1st Sunday of Lent B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2015

What is all this business about God making a covenant with Noah? I think the story-writer had a magnificent fleeting intuition of the mind of God. Effectively, he had God declare, “I shall never destroy the earth. I shall never wipe out a civilization. I shall never destroy anything. I shall never destroy anyone. There is no violence in me.” God could have gone on, “You might destroy the earth, or yourselves – but I shall not. In fact, if you keep close to me, if you learn to know me, you will not want to either.”

All that was in the pre-historical past. What about today? What sense do you make of what is going on in the world? What do you make of things after you have listened to the TV nightly news? The Good News of God? the Good News of the Kingdom?

Jesus stepped into a world not essentially different from ours. In his world, seven out of eight people lived at or below the poverty line, often going to bed hungry. Life was better if you belonged to the lucky elite with a bit of power and wealth. Yet even Herod, despite his being King, was paranoid about security. No right to freedom of speech for John the Baptist, arrested and rotting in prison. That was the world to which Jesus talked about the Good News of God, the good news of the Kingdom. But he did not stop there. He said, “Believe it, trust the God in whom there is no violence. And because invariably, instinctively, you do not believe that, change! Think again! Learn – somehow!”

Over the last two years we have heard Pope Francis waxing eloquent about the joy of the kingdom, the same Pope Francis who deplores the fact that we have lost the ability to weep. Wise people can live with paradox.

Getting back to Jesus. He had just come out of forty days in the wilderness, tempted by Satan, the personification of evil. We encounter Satan, rather, in the enculturation of evil. The culture has been saturating us with it since we were weaned from our mothers – so effectively that we do not see so many of our destructive assumptions. We take them for granted – our selective, ‘enlightened’, indignation at the behaviour of others, our instinctive trust in further power and violence as the best way to peace, our obsession about protecting our sovereign shores, whatever the cost.

“Change!” said Jesus. But even he did not know how to interest and enthuse with his sense of God or his vision of the possibilities of the Kingdom people with ears that would not hear, eyes that would not see. How do we learn to see what is staring us in the face? 

How did Jesus learn to see? John the Baptist got things started; then the Voice from Heaven; and the Spirit of God coming down on Jesus like a dove. The next thing, with a remarkable change of metaphor, that gentle, dove-like Spirit, drove him out further into the wilderness to engage with the persuasive possibilities suggested by personified evil.  Mark said Jesus was there for forty days – forty days that turned out to be the couple of years of his public ministry and that culminated in his death at the hands of the Roman empire, the embodiment of culture.

And Lent for us? Forty days, or rather a lifetime, learning to hear the voice that says, “I am the God who loves you. I am the God who is love, undeserved, forgiving, merciful love – the God in whom there is no violence.”  Forty days, a lifetime, learning to see the real, to see that others are as precious to God as I am. Forty days struggling to let others matter to me as much as I matter to myself. Forty days learning to weep. Forty days learning to be joyful – living with paradox, as Pope Francis would have us do, and growing in wisdom.