30th Sunday Year A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2014

The Extraordinary Synod called to prepare for next year’s Ordinary Synod on marriage and family life has just finished. Pope Francis was apparently thrilled with the approach followed by the Synod at his suggestion. Right from the start he had asked the bishops to say what they really thought – without looking over their shoulders to gauge how he or others present might react. That in itself sounds basic – but it was not the way that things had generally happened in previous Synods. The result was that differences of opinion became obvious. Sharp tensions arose. That was the price of honesty, and opened the way for the gentle action of God’s Spirit.

Interestingly, with all the tension, when the final summary of the many interventions and small group discussions was put to the vote, all of the points listed received majority endorsement, and only two fell short of the two-thirds majority normally required – those on welcoming remarried divorcees and gay people. Given the closeness of the voting on those two issues, Pope Francis decided that they be retained and the voting recorded. The final document of the Synod now becomes the focus of the Church’s homework for the next twelve months. It will constitute the agenda for next year’s Synod when the bishops will seek to discern together the guidance of God’s Spirit.

Differences of opinion need not mean disunity. What matters is that people respect and accept each other as brothers and sisters, and learn to agree to live together despite disagreements. Today’s Gospel succinctly sums up the response: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. Clear – but notoriously difficult! Love does not come naturally. Our spontaneous reaction is to assess everyone according to how does this person affect me? Habitually, we assess; we judge; we defend ourselves.

The Bible’s delightfully insightful creation myth puts the original temptation like this: You will be like gods, knowing good and evil. And since then, we have been labelling everyone good or bad accordingly – judging, condemning, fighting and destroying each other. As with most temptations, the original temptation was partly right. God can assess good and evil. But tragically that sense of God was overwhelmingly incomplete. Firstly and essentially God is love. God looks on us with love. God sees our beauty  - we are made in God’s image. God is the source of our dignity and treats us with respect. God sees our mutually destructive behaviour, and assesses it as such; yet God then looks at us with profound sadness, and with equally profound compassion, aware of our radical insecurity and our unconscious wounds buried below the surface.

We condemn; we compete, because we are radically insecure. We have not looked into the eyes of the infinitely loving God who gently loves us. Since we do not see ourselves through God’s eyes, we have not learnt to see each other either through God’s eyes. To this blind world God sent his Son – not to condemn but to save. The way of redemption involves our learning to look into the eyes of the loving God. Then we can begin to see ourselves and each other, and to sense that all-pervading insecurity through those loving eyes of God. We learn to approach each other with respect. We learn to tune in, beyond the stated opinions, to the fears and the hopes from where those opinions ultimately spring. Together we can move towards the “capital-T Truth” that constantly beckons us beyond where we are.

We need that enlightened approach so much in our Church today. We have been fixated on orthodoxy but light on love. We need respect so much in our world today. But how can we speak credibly to the world until we begin to live the truth ourselves? No wonder Jesus summed up his life’s work of saving our world in the urgent insistence: First: Love God with everything. Then: Love your neighbour as yourself.