31st Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 -2012

The scribe in today's Gospel got it right.  Generally, in the Gospels, they didn't.  But this one did.  It's important to notice, though, what he got right: To love God with everything, all stops out, and to love your neighbour as yourself is life.  Holocausts and sacrifices are religion.  He said that life is more important than religion – more specifically, living which is loving is more important than religion.  The two aren't the same.

We meet our neighbours and engage with God in the kitchen, the bed-room, the office desk, the paddock, the school or hospital, the bowling green, the supermarket… The ordinary is holy because it is there that we engage with God; we encounter and build the Kingdom

Religion can be confused with religiosity that tends to fence God around and confine God to special times and places and rituals.  It can all too easily drift away from loving, and too easily become self-absorbed, self-centred – meriting reward, avoiding punishment, considering ourselves better than others.  And we're all susceptible.  It's what, to so many of today's atheists, rightly smells fishy.

So the scribe was right.  As Jesus said: You are not far from the Kingdom of God.  But – not far from means not there yet!  What was still missing?

Living in love is easier said than done – loving God, not just a bit, not just a fair bit, but with everything, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and loving the neighbour – not just selected ones, but whoever crosses your path – even the ones next door, or the ones who inconveniently arrive in leaky boats via Indonesia without a visa.  We simply don't measure up.  But that need not be the end of it.

Fortunately, the Kingdom of God is gift, sheer gift.  It needs our cooperation, our desire to live in love, and our efforts to live in love; but, of itself, it is beyond us – yet offered, and there for the taking.  We access it through, with and in Jesus.

Have you reflected much about the delightful conclusion to every Eucharistic Prayer?  Through him [that is, through Jesus], with him and in him, O God almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory is yours.  Not: without Jesus, not prescinding from him, not independently of him – but through, with and in Jesus.

In the unity of the Holy Spirit.  That through, with and in Jesus is brought about through the unifying energy of the Spirit, who is the love of God abroad in the world.

Through him… Jesus has gone before us, for us.  But we can associate ourselves, and become one with him in his saving death and resurrection through the unifying energy of love that is the Spirit.  With him, with Jesus, speaks to me of intimacy, relationship and deep personal friendship – all the fruit of prayer.  That, too, consists of love.  In him, in Jesus, is what is totally beyond our capacity but is offered as free gift.  The risen Jesus has made his home in us and invites us to make our home in him. 

We do not yet experience the fulness of all this in what we call heaven.  But, in the meantime, we meet him, we connect with him, in sacrament.  Right now, within this sacramental meal, shared among friends, not by-passing or ignoring life and love, but precisely expressing and celebrating them, we engage with Christ.  And in the process … all honour and glory is yours, O God, almighty Father, from whom the whole plan originates and by whom it is endlessly sourced and sustained … and it is happening right now.