2nd Sunday Lent A - Homily 3

Homily 3 – 2008 

The second reading today from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy is a great (and brief) summary of what is contained more graphically in today’s Gospel.  Paul exhorts his readers: to bear the hardships for the sake of the Good News – not under our own steam, but relying on the power of God.

He then talks about the way he sees the Good News:  God has saved us.  So we are not destined to stay caught up inexorably in the never-satisfying experiences of day-to-day life – always living from the fallout of those events that consciously or unconsciously we do to each other, or to our world, as individuals or as society.  God has saved us: things can be different!

And then Paul says that this saving action of God does not depend on us or on our worthiness, but simply on God’s sheer benevolence and delight in us: not because of anything we ourselves have done, but for his own purpose and by his own grace.  It was God’s idea … and it’s pure gift.  It always has been God’s intention in creating and sustaining the world: This grace has already been granted to us before the beginning of time.  Jesus’ role was to make that intention of God’s clear – to reveal it to us, precisely because we so easily miss the point.

It don’t think it is the way most of us see God – the creating God.  But: To create is to love: to love is to create.  They mean the same thing.  But somehow we get the messed-up idea that salvation is a factor, primarily, of how we behave… and that God is only on about reward or punishment: God is a judge.  But Paul is saying: “No! God is above all a lover! and we are the ones that God loves! That’s the Good News.  If we see reward or punishment as Good News, our hearts have become pretty cramped!

But the fact remains that many in this world of people whom God loves either aren’t interested or can’t believe it, or won’t let themselves be loved – even though the thirst for love is hard-wired into us.  So, instead of love colouring relationships, too often it is love-substitutes or even sheer self-interest (or national interest – which is simply its extension.)

Paul talked about bearing the hardships: those hardships that are either the practical fallout of a world that doesn’t love, or the more personal hardships of prizing ourselves away from our own ingrained self-interest or substitute loves.  It’s hard work!

The voice that came from the cloud in the Gospel description of the vision of Jesus-transfigured said simply: This is my Son, the beloved.  He enjoys my favour.  Listen to him.  The voice was the voice of a God who loved: My Son, the beloved.  He enjoys my favour (or more accurately: “I find joy in him!”).  The message was: Listen to him! What had he said! Remember? The Kingdom of God is close at hand.  Repent and believe the Good News. Wake up to yourselves! Shake yourselves out of your illusions! See reality: God, the ground of being and the source of life, loves us.