FAST FOOD AD 2026, Thirtieth Helping

FAST FOOD AD 2026, Thirtieth Helping

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,”

-St. Paul

“Both the Gospels and epistles insist that thinking like Jesus is a personal responsibility, which each must fulfill for himself or herself. No one is so lacking in talent or education or so underprivileged that putting on the mind of Christ is beyond their grasp.”

-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical Scholar

Behavior flows from the mind. A person becomes what he or she in their mind thinks and desires. An avaricious mind precedes avaricious behavior. An angry mind precedes angry behavior. A lustful mind precedes lustful behavior. An unforgiving mind precedes unforgiving behavior, etc. Any act, good or bad, for which we are morally responsible is first conceived and chosen in the mind.

Hence, to “Love one another as I have loved you,” that is to live the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels’ new commandment, the commandment that the Church teaches sums up all the others and contains the entire Moral law of the Gospel, as well as presenting the will of the Father that is to be “done on earth as it is in heaven,” first requires putting on the mind of Christ.  St. Paul’s injunction, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” is not a take it or leave it option in the New Testament. It is the sine qua non for any and all acts in conformity with the saving will of God as revealed by Jesus.

Thoughts, habits and conviction contrary to the teachings of Jesus placed in our minds from our childhood, which we have learned from our parents and teachers, from our peers, from our friends and our enemies—with whom we share many values—from our reading, from stage and screen, and now from the omnipresent television and Internet, are the source of many of our behaviors. If by the grace of God, we wanted to think like Christ and thereby alter our behaviors, how much of what in our minds that we presently value would have to be discarded and what level of effort would it take to discard it?

“Too often in the modern world,” writes Rev. John L. McKenzie in 1978, we take refuge behind such excuses as “everybody does it. “Was it ever different in any society? My friend, Gordon Zahn, wrote about a German peasant named Franz Jagerstatter, who refused the advice of his Bishop, his priest, his neighbors and his family. He resisted going along with National Socialism, although “everybody is doing it,” and he maintained this position in spite of no more than elementary education and apparently less native intelligence than many who served National Socialism with a good conscience, or at least a quiet conscience. Of course it cost him his life; he was beheaded. He died, however, having saved something which those who survived had lost; they better than anyone else can tell what that is.

 I do not know for how long Jagerstatter endeavored to think like Christ, but he succeeded in doing so at the most critical moment of his life, the ‘krisis’ moment, when millions of others failed to do so. He was not the only Christian who resisted. He is simply an example—and that is why Zahn chose him—a little lonely man without power and prestige who showed that anyone can think like Christ and act accordingly.

Most of us can thank God that we are not likely to have such a horrendous responsibility of choice imposed upon us as faced by Franz Jagerstatter. The danger is that, like millions of Germans, we will not recognize the responsibility when it falls upon us. I write as a citizen of a nation which has shown no repentance of the horrors it has done, from the genocide of the American Indians to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the savaging of Vietnam.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy 

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“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.

Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!

Hosanna in the highest!