4th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 -  2006

The Pope wrote an encyclical letter last week on the theme of love: pretty basic! It’s title was taken from a phrase in one of the Epistles of John: God is love.  Deus Caritas Est. We have heard it before; but it is still good to think about.

Science aims to tell us: Why is this? Why is that? Why is this like this? Why is that like that? What is it made up of? How did it begin? But if we ask: Why is there anything at all? Why not perpetual, eternal nothing? some of us say: The source of simply being is what we conveniently call God.  If God then is the Being enabling our cosmos, giving it concrete existence, Benedict wants to remind us that this mystery sourcing all that is is simply love.  Our tradition teaches that we have been made in the image of God – so loving is hard-wired into us.  And we’re restless, unfulfilled, until we love.  Sounds good! But what does love mean?  In our experience, if we ponder hard enough, we discover a number of different energies that we have called love.  Ancient Greek philosophers, well before Jesus, put names to four of these love-energies.  

They talked of womb-love – that mothers know – fierce, protective, self-sacrificing.  At times the Hebrew prophets spoke of God’s love in terms of womb-love, only more fierce, more intense.  Does a mother forget her baby or a woman the child within her womb? Yet, even if these forget, I will never forget you.  

The Greeks also spoke of erotic love, that instinctive attraction that we feel towards certain people, that impels us to want to be one with them, to lose ourselves in them, as it were.  It leads us to feel that our happiness depends entirely on the other, on having them, on being with them.  It is a formidable force, but can quickly enough flip from one person to another, without anyone necessarily knowing why.  Check the women’s magazines!!  Usually it is not the result of our choosing.  It sort of just happens.

There is also the love of friendship.  Attraction-based love can move us onwards into friendship,  leading us to discover our need for intimacy, for knowing the depths of the other and for sharing our own.  All that I am, just as I am, offered to all that you are, just as you are.  Jesus invites us to that kind of love: I do not call you servants, but friends.  Surprising, modern research has shown that not many men have others they would call true friends, other than perhaps their spouse.

There is a fourth level of love, not based on attraction or even friendship, (though often blossoming forth from them, but not necessarily).  It is the love that prompts you to spend your energies for another, to serve others, not because of who they are or what they are like, but because of who you are, the kind of person you are.  It is the love that is unconditional, forgiving, merciful, serving, not getting anything out of it, but determining simply to give.  We need to choose to be so.  This particularly mirrors the essence of God’s loving.  It is Christian love, made possible by our sharing in the life of Christ.  One modern theologian summed it up in two words: to let be in the richest sense of those two words: to let, meaning to enable, empower, encourage, support; to be, meaning to become, unfold, emerge or grow.

Elements in our modern culture tend to focus on attraction-love – that is what all our pop songs are about.  Benedict reminds us that we have been made for more than that.  Only as we grow towards unconditional, giving love do we experience the deep peace that God hopes for us.  But it takes a lifetime, and beyond!