Luke 6:38
“Give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
Only one tradition – the shallow, atomized, individualist, and deeply stupid tradition of modern secular TV hedonism —turns a blind eye to this basic bit of common sense and thinks that one can do whatever one wishes so long as it “makes you feel good” and is your “personal truth of the moment.” As soon as we move away from such dim-witted vanity, we find that every religious tradition in the world acknowledges the basic idea that “what goes around comes around.” In the eastern tradition, this is expressed in the concept of karma. In the west, Jesus crystallizes a very similar idea in today’s verse. The eastern tradition recognizes that things and persons are connected. What we do, even in secret, affects others. The western tradition, especially the Catholic faith, builds on this and tells us what the basic principle of that connectedness is: the Blessed Trinity who is the maker of all things and in whom all things hold together. In other words, the justice at work in the world is not an abstraction but a Person: Jesus Christ, who will come in glory to judge the living and the dead and who will render unto every person according to his works. That’s good news, because a Person can forgive while an abstraction cannot. Today, give and it will be given to you.
