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September 18, 2022: Cheating Others is Cheating Ourselves
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No one loves being cheated. Imagine if all those scales were fixed at your local, neighborhood grocery store? “I’ll take 2 pounds of sliced turkey breast please.” “Coming right up, ma’am.” You look at all the meat being placed on the scale, watching the weight of the meat slammed onto the thin piece of paper, and maybe think, “That looks pretty close, but my intuiton tells me it may be just a wee bit under two pounds although the scale says two pounds.” Anyway, you take their word for it, that the scale is set up accurately and honestly. You take the meat home, weigh it on your personal scale (not the one you step on in the morning), and it says 1 pound, 12 ounces. Oops, you got jipped. You got ripped off.
I’m not trying to make anyone suspicious of any local supermarket and their scales. I’m sure they are all honest and accurate, especially with the number of customers they serve each day. All it takes is one customer to be cheated, have them discover the cheat, and before you know it, the entire town will know about it, if not the Better Business Bureau. No doubt such a thing would adversely affect the business who cheated, which most every business does not want. Nor should a business ever be falsely accused of doing such a thing if not true.
We see cheating in the professional – and amateur – world of sports popping up here and there. Without proof, I sense that some college athletes have cheated in some way on a scale that would surprise many who enjoy watching sports. There was the serious issue of steroids and already big men bulking up even more with baseball bats in their hands in the world of Major League baseball. Maybe this happens when pitchers get too much of an advantage, or when hitters are too good at hitting? Or maybe hitters and pitchers just want any advantage they can get against any opponent they face. The baseball steroids cheating scandal has had its consequences for certain players associated with being part of the “steroids generation” of this greatest of sports. Even here, with the many, many talents a player is blessed with, which is all from God, even here they feel the need to gain an advantage over another player, even if it means to cheat in some manner. The consequence, thus far for some, is being kept out of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown because they have been labeled as cheaters.
Two players I think of off the bat are Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. These names may be unfamiliar to anyone who does not follow the great sport of baseball, but who would rather work in the garden or go shopping or play bridge at the local Senior Center. God bless any and all who do not follow the professional game of baseball, and never have. There are days I’ve been somewhat envious of how you can keep your life busy and entertaining while having zero focus on any and every sport ever invented. I find this amazing, having grown up in a family where sports were all the rage every day.
But for many folks who are Red Sox fans and fans of all Boston sports teams, to know that Roger Clemens is not in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame is an absolute shame. His numbers and statistics for gaining entrance into the cream of the crop of recognition for one’s career are over-the-top fantastic for any player to have his name enshrined in Cooperstown, like Big Papi’s was back in July. Maybe Roger needs a smile as big as Big Papi’s, accompanied by a personality as big as Boston, and he would have been chosen by now to join the best of the best. But not to be, at least not yet. Roger has been labeled by those who vote players into the Hall of Fame as someone who used steroids to both enhance and further his career. I’m not saying he did this act of what is obvious cheating. I have no idea. And neither do you. However, if you look at Roger at an earlier point in his career, and then look at Roger in the latter part of his career, the visual is one of a different looking body. I’ll leave it at that. The same goes for Barry Bonds. If either one stepped on an honest scale later in their baseball careers, their weight would have been on the much heavier side from earlier days, and not because they were getting old or eating more Coney Island hot dogs. These would be the reasons for myself gaining weight. And some of you, too. But not for athletes who work out most every day.
Whether Roger and Barry cheated with steroids, along with a whole bunch of other players from the 1990’s and 2000’s, we’ll leave that up to them, God, and the voters who vote for their enshrinement. One day God will either enshrine them in heaven or not, just like the rest of us. This is why seeking God’s mercy and forgiveness in the Sacrament is necessary for our future enshrinement in heaven. The point here, however, is the potential cheating in order to gain an advantage over a competitor. Or, cheating in business to make higher profits while handing out fewer items, such as slices of turkey.
As will be heard in this week’s first reading from the Book of Amos, the dresser of sycamores, this Prophet called by God from among his trees lays the charge of cheating scales against those selling in the marketplace. Again, I’m not looking to create a ruckus here, or enhance the deep suspicion of any of the three or four readers of this column. I’m not looking for you to see the seller at a local farmer’s market as one whose scales are “broken” in their favor. After all, farmers are some of the most honest, God-fearing people in the world. And the hardest working.
