17th Sunday Year A - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2011 

I have been thinking about the pearl of great price.  What is it?  For me, today’s Second Reading helps to give it shape.  I’ll read a bit of it again: God cooperates with all those that he has called according to his purpose.  They are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son (so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers).  He called those he intended for this: those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory.  Paul talks about God’s original purpose - God’s purpose in creating us.  He says that God intended us to become true images of his Son.  But image does not capture the full idea.  He sees us as the younger brothers and sisters of Jesus.  [Paul called Jesus the eldest of many brothers (& sisters)].  So the image, the likeness, is a sort of family likeness.  There is a sharing of life, a sort of sharing of spiritual genes.  Whose genes?  If Jesus is God’s Son par excellence, if we’re his brothers and sisters, then our genes are [sort of] God’s genes.  We are not just creatures of God - we are part of the family, brothers and sisters of Jesus, sons and daughters of God.

Paul says that God calls us.  That suggests to me the invitation to personal one-to-one relationship - the way that persons relate to each other.  Paul then says that God justifies us.  It is clear from elsewhere in Paul’s Epistles that God’s justifying us is God’s forgiving us - God’s judgment, God’s declaration, that we are loved, irrespective of our behaviour, of our puny human goodness or badness.  To the extent that we let God love us, that we freely choose to accept God’s love, then God leads us to share not just the same humanity as Jesus but somehow his divinity.  We share in the risen state of Jesus.

That was God’s intention from the moment of the Big Bang, from the first moment of creation.  Right from the beginning of the whole evolutionary process, God put into that mixture of matter and energy that God first created - the potential, indeed the straining (across all those billions of years) towards not just becoming alive, mobile, organic, sensate and intelligent but coming to be resurrected in the risen Jesus.  However, that last step, that coming to share in the life of the risen Christ, requires human cooperation.  God calls, and we need, freely, to answer the call.

Let’s pin it down a bit more - this sharing of the life of the risen Christ, this sharing the very life of God.  The Scriptures tell us that God is love; God’s life is loving.  That means that the created universe has been predestined from the moment of the Big Bang, to evolve towards human persons - free human persons, who choose to receive God’s love and to be empowered themselves to love.  The vast universe, all those vast galaxies, have been predestined towards love: created, called, justified, glorified - evolving towards persons who love.

To recognise this is to discover the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field.  It is the one thing that ultimately matters.  The fellow who discovered the hidden treasure had a stroke of luck.  He wasn’t even looking for it.  Discovering the pearl probably involved a bit of luck, too, but was more the result of a long and determined search.  Recognising that God loves us; recognising that love is our destiny, our calling, is not quite luck, but it is sheer gift, sheer grace.  Sometimes that gift seems to come out of the blue.  Sometimes it is the fruit of a long and determined search.  The wonderful thing is that it is there - there, needing only to be recognised.