14th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2009

I get great assurance from this passage in tonight's/day's Second Reading from the letter that St Paul wrote to the community at Corinth.  He talked about a thorn in the flesh which he interpreted as an angel of Satan to beat me ... and to stop me from getting too proud.  He didn't say what it was - and I'm glad that he kept its identity wide-open. It gives me the possibility of identifying with it.

Whatever it was, he didn't like it, and wanted to get rid of it. He said that he prayed to the Lord three times for it to leave him.  His expression three times isn't about how many times he prayed but about how intensely and feelingly he prayed.  But, for all his efforts, it didn't work - and he was left feeling unhealed, inadequate and humiliated.  He didn't get his way with God. But apparently it didn't stop him praying; and in his prayer came the insight - the voice of the Lord - saying: My grace is enough for you; my power is at its best in weakness.

My grace is enough for you. What does that mean?  I love you.. That's enough. What more do you need? You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be in control. You can be weak. You can be anything - and I shall still love you. That's enough. What more could you need?

And, in case Paul thought that his thorn in the flesh made him less adequate to be an apostle, less able to do his thing for God, Jesus added: my power is at its best in weakness; At its best ... in weakness. And Jesus should know.  At his weakest - humiliated, brutalised, mocked and abandoned on the cross, God had saved the world.

As far as helping the world was concerned, Jesus didn't need Paul doing his thing for God, but Paul letting God do, through him, God's will for the world. Not: God doing what Paul wanted, but Paul doing what God wanted.  So, in his wonderfully full-on way, Paul could comment: So I shall be very happy to make my weaknesses my special boast ... for it is when I am weak, that I am strong.

Alcoholics Anonymous know that. They know that recovery starts only when you know you're beaten. And they also know that the best one to help an alcoholic is another alcoholic - one who has faced the problem, who has faced the utter weakness, and has experienced what can only be the power of God.

The best healer, perhaps the only healer, is the wounded healer. And we all qualify as wounded. We all have something that beats us: our thorn in the flesh. And if we don't think we have, we have still to grow up or still to own up.  The wonderful 14th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, once wrote: “We need to sin ... or we would never know the mercy of God.”

My grace is enough for you. Let it be, believe it, surrender to it... wriggle and squirm as much as we like, but we don't have to have our act together for God to love us. What a miserable God it would be who would love only the worthy or the perfect!  And if we worry about our influence on others ... we can listen to Jesus saying: My strength is at its best in weakness, and do a "Paul" and discover, and then shrug our shoulders, and boast that only when I am weak am I strong.

It hurts our ego; it undermines our self-image. It can all seem back-to- front. That's why we have to be open to change first before we can believe the Good News of God's Kingdom.