However, the issue of cheating is one that potentially runs the gamut in the world of business, the world of politics, in our personal lives, and likely also found in the world of God’s Church, where it has no business existing. Cheating actually has no business existing in any area of life, be it business or sports. A fair, honest game should be a fair, honest game. If we lose a contest fair and square, then we should shake the hand of our opponent and congratulate them with the words, “I look forward to our next meeting.” And certainly not with the words, “How did you cheat to beat me, because I know I’m better than you?” This would be the reaction of a sore loser. We should “man-up” and “woman-up” and accept defeat for no other reason than that it builds character. But, if we suspect our defeat was at the hands of a cheater…. What’s the reaction to be?
This begs the question, “Is God a cheater?” The answer, of course, is a resounding NO. God is as honest as they come. In fact, God is the Creator of honesty, and all the virtues. If God were not honest, he would then be the devil, who is the father of lies. It seems to me that too many folks, religious or otherwise, get this easy truth mixed up at times. God is treated like the devil, while the devil gets a free pass, when things go wrong in our lives. Be it health, finances, business and labor, or relationships, which is a big one. When life goes south for a short time or long time, we tend to get angry at God for not being honest about his words, “Ask and you will receive, knock and the door will be opened for you.” Again, character building comes through suffering, pain, and adversity. I can write this because I know it firsthand. There’s zero guessing on this one, unlike Roger and Barry potentially using steroids to enhance their careers and statistics to gain an unfair advantage over a competitor.
But what if I said that God is a cheater, in a certain sense? I’m okay with this, as long as it’s directed toward our eternal salvation, which our Lord Jesus died for. Maybe we could say something like, “God cheated the devil when his Son died on a Cross so that we may live forever, rather than suffering eternal punishment. God cheated the one who is at the center of all misery in this world, who thought he had us captured and enslaved in his ugly ways, his sinful ways, his degrading and sub-human ways. And God did so with the best curveball ever thrown by any pitcher in the history of the world. A curveball that was so unexpected that it still confounds many folks today as to what sort of God would send his Son to die for this little group of wayward aliens who call themselves earthlings?” Why? Well, obviously because he loves us a lot. God, in a sense, cheated the devil from claiming victory over all people, including our souls and bodies that will be raised up when Jesus comes back. God “cheated” the first cheater, returning us to the honest relationship of being in right relationship with our Creator rather than a horrid relationship with our accuser. God turned cheating on its head, returning us to honest to goodness lovers of the Divine.
Scales, businessmen, and their cheating ways are at the heart of this week’s reading from Amos. They are rightly accused of ripping off people looking for an honest purchase, expecting in return all of what they pay for. God offers the honest prize for us who have faith. Our faith in Jesus, and his countless promises, have no deception in them, for God cannot deceive. The Christian scale of goods is set up in ways that we can fully trust we get what we pay for. If we’re off to Purgatory after we take our last breath in this world, then God’s honest judgment is what leads us to cleaning our souls before we arrive at the perfection of heaven. We get what we pay for in terms of our actions and our faith. But may we not lose sight of the truth that God’s scale is one of mercy, with not one ounce of mercy left off the scale for us who seek to stand on this virtue that leads us to our enshrinement in the one and only Hall of Fame that matters. “I’ll take two pounds of turkey breast, please. And two pounds of God’s mercy, too.”
HOLINESSIf … Christology meant only a capacity to imitate the God-centered life of Jesus, he would be only another paradigmatic figure worthy of imitation, albeit a God-intoxicated one. There is, though, another strand of the biblical witness of Jesus that insists that his life and work somehow directly affect who we are and what we can be. In this understanding, Jesus is the catalyst for a new form of living that puts us in contact with him and with Abba. Jesus, in short, is the agent of our holiness. In this the experience of the earliest Christian assemblies is paramount. Jesus, according to the most ancient profession of Christian faith, died for our sins and was raised up as the “firstborn” of all who would come after him and believe in him.
The entire significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ was not merely a memory for the first Christians; it was an experience that touched them as they recalled it in baptism and re-called and remembered and re-created it in the breaking of the bread. Indeed, as recent scholars have noted, the earliest Christian assemblies possessed a twofold language by which they summed up who they were and who they were not. The Pauline literature is filled with both inclusionary and exclusionary language: believers versus pagans; the baptized versus the unbaptized; the saints versus the impious, etc. In other words, the early Christian assembly was holy precisely because it was identified with the mysteries of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ kept alive and celebrated in community. At the same time, this community opened itself to everyone who would share that faith in such a way that the exclusionary language defined who a Christian was, but there was an inclusionary motif that welcomed all others to be part of that fellowship. from The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality