Trinity Sunday - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2008

When I first heard of Sr Veronica’s sudden death two weeks ago, I noticed that one of my early reactions was a brief twinge of envy – She had beaten me to the adventure of eternal life.  Of the three of us, Peter, Veronica and myself, I had imagined that I would be the first to get under way.  Veronica had beaten the gun!  Her death perhaps situates our reflection on today’s gospel.

The Gospel states that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone one who believes in him … may have eternal life.  It then repeated much the same thought: God sent his Son into the world … so that, through him, the world might be saved.  When we hear of being saved, most of us tend to think of being saved from original sin and the prospect of eternity in hell – but that was not what the Gospel had in mind.  (The doctrine of Original Sin was not developed until centuries after the Gospel was written.)  So, if the Gospel did not have original sin and hell in mind, what did Jesus come to save us from?

From your own experience, do you think that the world, society, yourself are basically OK as is – except for some cosmetic tweaking here and there?  If salvation, finally, is much the same as eternal life, (as the Gospel seems to suggest), and if life as is seems OK enough, is that how you would like life to be for eternity?  I, for one, wouldn’t.  I couldn’t for a moment come to terms with the thought that life as is would continue, basically unchanged, for eternity.  

One problem most of us have, as we think of eternity, lies in whether we imagine life in eternity to be simply an individual experience or a collective experience.  My instinctive reaction is that, if the experience of eternity involves everyone else, too, then I would like people to be radically different from what they are now.  I don’t want the selfishness, the competitiveness, the drivenness, the emptiness and the violence of society to continue as is for eternity.  Eternity could be bearable only if we would all live not only in harmony but in deeply loving relationships.

If I think beyond my instinctive first reaction, I realise that eternity will be liveable only if I can love everyone else – and that is what I do not succeed at doing now.  I need to be saved from what stops me loving unconditionally – my fears, my insecurities and my fascination with myself.  And I would like to think that others undergo a similar growth, a similar liberation, a similar salvation.

God wants that to be, too, because God is wholly love.  So God sent Jesus.  But for salvation to happen, to really live eternally, we have to believe Jesus; we have to take him seriously; we have to take notice of what he has shown us; and we need to trust him.  His message was quite simple.  His recipe for the world’s salvation was quite simple: love one another.

I would love to have the freedom, and the power, of the risen Jesus.  Remember last week’s Gospel: After his resurrection, Jesus could come to the world and say simply: Peace be with you to those disciples who had abandoned him and denied ever having known him, and, by extension, to those thousands of others who had ignored him, found him boring, or who had seen him as irrelevant, an embarrassment, even as an enemy 

The wonderful thing is that the Father, in his love for the world, sent Jesus to save us from each other – and, perhaps, even more pertinently, to save us from ourselves.  Jesus accepted his mission: he showed us what love is; he showed us that love is possible, and he told us that our only hope really to live life, in any real sense, is to choose to love.  But more than that, the Father and Jesus have sent the Spirit of Jesus to empower us in our choice to love.  That is how, together, Father, Son and Spirit, have saved us and enabled us to live into eternity – And the process has already started.