2nd Sunday Advent C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2018

George Bush Snr. died during the week. It was he who, nearly thirty years ago, along with Margaret Thatcher and a number of other national leaders, including our own Prime Minister, declared war against Saddam Hussein, contrary to the judgment of the United Nations. That war was the 1991 Gulf War. What influence the war had on the prolific spread of aggressive Muslim extremism since then is anyone’s guess. Among those passionately opposed to the War was Pope John Paul II.

That is past. God’s ever-ready forgiveness handles the past quite adequately. The present and the future are God’s concerns. God wants to save us from ourselves and from each other. Simply put, God wants us to stop sinning. Sin involves much more than the personal relationship of sinner and God. It is a choice against truth and value. Sin directly affects other persons, as well as the integrity and dignity of the sinner. Becoming free of sin is a prerequisite for anything approaching peace in ourselves and in the world. Sin is an attitude, a careless or hostile attitude. It is a power alive within us. It usually involves a degree of blindness and ignorance. We are so used to it that we do not even see it as sin at all – we take it for granted. The removal of sin requires a stance always open to deeper conversion.

In this context of on-going conversion, I find Paul’s prayer for his Philippian friends, as we heard in today’s Second Reading, wonderfully relevant. He wrote, “My prayer is that your love for each other may increase more and more, and never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception so that you can always recognise what is best”.

Paul was no longer with the Philippians. He wanted them to be able to discern for themselves, “to recognise what is best”, to know what to do and what to refrain from doing – an indispensable moral skill that our world leaders and politicians, as well as everyone in general, so sorely need if they are not to destroy us and our world. He wanted them to develop their personal consciences.

In order to act conscientiously, people need to be open to a profound attitudinal change. Paul saw that people’s ability always to recognise what is best, that is, to reach conclusions conscientiously, depended crucially on “their love for each other increasing more and more”. If we are honest, that is asking for a seismic change of attitude. Yet that choice deliberately to love is where peace within us and in our world necessarily begins. Most people, ourselves included, are simply not interested in other people, even instinctively wary of them – perhaps even mildly [or majorly] hostile, seeing them as potential threats to our comfort zones. To even want to love people, to be interested in what is best for them, requires truly genuine conversion. To actually love them all – everyone – requires perseverance and practice and even down-to-earth wisdom. It means being different from the crowd.

Yet, the human dignity of others is the same human dignity that God has given to us – no less, no more. We need somehow to train ourselves to think spontaneously, “How will my choice affect people?”

There is a lot more, of course, involved in forming a mature conscience, in discerning how to act responsibly and, as Paul put it, “recognising what is best” than simply deciding to act from love. Paul prayed that his Philippian friends also “improve their knowledge and deepen their perception” – and those two factors, theoretical knowledge and practical perception, call for further care and further skill. The practical perception, I believe, is the fruit of contemplation. Yet the deliberate choice to love everyone remains the indispensable starting point.

Let us listen again to Paul pulling it all together once more, “My prayer is that your love for each other may increase more and more, and never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception so that you can always recognise what is best”.