8th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2006 

Did you notice one of the posters pinned to a display board in Mildura, put there by some of the friends of the six teenagers who were so tragically killed last Saturday night? The one I am referring to said: "God takes the good – but this time he took the best.  RIP"  The poster reflected a search for meaning in the midst of utter catastrophe, and showed evidence of a faith in God.  Perhaps the thought even succeeded in giving some degree of peace.

Personally, I don’t share that faith.  It does not sit comfortably with my sense of God at all.  In fact it contradicts my sense of God.  These were kids – 16 year olds.  They had hardly started to live life.  Their deaths have shattered the peace of their families and their friends, perhaps affected their lives for ever.  What sort of God would do that? Only an uncaring, heartless, cruel God.  That is not how I interpret my own experience of God.  I don’t believe that.

That sense of God doesn’t sit comfortably either with the great Hebrew prophet, Hosea, whom we heard in the today’s first Reading, or with the sentiments expressed in the Responsorial Psalm.  For Hosea, God is God of infinitely tender love: I will betroth you to myself for ever.  I will betroth you with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love.  For the Psalmist: The Lord is kind and merciful, compassion and love. - as a father has compassion on his sons...

I don’t believe God called those children to himself so suddenly, so tragically.  God didn’t kill them – their deaths were accidental.  Could God have somehow intervened to stop their deaths? Honestly, I am not sure.  Could God have prevented their deaths by arbitrarily suspending the laws of nature, even just for a moment? What happened to those teenagers was only one of thousands of tragic events that happened around the world that night, that happen around the world every night, every day.

If God arbitrarily suspended the laws of nature in all those cases, they wouldn’t be laws of nature.  Could we live or progress in a world where things aren’t governed by laws of nature but just happen (or don’t happen) depending on the arbitrary intervention of God? Would we want God to interfere in people’s free choices, to make a joke of people’s freedom? Could we live in a world like that?

Does God’s choice to create us and to give us being, (so... necessarily making us less than divine, necessarily finite and limited), and then to call us to love (so... necessarily free, and responsible for our decisions), ...does God’s loving us somehow limit the ways in which God can be all-powerful, omnipotent? I don’t think that a loving God can act in ways that play with our dignity, indeed, that are not loving.

You parents know that, when you choose to love your children, to allow them to grow responsibly, you surrender your direct power over them voluntarily, precisely because you love them.  You allow them scope to hurt themselves, to hurt others, rather than keep them perpetual children under your control.  That’s love!  You do it, even at the price sometimes of deep hurt and disappointment.  The God who is love allows things to happen in our world things that God does not want to happen, things that distress God deeply.  He even allowed people freely to torture and to kill Jesus because God loves!

But the fascinating thing is that God who didn’t deliberately take them (as the poster claimed), who didn’t want those kids to die that way, now that they have died welcomes them with loving arms.  As Hosea said, God betroths them to himself with tenderness and love, opens up for them a whole other way of being alive, shares with them the same life that God gave to the crucified Christ, risen life, that is utterly beyond our imagining.  And all they need to do is to be prepared to accept it, to be swept up into it, to become lovers of life, of others, of God.