15th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

Homily 3 – 2011 

Carbon is to be given a price, and, one way or the other, we shall all eventually pay the price.  People who know a lot more than I do cannot, or will not, reach consensus.  I feel quite disempowered.  Yet, I know that a lot of people are worried because they fear the possibility that their lives, and the lives of succeeding generations, will be severely affected – and that concerns me.

It is coincidental that St Paul, in today’s Second Reading, refers in some ways to the backdrop against which the present drama is unfolding.  Paul takes his cue from the story-line in Genesis about the creation of the world and of humanity, and about the cataclysmic choice of Adam and Eve to cut themselves free from God.  Genesis had located humanity fairly in the centre of the whole project of creation, dependent on it and, at the same time, responsible for it.  As a result of humanity’s option for sin, the created world, which was there to sustain humanity, became twisted.  With suffering you shall get your food from it.  It shall yield you brambles and thistles.  You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.  

St Paul in today’s Reading made the point more directly: … creation was made unable to attain its purpose; but he also observed: … it was not for any fault on the part of creation.  Well, who was responsible for the Garden becoming a Wasteland?  The translation we have here says: It was made so by God.  But the original is more vague – and could have referred directly to Adam and Eve and their option to sin.  The point is ultimately the same, however, because, as the Genesis story would have it, God’s action was in response to the sin of Adam and Eve.

In one way or the other, then, human sin is responsible for the mess we make of our world.  It is human greed, human ignorance, human injustice, human distrust of others, human unwillingness to share what we have (including our wisdom), human unwillingness to change what we have become used to, that twist and disfigure so much of our world, and are responsible for so much human suffering.

As St Paul wrote:  From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, is groaning …, and not only creation, but all of us … we too groan inwardly.  Paul’s intention was not to discourage his little Christian community but to give them hope and to keep them focussed.  If it is human sin that is ultimately the cause of so much of the world’s suffering, then, as God’s grace overwhelms sin, the world’s mess, too, will be overwhelmed.  That is why Paul could write: Creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God.

As humanity learns to face its sin and to name it, and as it becomes willing to change, our world achieves once more its original purpose.  But that calls for us to respect our world and our place in it, to respect its limitations and our limitations, to moderate our greed, to cooperate as nations, to share our wisdom and our wealth and to work together.  The world’s problems, ultimately, are not just scientific, economic or political, but moral.

In the meantime, politicians will give us what the electorate majority wants.  It is too easy to make them the scapegoats for our own unwillingness to act responsibly in justice and in compassion – and to pay the price.