“Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Luke 6:37-38
“The season of Lent has come round again, the time when I owe you my annual exhortation, and why you also owe the Lord your good works as suited to the season; not of course that they can be any use to the Lord, but they are of use to you…to our prayers we must add, by almsgiving and fasting, the wings of lovingkindness, so that they may fly the more easily to God and reach Him. For this the Christian mind can readily understand how far removed we should be from the fraudulent filching of other peoples’ property; when it perceives how similar it is to fraud when you don’t give to the needy what you don’t need for yourself. The Lord say, “Give, and it will be given to you; forgive, and you will be forgiven” (Luke 6:37-38). Let us practice these two sorts of almsgiving, namely, giving and forgiving, gently and generously since after all we pray to the Lord that good things may be given to us and that evil things may not be repaid to us.”
Augustine of Hippo (354-430) in “Sermons on the Liturgical Season” 3.6 from The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the Twenty-First Century, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY; New City Press, 1995) 107.
Feast on this truth on the third Sunday of Lent.
God does not need our good works, but we need to do them. Our proclivity is to store up treasures for ourselves. Augustine smartly labels this as “fraudulent filching.” Great expression. It means “wrongful theft” or “keeping for yourself what God intends for others.”
As we enter the heart of the season of Lent, what do you have that God wants you to share?
Consider how the clothing, possessions, and money you have could benefit others. With your generosity, aid someone in crisis. Provide support to help a ministry build capacity. Do this not because the individuals or institutions need it, but because you need to give. God resourced you to share.
And add forgiving to your giving. The pathway to being people of justice is to forgive and give. When we extend to others the grace that we received, we show that we “get it.” We grasp that the purpose of the grace given to us is to extend it to others. See how giving and forgiving are linked?
Only when we learn to share generously and gently the resources and the forgiveness we have received during Lent do we discover that we never run out. Should we decide to stop forgiving, then the spigot of grace will stop flowing toward us. Give and forgive.
Any other way of living for a Christian is fraudulent filching.