Bad Conscience

25th Week in Ordinary Time - Thursday; Memorial of St Vincent de Paul (27 September 2018)

Ecclesiastes 1:2-11

Luke 9:7-9

“And Herod was anxious to see Jesus.”

Herod had a bad conscience. He decapitated John the Baptizer. It made him anxious to see Jesus. “Who was he? What did he know? How did he react? Was he a prophet? Was he Elijah? Or, God forbid, was he maybe John the Baptizer, whose murder still haunted him?” Thinking about that last possibility, “Herod said, ‘John? I beheaded him. So who is this I hear such reports about?’”

We don’t know whether Herod ever got an answer to his question about who Jesus was. We do know that when later informers come to tell Jesus that Herod wants to kill him, Jesus calls Herod a fox (Luke 13:31). In the end the two met when Pilate sent Jesus over at his trial. Herod didn’t get any reply to his questions from Jesus. He didn’t take any responsibility for Jesus’ fate, either. He had been anxious to see him, now he was anxious to get him out of his sight.

There is an old saying: “Conscience does make cowards of us all.” A bad conscience certainly does. We are hiding things not only from the others, but even from ourselves. We live in constant denial and at the same time in fear of being found out. Some psychologists even suggest that this is what makes us so interested in court cases. Will the defense be able to outdo the prosecution, so that the accused will be able to keep his crime hidden, sometimes against all evidence? Let us be aware that being true to our true selves is being true to God. Our true selves posses within themselves the God-consciousness and conscience, the voice of God.

Herod can be our example in one way: his bad conscience makes him want to see Jesus. When we are in bad conscience it would be a good thing for us to have the same desire—not for the reason Herod had, but in view of an admission of sin, forgiveness, conversion, and also to get rid of the constant anxiety of that bad conscience.

What is this conscience in us? It is the innate drive to value that rewards success in self-transcendence with a happy conscience and saddens failures with an unhappy conscience. We certainly need the peace of a good conscience and also the disquiet of wrong words and wrong deeds, so that we grow day by day. Because the human capacity to deny the reality of sin is shocking, and we can see how we have built a culture of death, even be proud of our progress that comes from ill-gotten profits, brutal wars and bloodshed.

Let us remember that conversion or transformation is the work of a good conscience. Let us today enhance the God-consciousness that is within us, and thus develop a good conscience, which is nothing but the voice of God.