the well-intentioned evils of humanity have woven a web of evil consequences that a thousand years of altruism alone could not undo.

Not a very pretty picture or pleasant future.

What then of the promises of the Lord we hear in today's first reading? Was this really good-sounding deal really no deal at all?

Knowing our sinful nature, was God making cruel taunts under the guise of a fair-sounding covenant, offering a tantalizing paradise that we would never be able to attain?

No, the promises are true, just as the statutes and commandments of the Lord offer a sure path for doing good and avoiding evil, but the fulfillment of the promises becomes possible only through the infinite merits of the death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ: a fulfillment, in fact, more wonderful and glorious than anything possible by human perfection alone – a "long life" that is eternal bliss, a land flowing with the milk of God's never-ending love and the honey of his inexhaustible Truth.

As we await the total realization of that fulfillment, there is no greater preparation than the Great Commandment set forth in the first reading and repeated in today's Gospel (Mark 12:28b-34):

Sh'ma Yisrael
Adonai Elohaynu
Adonai Echad

V-ahavta et Adonai Elohecha
b-chol l'vavcha
u-v-chol naf'sh'cha
u-v-chol m'odecha.

Hear, O Israel!
The LORD is our God,
the LORD alone!

Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God,
with all your heart,
and with all your soul,
and with all your strength.

No matter what, may everything we do be filled with the love of the Lord.

May everything we feel be filled with the love of the Lord.

May our every thought and word be filled with the love of the Lord.

Now and in the world without end.

Deal.