4th Sunday of Lent B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2012

Did you notice today's Responsorial Psalm – a beautiful expression of feelings that were anything but beautiful – feelings of profound sadness and loss, feelings of deep depression? The Psalm expressed the desolation of the Hebrew people, enslaved and deported to Babylon. Yet it was from that seedbed of virtual despair that wonderful discoveries came. There, the deported Hebrew people undertook the long, slow journey towards wisdom.  

The First Reading captured one of the dawning insights: The Hebrew people’s fate was not a failure on God's part but was their own fault, an inevitable consequence of their deafness to the patient, nurturing, anxiously warning  call of God. The God of their ancestors tirelessly sent them messenger after messenger since he wished to spare his people. The author's insight, though a real advance, reflected only a faint step towards the truth. He still saw the nation's eventual destruction and humiliation as an expression of what he believed was the wrath of God - who, though he did not abandon his people, seemed nevertheless to have punished them. So many people, even many Christian people, still see God as a God who punishes violently. 

We see such a contrast to that punishing God in the two other Readings we have heard today. Both the Epistle and the Gospel give us profound insights into how God sees us and reaches out to us. As the Epistle puts it: God is generous in mercy, infinitely rich in grace. Perhaps we're too used to the word grace to be alert to its beauty. Grace is graciousness, gratuitous graciousness, sheer giving. God loves us when we are not worth loving, not for anything of our own, not for anything we have done – Even when dead through our sins, God loves us and overwhelms and floods us with life. 

The translator gets carried away by enthusiasm, and calls us God's work of art. The original Greek word is "poema" [from which our English word for poem comes]. We are God's poem/God's work of art. I am. You are. It's true. We need to sit with the truth in silence, in silent wonder – especially in those moments or moods when we feel ourselves to be anything but God's work of art.

Then the Gospel takes up a similar message, assuring us that God so loved the world – the world darkened by sin, murderous, blind, vindictive, simmering with hostility. God so loved the world that he sent his Son - right into the middle of it all. And in sending his Son, God virtually handed over himself. He sent his Son not to condemn the world but to save it – to save it from its ingrained hostility and destructiveness and the fearful mess they create.

If you sometimes hear an inner voice condemning you, telling you that you are no good, bad news, brutally hostile to you, it is not the voice of God. [The Hebrew word for Accuser is Satan]. Condemning paralyses; it sucks out energy. Condemning is withdrawing love. When we refuse to follow Jesus' way of love; when we persist in our often unnoticed hostility, we condemn ourselves; we condemn others; we lock into the way of non-love.

The Gospel continued: On these grounds is sentence pronounced – [not by God, but by us!] that, though the light has come into the world, people have shown they prefer darkness to the light. We killed him. But that's not the last word. Back to the Epistle, where Paul was writing to the little Christian community in Ephesus, who were trying to live by the truth, coming out into the light, opting for the way of love: God brought us to life with Christ, and raised us up with him, and gave us a place in heaven, in Christ Jesus. 

That is what we say Amen to in every Eucharist, in today's Eucharist: Through him, and with him, and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory is yours, for ever and ever.