1st Sunday Advent B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2011

I would like to invite you today to reflect on your own experience, and I shall share some reflections of my own, taking my cue from today’s First Reading where Isaiah addressed the issue of his people’s sin.  Isaiah embodied perhaps the highpoint of Israel’s insight into the mystery of God.  Yet he wrote without knowledge of Jesus or of what Jesus had to tell us about God.  At times he missed the point.

I want to explore some issues surrounding our sense of sin in the light of what Jesus revealed to us of his Father.  There is a preoccupation among many of us with the question of God’s forgiveness.  If we take notice of what Jesus had to say, there can be no question about God’s forgiveness.  Forgiveness is simply God’s love as God engages with sinners.  And we know that it is unconditional.  It is constantly offered – always on tap, if you like.  It doesn’t have to be begged for, or somehow won.  Preoccupation with forgiveness misses the point.  Forgiveness is where we start from, not what we aim for.  In a certain sense, we can have all our sins forgiven, we can be spotless, as it were – but that only brings us from behind scratch to the starting line.

Mesmerised, too, by an emphasis on commandments, we can be sometimes obsessively concerned with merely observing them.  But that misses the point too.  People totally closed in on themselves, complete loners, don’t kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, etc.  To not break commandments, all they need to do is to avoid people.

But Jesus has shown us that that is not what God is interested in.  God offers us love.  God enables and calls us to love – because only when we love do we become truly alive.  And growth in love is more than a factor of not breaking commandments.  It is about cultivating and nurturing the virtues that are the concrete building blocks of consistent love.  We can take God’s forgiveness for granted.  What God calls us to, after sin, is reconciliation – is engagement, relationship – a relationship of ever-deepening love.

But it takes two for any relationship.  We aren’t reconciled, we don’t love, by avoiding people (or God), but by engaging with them.  In any relationship with God, the uncertain factor is not God.  It is us.  In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul pleaded quite emotionally about this issue: It was God who reconciled us to himself, through Christ, and gave me the work of handing on this reconciliation.  It is as though God was appealing through me – and the appeal that I make in Christ’s name is: Be reconciled to God.

This raises the practical questions: How do I engage with God?  How do I love God?  How do I know I love God?  The First Epistle of St John throws light on these questions: Among many things, John wrote: We can be sure we are in God only when the one who claims to be living in God is living the same kind of life as Christ lived.  And later he warned: Those who do not love the brothers or sisters that they can see cannot love God, whom they have never seen.  So our love for God is broken or cooled in parallel with our engagement with others.  And our reconciliation with God runs parallel to our efforts to grow in our love for others – which is definitely more than merely being innocent of outright offences against commandments.

We haven’t got far, but I wanted to get this clear from the start.  Our preoccupation need not be mere forgiveness.  What is critical is what St John called living the same kind of life as Christ lived.  What I would like to do next is explore, as the adult people we are,  the practical shape of the sins we commit -  moving beyond the somewhat trivial shopping lists of children to questions of conscience, blindness and our complicity in social sin.