3rd Sunday Advent B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2017 

Before she died, my sister was insistent that her funeral be joyful. How can you be joyful at the funeral of one you love? You can, but you need to have learnt to live at two levels of experience at the same time. There is the surface level of the normal feelings that come inevitably in response to how we perceive whatever is going on around us. At the funeral of one we love, the natural, normal feeling is sadness – whether we want it or not. It can be a quite profound and totally appropriate grief. At the same time, and just as real, but at another level, there can be another feeling that comes from having learnt to be aware of the presence in us and in the world around us of the God who loves. This feeling is a consistent feeling that never leaves us. It may be low intensity, a bit like the background noise of the sea, or the low rumble of middle-distance highway traffic. But we can tune in to it without effort. It is what enabled St Paul to write, “Be happy at all times”.

It is what also explained Paul’s further comment, “Pray constantly.” He wasn’t talking about saying prayers all the time. That is quite unrealistic. He was referring to the habit we can acquire of being somehow attuned to the constant presence of God – not unlike the more spontaneous experience of someone who has fallen in love with another. But in this case, it has to be learnt and practised.

Paul was referring to that same habit when he wrote, “for all things give thanks to God”. In mentioning that, he also gave us a clue how to acquire the habit. It involves our deliberately developing another way of seeing life that, in turn, enables a whole new way to respond to life. We have to learn to attune our inner antennae to pick up the closeness, the presence, of God. Recall again the opening message of Jesus when he began his public ministry, “The Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.” God at work is “close at hand”. That is “Good News”, but it is not immediately obvious to everyone. We do not necessarily see it; we “believe” it. We need intentionally to cultivate a different way of seeing, somehow – what most Gospel translations refer to with the totally inadequate word, “Repent”.

That different way of seeing means that we have to give up our usual expectations of what we are going to find. The coming feast of Christmas provides a wonderful insight into the nature of God. In line with the revelation given to the shepherds, “You will find an infant wrapped in pieces of cloth and lying in a feed trough” – not unusual for most babies of poor families, but hardly expected for God incarnate – it reveals a powerless God. Somehow we have to become easy with that, or we’ll never attune to the presence of God in life. The fascinating thing is that any totally powerless infant can be in fact incredibly powerful – calling for, and somehow enabling an altogether different, often inconvenient but willingly accepted, even joyful, way of living for its parents. The powerlessness of this infant’s power was immensely more powerful than that of Herod or Caesar, and of every Herod and Caesar that succeeded them over the centuries.

John was at peace with powerlessness – content to be simply who he was, happy to be no more than a “voice”, a voice “crying in the wilderness” at that. He could do no more than “witness”. We, too, need to come to terms with the powerlessness of God, to become familiar with it, to learn to trust it, to see how effective it indeed is, and quietly to trust it. Like Mary, the powerless infant’s powerless mother, we need to discipline ourselves to ponder and treasure experience in our hearts – and see what we learn!